The Water Right My Grandmother Left Me

Chapter 7

I was not going to walk up that creek alone. Not because I was afraid, although I was, but because the law works on witnesses and the valley works on memory, and I needed both.

So I started driving. Not calling. Driving, to doorsteps, the way my grandmother would have.

I went to the old ranches first, the ones that had been on Spring Creek as long as we had. The ones who remembered when the water was a neighbor’s handshake and not a company’s asset.

I sat at kitchen tables and drank coffee I did not want and I laid the certified decree on the oilcloth and I let them read it with their own eyes. June 14, 1921. First on the creek.

“If they can dry me out,” I said, “they can dry you out. My right is the shield for this whole creek. The day my 1921 goes down, your 1930 and your 1946 are next, because there is not enough water in Spring Creek for those pivots and all of us. I am the oldest right. I am the wall. And they are coming through me first because they think a widow is the softest place in the line.”

Some of them were afraid. The company had already been to see them too. Garrett had offered one family a deal to lease their hay ground. He had hinted to others that a man who stood with me might find his own water rights reviewed.

That is how a company fights a valley. It does not fight all of you. It peels you off one at a time with a little fear and a little money.

I lost two families that way before I learned to get ahead of it. One told me, not unkind, that they had their own grandkids to think about and could not afford to make an enemy of an outfit that size. I did not argue. You cannot argue a scared man into being brave. You can only show up at his table with something true and let him decide.

So I changed how I talked. I stopped asking people to help me. A widow asking for help is easy to turn down, and it puts you below the person you are asking. Instead I told them what the company was going to do to them, with dates and flows, using their own water rights, and I let them get angry on their own behalf.

But these were old people, and old people in this country have long memories and short patience for being bullied. More than one of them had a father or a grandfather who had known Effie Dunmore. More than one of them owed their own place, somewhere back down the line, to the fact that she had held the water.

An old man named well into his eighties, a man whose father had helped my grandmother set the first wooden gate, put his hand flat on the decree and said, “Hazel, I was at Carl’s funeral and I was ashamed of every one of us who figured you’d fold. Your grandmother held this creek for all of us and nobody ever thanked her for it. Tell me when and tell me where. I will be there if they have to carry me.”

By the end of that week I had a dozen ranch families who said they would stand at the headgate with me when I opened it. Not to open it for me. I was clear about that. I would open it. They would stand as witnesses that the oldest right on Spring Creek was being used, in the open, by the woman it belonged to.

I set the day. A Saturday morning, so the whole valley could come. I told the water commissioner, so the state would have a man there to see the law satisfied. I told the clerk at the courthouse, who told half the county by noon.

And I made sure, through the one channel I knew would carry it, that Garrett Vance and his company knew exactly when I was coming to open my grandmother’s headgate.

If they wanted to stop me, they could come stand in the creek and do it in front of the whole valley.