IT IS SOMEHOW COMFORTING to see someone take part in a tradition, a job requiring very specific skills and temperament, a job that has not changed in detail or substance for a couple of centuries or so. It is even more comforting to see such a job done on behalf of the common good.
Such is the position as Mayordomo of the Acequia de Los Duranes. Brian Harrison is charge of this irrigation ditch and the allocation of water to the landowners entitled to it. As a group, they are on a kind of honor system – they must turn their gate valve on and off at the allotted times. Overusing your turn is a major violation of the social order.
The common good has to be the operative premise, and the person who manages this has to navigate through the messiness of everyone’s respective needs.
But here in Dixon, it works. Imagine!
How long have you lived at Dixon?
About 32 years now. What brought me was forestry work. I came out to join up with a bunch of people on a worker-owned cooperative, Forestry Workers Cooperative.
The reason that I joined up with that outfit was because I was ready to get out of the city. I’d been living in San Francisco and I was just feeling that I was working far harder to live there than was worthwhile. I wanted a change and forestry work was the perfect change for me. It was the absolute opposite of living in a city.
After doing that for several years, I hooked up with the woman who’s now my wife. We got pregnant with our first child and I quit doing forestry and did construction right here in town. I just got to know the place and became attached.
To bring you to the present, what’s involved in Mayordomo work?
The Mayordomo takes care of the physical properties of the acequia, which is this irrigation ditch. It’s a conduit for water. It allows people to water their gardens, fields, orchards. It’s maintaining the flow and bringing it to the people who need it or making sure that they have it when they’re scheduled.
That means removing any blockages and repairing the ditch if it breaches. A beaver could build a dam in there and the water finds its way up to a gopher hole, and then it suddenly have an open ditch that’s pouring onto someone’s property and nobody’s getting water down below. Taking care of the presa, which is the dam diversion that brings water into the very beginning of the acequia. It’s also, scheduling with people, with the parciante. Those are the people who receive the water.
I guide a crew through the acequia to clean it. The cleaning generally goes in two parts. It’s the la jara, cutting the sides of the willow. And then the lumpia or the sacca, which is shoveling out the ditch, taking out the silt from the year before and maintaining the bottom of the ditch.
What is the source of the water?
The source for this acequia as it goes through Dixon is Rio Embudo, which is basically fed by the Trampas, the Santa Barbara, the Rio Pueblo and various other springs. And then there’s a confluence where it joins the Rio Grande just down here in Embudo.
How long has this acequia been here?
The Acequia Los Duranes – I’ve asked that question of a lot of people around here nobody seems to know. Nobody really even knows or I haven’t got the answer to the question of who Los Duranes were. Obviously, that’s a surname, a Spanish surname. There are some people in Dixon that carry that surname, but no one who has owned property and lived here that I know of remembers any Duranes living up here. So it must have gone pretty far back.
I have a friend, an archaeologist who’s looked at the colonization and the original inhabitants of the place. He’s found some pueblos up above, first settled in the mid-1700s, I think. There were about seven families. A handful of them were Hispano families, a handful were Native families that first settled this area. They didn’t last very long because they were subject to predation by raiding tribes. Then there was a second settlement, like some 40 or 50 years later. I imagine that’s probably when the acequias were first dug.
When and how were water rights determined?
This goes way back to when these little river valleys were settled. I think it’s that form of governance comes probably all the way from Spain because it goes back to the Spanish Conquest and then the development of these outside enclaves.
Who was in charge when these water rights were defined?
That’s a good question. I mean, yeah, who was in charge? Now the state is adjudicating a lot of these rights or going in and changing them over. But the governance of the acequias, at least here, is still a holdover from when it was part of Mexico and then previous to that part of Spain.
Water is scarce…
It’s definitely true. The water level really depends on the snowpack and our summer rains, which people call monsoons. I call it the rainy season. Monsoons are in India.
We have ways of sharing the water between the different acequias once the river gets so low that it cannot possibly supply all the acequias at once. These acequias, the way they’re governed now is essentially the way they were governed for generations and generations.
In the beginning, I think it was according to how much land each parciante had. They were entitled to so much water, which really comes into play when it is in short supply. The river is pretty full right now, so there’s really no haggling over the water, and that would have been the case a long time ago.
So what do you say when people aren’t happy with what they’ve been allowed?
Well, it depends on what their complaint is.
You deal with each complaint individually, but some things are easier to navigate than others. If someone calls you drunk at 1:00 in the morning and says there’s no water, and it’s because you’re on rationing, then you can scream in their ear, don’t ever fucking call me again.
Sometimes you only know if you get a complaint from someone who is not getting the water who is scheduled to get the water. So say, a neighbor of mine calls me up and says, I had my gate open and the water suddenly stopped two hours ago. I don’t know what’s going on? The first thing I do is look down into the acequia to see there’s water running there. If so, then I go upstream until I find the water. Someone upstream could have left their gate open, some kid could have gone by there and opened the gate, but it doesn’t happen very often on this acequia.
I’m very lucky as a Mayordomo of this acequia. One of the reasons that I’ve been doing this for 20 years is that this acequia happens to be blessed with good parciantes. In other words, with people who are willing to help if they can. They pay their dues. They don’t take the water out of turn. And so, being a person who kind of likes to avoid confrontation as much as possible, I’m very grateful for that.
How does climate change affect this?
I have to say, I haven’t been at this job really long enough to have a feel for that long-term cycle where drought at the end of a ten-year cycle is expected. But I’ve seen pretty extreme drought from early on. And then I’ve seen some wet years. So far, the drought aspect hasn’t been any worse lately than it was when I first came here. But flooding, the flash floods, that’s something that has increased, the frequency.
How do you get started as Mayordomo?
Theoretically, we get paid to do this. I became Mayordomo, and I’ll tell you, we don’t have a water right on my piece of land that we’re sitting on now. I’ve acquired one since then by purchasing a piece of land just below us on the river, but this was what we could afford with this little house on it. My wife is a gardener and she was a market gardener. She loves to grow, and we needed water that couldn’t be provided by our well, which is a low recharge well.
When I moved here, the Mayordomo of this acequia was just on his way out. So I went to the commission and said I would gladly act as Mayordomo. You don’t have to pay me, and all I want is to be able to water. I’m not asking you for a water right, because I know that that would be illegal, but just to be able to pump out of the ditch so we can water our gardens. They were very pleased to accept, but being very kind people, they decided that they were going to pay me, so they paid me, it was just a little amount. Since then, the parciantes have actually raised my pay, but it can vary. For this year, I’m not taking any pay at all. I’ve never really been in it for the money. There’s something else that I get out of it, I suppose.
What is that?
A connection with my neighbors, with the river, with the riparian area. Those are the things that really keep me keyed into it.
I like being a part of a greater kind of community than just human beings. I like the fact that I can walk anywhere. I like the idea of public lands that I can pretty much go in any direction and no one can force me off of it, as long as I’m not doing anything harmful. I like the people.
I’ve always got something useful to do, and there are lots of recreational things that I like – mountain biking, fishing, rafting, river surfing, hiking.
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