Sunday, March 01, 2009

Irrigation District

What’s still green: Juniper and other conifers; rose and lilac stems; Apache plume, honeysuckle, prickly pear, yucca, hyacinth, rock rose, some grasses and weeds beginning to green in places along road.
What’s gray, blue or gray-green: Piñon, winterfat, saltbush, loco, snow-in-summer.
What’s red: Branches of apple and peach; stems on cholla and some shrub along the river; leaves on pinks, coral bells, beardtongues, small-leaf soapwort, pink and yellow evening primroses, some golden spur columbine, purple aster and anthemis.
What’s yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches; arborvitae and other conifers.
What’s blooming inside: South African aptenia and kalanchoë.
Animal sightings: Small birds flit through lower branches of peach and cherries mid-mornings; rabbit out last night at twilight.Weather: Early morning temperatures varied from low 20's to high 30's; afternoons near 60; last rain 1/24/09; 11:25 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: Our annual ditch meeting was held this past Tuesday at the local firehouse. We’re now part of the Santa Cruz Irrigation District which has absorbed some twenty ditches, including three in my immediate area, since the federal government took over a botched private project begun in 1925 by John Block to dam the Santa Cruz river near Chimayó for the benefit of lowland farmers.
Arroyos, deep and wide, once defined the limits of irrigation supported settlement for people who no longer remembered how Romans built those aqueducts at Mérida in the conquistadores’ Estremaduran homeland. Hollowed logs were used to span canyons and gullies.
The village ditch existed between a wide arroyo and the river. Another somehow passed that barrier and stopped at the next deep arroyo. My ditch is more recent and uses metal pipes to carry water over one deep arroyo before dumping on ranch land before the next major break.
Open trenches were being used by the pueblos when Juan de Oñate arrived in 1598, and still exist in areas where canals cross Santa Clara land. The path of the main ditch uphill from the main road can be traced by the presence of trees in otherwise open grass and scrub land. In places where active laterals come down to cross the road, trees follow the open ditches. In other places, lines of trees survive where the ditches have either been filled or replaced with concealed metal pipes.
Many distribution ditches in the village are still open troughs, edged with grass or weeds; only a few have sluice gates Metal culverts now carry the water under drives, although a few have installed cattle guards. Portland concrete was perfected by Thomas Edison in 1902, and some ditches have been lined. Such reinforcement was an individual choice, so cement sections alternate with earthen ones.
The irrigation network on the other side of the arroyo required hours of maintenance in the 1930's, and had the highest concentration of people unable to pay fees for irrigation. Although the interior department didn’t provide reasons, it suggested the other area where people couldn’t afford the dam construction levies, La Puebla, had a channel that ran through sandy land with banks that constantly collapsed. Each breach meant their land could be silted and crops destroyed.
The ditch along the main road may have been sighted through equally bad land when its builders needed to find a way around the arroyo. It could be the more ambitious thought the high location would allow them to irrigate more land. It may also be they had forgotten what the early Spanish colonists knew who spent time looking for non-porous land for the acequia madre before they established a settlement.
When the Reconstruction Finance Corporation intervened in 1935, the agent for the receivers, Cook, had already taken over 75 pieces of land in the district, and resold some to migrants from Texas and Oklahoma. At some time in the recent past, hay farmers who settled along the main road buried their sections of ditch and installed surface valves to feed ten-foot sections of portable, perforated aluminum pipe that flood their fields. Recently, some homeowners who bought lots from those farmers have been using gated PVC pipe to water lawns.
Lost knowledge, new knowledge are separated by a wide arroyo from traditional village ways in an irrigation district that stretches from Fairview, settled briefly by Mormons in 1895, through Sombrillo now farmed by Sikhs and on down to La Puebla where Los Penitentes were active. Tourists use the lake formed by the dam, while everyone with water rights, from traditional settlements along the Santa Cruz to our Anglo hay farmers, depends on collected snow melt for vegetable plots and commercial fields, flower gardens and suburban lawns.
The social structures that govern water may have changed, technologies have certainly been modernized, but the challenges of growing anything but Russian thistles on dry land remain constant. If you see something green here, there will be a ditch nearby.
Notes:
Calkins, Hugh G. "The Santa Cruz Irrigation District - New Mexico," 1937, on-line through New Mexico’s Digital Collections project.
Carlson, Alvar W. The Spanish-American Homeland, 1990, describes log cañolas.Dobkins, Betty Eakle. The Spanish Element in Texas Water Law, 1959, cited by José A. Rivera and Thomas F. Glick, "The Iberian Origins of New Mexico’s Community Acequias," Economic History Congress, 2002, for how settlers selected land for ditches.US Department of Interior, Tewa Basin Study, volume 2, 1935, reprinted by Marta Weigle as Hispanic Villages of Northern New Mexico, 1975.
Photograph: Head ditch paralleling road with wooden gates; irrigated field on other side of embankment/dyke was burned this week; road near village, 28 February 2009.

No comments: