We climb the clover to the pinnacles of safety.” The insects cry in different voices, “When the water comes 60 that regulates our stem of the canal) may not adjust the flow exactly to 30 inches, and I may get a little more or less. ![]() My usual 30 inches are not much compared to neighbors who order 90 inches or 120 inches, so the “Zanjero” (the CVWD employee who opens the water valve gate up on Ave. When date growers want to order water for their palms, we can call or email the Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD) and order water-“30 inches on Monday, off Wednesday,” and their computer alerts the computer at the Imperial Dam on the river, which regulates how much of the total flow is routed over to our canal and Valley. As we are below sea level in the Salton Sink, the need for pumping is minimal. With the West drier and the current drought dire, the river’s flow, which supplies water across the American West, as well as to Mexico, cannot meet the needs of all the humans who depend upon it. This summer, for the first time ever, water on the Colorado River was rationed. Water that entered the Colorado River basin as melted snow in Wyoming and Utah, Colorado and Arizona, and even New Mexico, contributes to the flow onto my property.īut this is a historic moment, too. I follow the tradition of thousands of years, of date palm growers diverting the waters of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates and Indus, to irrigate their gardens. ![]() The palm said, “My clover is cool around my bole, over my hidden roots. In her 1997 poem, “Colorado Water,” she wrote: ![]() Even as she was going blind, my mom, ever the poet, delighted in sitting out among the palms and birds, and enjoying and visualizing the scene, as I irrigated my date gardens in the Coachella Valley of California.
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