The Water Right My Grandmother Left Me

Chapter 9

Here is the thing the lawyers had gotten wrong, and the thing Garrett had never understood about me.

They thought the fight was over the gate in front of me. It was not. The gate in front of me was dry because the dam a mile upstream was taking everything. Opening my gate onto a dry bed would have proven nothing, the way Garrett said.

But a senior right does not just mean I get to open my gate. It means the state is bound to make the water come to it. It means the junior user upstream, the company, has to let my water past their dam, down the creek, to my headgate, before they take a drop for their pivots. First in time, first in right. That is not a feeling. That is a duty the commissioner is sworn to enforce.

I had learned that word too, in three weeks of reading at my kitchen table past midnight, with the dictionary and the state water rules and my reading glasses sliding down my nose. A call. When a senior right is not getting its water, the holder places a call on the river, and the state is bound to shut off the junior users upstream, newest first, until the senior right is made whole. It is the oldest power in dry country, and it belonged to me, and I had never once in my life had to use it, because until that summer nobody had ever been greedy enough to make me.

So when I put my hand on the wheel, I turned to the water commissioner, and I said the sentence I had driven to twelve kitchen tables to earn the right to say.

“I am placing a call on this creek for my 1921 right. I am asking you to do your job and shut their dam down until my water reaches this gate.”

Eighty people went quiet. The lawyers looked at each other. And the commissioner, standing in front of the whole valley that had elected him and would elect him again, took out his phone and called the company’s dam and ordered it opened to satisfy the senior right on Spring Creek.

One of the city lawyers started toward him fast, talking about hearings and injunctions and the coming years.

That is when the old ranchers moved. Not toward the lawyer. They just closed up, quiet, shoulder to shoulder along both banks, a wall of weathered people who had decided whose side they were on, and the lawyer stopped where he was. There is nothing in a law book for eighty neighbors who have made up their minds.

I will tell you the exact moment Garrett Vance understood he had lost, because I have thought about it every day since, and I have saved it for the first comment and for the end of this, because it is the part that matters most.

But the water came first.

It took almost an hour. The dam was a mile up. We stood in that heat and waited, and I kept my hand on my grandmother’s wheel the whole time, and nobody left.

Then somebody at the top of the bank said, “Listen.”

And we heard it. A long way up the dry bed, a sound I had not heard in two months. Water, coming down over rock, the particular voice of Spring Creek that I had known since I was a girl, that my father knew, that my grandmother knew when she dug this cut with a borrowed team.

You could smell it before it reached us. Wet rock and mud, the smell of a creek, a smell I had not had in my nose since June. An old man beside me took his hat off at the smell alone, before the water was even in sight.

It came around the bend in a brown head, pushing dust and sticks ahead of it, and it filled the dry bed bank to bank, and it came down to my grandmother’s headgate while eighty people stood on the banks and did not say a word.

And I opened the gate.

I turned the steel wheel my grandmother set in 1921, under a full head of water for the first time in years, and the creek poured through the cut and down the home ditch toward a hundred and forty cattle that had not had enough to drink in two months.