Sometimes I wonder briefly how normal people spend their rainy
Tuesday afternoons. Last Tuesday, I took our dog Zay on a ride
through South County to visit three of our dams. We started off by
driving through Silva’s Crossing, just to see if Uvas Creek was
flooding over the road yet. It was not.
Sometimes I wonder briefly how normal people spend their rainy Tuesday afternoons. Last Tuesday, I took our dog Zay on a ride through South County to visit three of our dams. We started off by driving through Silva’s Crossing, just to see if Uvas Creek was flooding over the road yet. It was not.
The swirling brown water was running high, but still about a foot below the road surface. We wended our way north on Santa Teresa, west on Hecker Pass, north on Watsonville Road, and north on Uvas Road, winding through green hills, rain drizzling down. The newly doubled Uvas Road bridge is open, so it is no longer necessary to be quite as wary of on-coming traffic as previously on the old lane-and-a-half bridge.
We parked across Uvas Road from Uvas Dam. The rain chose that moment to change from a drizzle to a sprinkle, and as we disentangled the leash and the umbrella and crossed the road, strengthened into a real rain. I didn’t mind.
I have lived through droughts in California, and any rain looks good to me. To be sure, a California drought is not life threatening. Unlike India and Africa, we do not have famines during a drought. Droughts for us mean that we can’t water the lawns or wash cars or flush the toilet as often as we like, and that food prices go up. But these are mere inconveniences. No one dies, because we have infrastructure: dams and wells and reservoirs and canals and irrigation.
In the city of Gilroy, our water comes from city wells. The wells draw water from the water table. The water table is recharged every year by water pressure from our reservoirs: Uvas and Chesbro and Calero to the west, Coyote and Anderson to the east. Our reservoirs are recharged every winter by rainwater falling on the hills, running into creeklets, creeklets joining creeks: Eastman and Croy, Sprig and Bodfish, Uvas and Llagas. Coyote Creek runs north to San Francisco Bay. Llagas and Uvas run south to Pajaro River and out Elkhorn Slough to Monterey Bay.
Human Californians love the rain, because rain means water for the coming summer. Zay hates the rain, but loves going for walks. His love for walks triumphed over his hatred for water falling from the sky, and we proceeded across the dam, with Zay zigzagging wildly across the top of the dam.
Uvas Reservoir was brown and turbid. I had driven by just the week before, and was considerably cheered to see that it was filling fast. We walked all the way across to the spillway. The surface of the reservoir is still nowhere near spilling over, but the wide concrete surface of the spillway was catching clear rainwater and channeling it down into the creek.
Downstream of the dam are several houses. I would not want to live downstream of an earthen dam in earthquake territory. The wind picked up and a squall beat against the umbrella. I skirted the puddles; Zay splashed through them, shaking himself at intervals. Back in the car, he shook himself again, filling the interior with the unmistakable odor of wet dog. Then he settled down in the passenger seat for a long snooze while I continued north to Calero Reservoir, then doubled back and turned east on Oak Glen to Chesbro.
All three reservoirs were wide and brown, and although far from full, filling fast. All connecting creeks were swollen and running with brown runoff water. All the hillsides were green and fresh, as fresh as the rain-washed air. And the rain changed from drizzle to sprinkle to squall and back again, but never quite let up.
We have a long way to go. South County is not quite at 80 percent of our season normal rainfall. The county’s total reservoirs are only filled to less than half of their collective capacity, with Uvas and Chesbro trailing the pack at 17 and 8 percent respectively. We need another five storms like last week’s. But it was a glorious start.
