Brace yourself, we are in for a dry spell...

Whatcha gonna do when the well runs dry

you gonna run away and hide

I'm gonna be right by your side

for you, pretty baby, I'd even die.

An old Ricky Nelson tune, stolen from and old nursery rhyme, about an old drought.

It occurred to me that this is the time of the year when the days start getting shorter, and the trees start sucking the sap back out of the leaves, and they get ready to drop. The evergreen leaves harden for winter, and they stop drawing moisture from the air and ground. The water sometimes comes back to the springs even before the rainfall, just because the trees have stopped drinking. It’s the time of the year that we usually have our worse wildland fires, because everything gets tinder dry, and the days are still hot enough to cause the fire to flare out of control. This year we had 100-plus-degree days in May. The dry lightning storm set the State of California on fire, and the most of them will burn until the next rainfall, and there isn’t one in sight.

Back in the early seventies, before Al Gore invented the Internet and Global Warming, we had a drought that only gave us twenty-two inches of rainfall. Back then all of the weather experts were predicting a “New Ice Age”… Yep it’s true. You could look it up!

Most of the springs, on land that the real estate people sold to the newcomers as “year around springs”, dried up. The people in the hills didn’t know what to do, so they bought a bunch of pickle barrels from Burrell Keating, at the old Eel River Salvage Yard, next to the drive-in theater. That was down behind the Renner Union 76 plant for the people that wonder where this all took place.

The people with pickle barrels went begging for water, they were met with much reluctance. Nobody wanted to give up their water. Outside faucets were locked, or removed, to keep people from stealing water. Finally the hill people started stealing water from the fire hydrants in the middle of the night.

Later in the summer, when it was realized that we had a dire water emergency, one of the emergency service groups set up a coin-operated water dispenser at the Redway Fire Department. The dispenser was connected to the fire hydrant in front of the fire hall. As I recall a quarter bought fifty gallons of water. (I may be wrong) It was a very popular feature. It was back before there was drinking water trucks operating in the area, and everyone hauled their own water. I remember one fellow that hauled his water in a water bed mattress in the back off his old half-ton truck it would squat and waddle like a duck going down the road but he got his water home.

The way things are shaping up it looks like we had better brace for a dry spell. Quite different from the last drought, the Redway Water District had their board of directors pass a resolution that the Redway Water Company could shut off the contract water haulers at any time that they deemed it necessary. Just so the people know that they may have to learn to drink dust if it gets dry. So, you have been warned.

My grandmother, who had an uncanny ability to know what the weather was going to do just from watching the wind and the direction that the clouds were moving, used to say that “a dry winter is a cold winter”. She was remarkably right. The year that we only had twenty-two inches of rain, the winter got down to 14 degrees in Redway. All of the wet barrel fire hydrants froze and broke. The old-timers had all of the storms of the winter season named, the storm that caused the fifty-five and the sixty-four floods were called the “December storms” or the “Christmas storms". I don’t recall them having any name for a drought, other than a dry spell. They never thought that anything could change the weather and they just took what they got.

Just like the Redway water Department, the Russian River people are trying to decide what they are going to do for water when Lake Mendocino dries up. They are now down to less than fifty percent of what the lake will hold. The Lake Mendocino gets some of it’s water from the headwaters of the Eel River. They acquired it a long time ago by contracts that were signed giving the Russian river people Eel River Water. The Eel River water serves a twofold purpose of generating electricity for them, and watering their grape fields. The water is also used for municipal water supplies. Our ancestors were probably caught at a weak moment, like the Klamath people were when they signed the contracts with the Klamath potato farmers to take their water away.

I had an old friend that said; “Whiskey is fer drinken’, Water is fer fighten”. After we get through fighten’ about water we will look back fondly on the days when all we fought about was who grew too much Marijuana.