“If it’ll grow sage brush,” says Parker, “it’ll grow grain.” A staid man with a shadow of a red stubble beard who has farmed for my father for thirteen years, he clears his throat. “That was my grandpa’s rule when he bought land.”

Parker’s family land—dryfarm fields in the hilly country forty miles north of our farm—would have been irrigated had the Teton Dam not suffered its catastrophic failure in 1976. The dam collapse killed eleven people, over thirteen thousand cattle, and the dream of irrigating acreage that before had only been watered by rain.

My father directs his pickup across the washboard gravel roads and adds, “The taller the sage, the better the drink. That’s the way I learned it.”

Outside, the season showcases dry Idaho July, and the three of us drive through country high above the basin that holds many of Idaho’s fertile farms. The prairie grass and thistle paints the horizon in parched amber waves; the blue-gray outline of northern mountains stand like afterthoughts. We roll up and down the hills in search of a clearing where we can spy on the Californians who have been stealing our water.

Eventually, my father stops the pickup on a bald knoll. Our lookout rims the southern edge of a horseshoe-shaped valley. A newly cut road switch-backs down the basin around the far hill’s face. It’s drastic, this carving out, a scar tearing through the grass. Down one swale and into the valley’s bottom is a winding stretch of quaking asps and cottonwoods and willows: the trees’ bright green a stark offset to the surrounding toasted flora. The green denotes water, that slippery commodity that controls this land.

“That stream must feed the lake,” my father says. He reaches behind the driver’s seat, extracts binoculars, and glasses the streambed as if hunting for elk.

<>

Every Monday morning from May until September, my father and Parker calculate how many square inches of water to put across their fields of potatoes and grain. Their pumps pull from Birch Creek and pipe the water over three miles of fields. But for the past two weeks, their irrigation system has been running with insufficient water pressure. Their estimates have been undercut; subsequently, their crops suffer. At first, they were mystified. But then, just last week, my father figured it out.

Earlier this year, California investors had purchased a ranch above Birch Creek and subdivided it into twenty-five lots. My father and Parker had watched the investors as they built roads and stretched power lines to their land, not paying them much mind. But one day last week my father was driving up and down Birch Creek Road and discovered an industrial-sized tanker pumping water from the creek.

“He was just leaving,” my father says, “so I blocked him with my truck and walked up to his window. Just a worker guy, no say in anything, but I lit into him and got his boss’ phone number. At first, the boss denied that he’d told his crew to take water from the creek, but eventually he admitted to it. They were using the water up on their roads to keep the dust down and to mix their cement. Once he admitted to it, he even had the nerve to tell me the investors had the legitimate water rights.”

Water rights—the legal permission to use water from wells, springs, rivers, canals, and aquifers—are paramount in this country. When property is bought and sold in Idaho; mature water rights can often double and triple the land value. Water rights don’t prove ownership of water, but rather deed a possession of usage. The use of public waters without a water right is illegal, the sole exception being domestic-use water, as a homeowner deserves water for his or her home as well as enough to irrigate up to half an acre. Idaho law provides civil penalties for appropriating water without a valid right.

“But that’s a bold-faced lie,” my father says, handing me the binoculars. “They don’t have water rights up here—I own them all.”

I know my father means business. When I recall memories of family prayer (a rite my father and mother and sisters and I practiced together every morning) I cannot remember one invocation that didn’t contain a plea concerning water. We prayed for snowpack in the winter, rainfall in the spring, and celestial restraint during planting and harvest. My father watched the Weather Channel like it was prophetic alarm, carrying his muddy boots into the living room and dressing in front of the television. He’d edge out on the couch and strain to hear everything. I’ve been hushed innumerable times during the five-day forecast.

<>

A discussion of western water rights—a topic so convoluted and complicated on its own—is difficult to have today without including ecology. Salmon, trout, river otters, and myriad other fauna fauna enter the conversation. But one species that perhaps I never before considered is the beaver. Our vernacular today provides varying connotations that involve the fury dam-builder: the eager office worker, a person with incisors like Chiclets, even an anatomical reference to the polestar of feminine sexuality. But often overlooked is what scientists have dubbed the water-dwelling rodents: Little People. Beavers mate for life, protect their family, build hovels and lodges, congregate amongst cousins and grandparents and aunts, and fight other beavers that don’t share their bloodlines. Studies show that humans and beavers share survival mechanisms. Like humans, beavers are incredibly adept at altering their habitat to their suit needs, even diverting streams so that the water runs closer to more favorable stands of trees. It would be much easier for the beavers to burrow for shelter in the riparian muck, but instead they stop the water and build dams. One scientist employs that beavers always have to be moving, working. Hence the busyness. Another posits that beavers disdain the sound of running water and construct dams in the narrowest, noisiest point of streams to quell the riffle. In one study, a man put out speakers near mature beaver dams and amplified the sound of running water. He returned to discover them buried under sticks and stones until silenced.

<>

In 1889, a New York Times writer visited the Gem state and published an article entitled “Idaho Has a Great Future.” He wrote: “When this territory was named ‘the Gem of the Mountains’ it could not have been for anything that was seen in Pocatello; or if it was, then it must have been named just for its hardness.” He later noted, “The only crop secured from the soil is one of dust.”

I imagine the writer alone in his slat-board hotel room, plunking out his article while the wind whistles through the wall cracks and railroad cars thunder past his window. The man coughs and coughs again, the ever-present dirt clouding his lungs.

Technically, most of Idaho is a high desert with its annual rainfall of eight to twelve inches, though I recall years mostly between four and six. Once the mining petered, all that remained was dry, unusable land. Irrigation had been attempted a number of times. First up north in Spalding, the year 1837, at the Whitman missionary farm. In the 1850s, homesteaders dug crude ditches in the Boise Valley to irrigate small vegetable plots for harvests to be sold to the influx of prospectors. Near modern-day Preston, Mormons migrated from Utah and claimed water from Maple Creek. Idaho’s population hardly grew in the 1850s and 60s, and then was restricted to areas close to rivers and streams. Farmers tried water-wheels and other primitive transports but none could be used large-scale. The 1880s brought private-venture canal companies to establish an intricate irrigation diversion that would take water from the Snake and other rivers, but money soon ran out. By 1889—the year the Times writer visited— private investors and farmers had dug nearly forty canals. But none had ever carried water; before that occurred, the banks had sent foreclosure notices.

The rub was that the Snake River plain—a broad tectonic depression on top of rhyolitic ash-flow tuff—held immense agricultural potential. With nitrates and residual ash compressed for millions of years (Idaho’s whole southern section is pocked with volcanic remnants), the dirt could grow a wide variety of crops. But by 1890 momentum for growth had waned considerably; without water, life out west proved impossible. A series of government acts saved the land, at least for human habitation. The 1877 Desert Land Act morphed into the 1894 Carey Act, which finalized in 1902 with the Newlands Reclamation Act—all of these plans centering on the sale of public land to private investors. The federal government would sell tracts and with the money, “plan, construct, and manage irrigation projects for the purpose of reclaiming marginal lands.” Farmers and ranchers supported the ongoing costs by paying agreed-upon fees and taxes.

Once canals were established, Idaho blossomed, but more problems followed after the surface water ran out too quickly. In the early 1900s, the Snake—the Columbia’s largest tributary and the US’s twelfth-largest river—ran dry for nearly a month along a ten-mile stretch: all the water had been diverted. To catch and manage the massive amounts of runoff that came from snowmelt (and better regulate water volume), nearly twenty-five large-scale dams and reservoirs were built along the Snake and other Idahoan waterways for irrigation storage and delivery. This dam-building era lasted nearly sixty years, totaled 472 U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built dams, and ended with the Teton Dam failure.

But still, this surface water didn’t suffice. With so much fertile ground, farmers needed more drink. They finally found it beneath them. In the 1940s, locals discovered the Snake River Aquifer. At an estimated 10,800 square miles, the aquifer boasts an area larger than the state of Massachusetts. High-lift pumping that bored four- to seven-hundred feet below ground level made valley bottoms fecund; in turn, the aquifer limited the amount taken from rivers and canals.

Combining surface- and groundwater-pumping makes Idaho’s current water usage staggering. Four western states (California, Idaho, Colorado, and Nebraska) make up half of the U.S.’s surface and groundwater withdrawals. But Idaho and California stand in a category of their own; as is, they are the only two states that pump between 15,000 and 31,000 million gallons per day. Considering that California houses approximately 36 million inhabitants compared to Idaho’s population of just under a million and a half, and the fact that Idaho’s irrigation season lasts only six to seven months, and that mining and commercial and domestic usage of Idaho water accounts for less than three percent total, an outsider can gained a sense of how vital the fourth element is for farmers. Annually, irrigation draws approximately six trillion gallons of water for Idaho’s crops.

<>

The water altercation that brings my father, Parker, and me to the hills is timid compared to most. If water decides a crop’s success or failure, landowners are willing to fight over it. Here’s a true story from the annals of the western ditch bank:

Two boys grew up as friends on neighboring farms. It was the 1970s when flood irrigating still pervaded, and farmers used the ditch water according to a schedule put forth by the local watermaster. Sometimes the water came in the day, sometimes at midnight. Regardless, one had to take the liquid as it came. The boys both inherited their family farms. As adults, their friendship waned, as both accused the other of using too much water, or water out of turn. One summer, words aggressed to threats, and one July day, threats climaxed to fists. In the brawl, fists wielded shovels. Mid-scuffle, one man brought his spade down on the other’s face, knocking his right eye to blank blind nothing.

Years passed, and the men never apologized. Almost a decade after the melee, in an eerily identical summer, the one-eyed man rode out to the ditch bank with his rifle. He wasn’t scheduled for water, but had closed his neighbor’s headgate, diverting the stream, and then slipped into the brush, knowing his neighbor would come to find out why his river ran dry. Once the neighbor showed, the man put a slug in his chest, killed him dead, then returned home and called the sheriff. With a life-sentence in prison, the one-eyed man never again needed to water-worry.

<>

Icy, youthful memories come from the irrigation canals. I loved opening my eyes in the frigid water, watching green and blue rocks skitter along the river bottom. A number of days, the canal babysat my friends and me—we’d float the six miles into town on inner tubes. When moving pipe as a kid, I’d overheat such that I’d bury my head in the canal and drink the murky water in great gulps. Not once did I suffer a case of giardia (or Beaver Fever, as my father called it), even after we found a dead pig upriver, bloated and stuck in the cattails. During the slow summer days, Parker and the other workers and I would steal away to the reservoir for a few hours of waterskiing.

Like most farms, our land pulled from both surface and groundwater sources. The desert farms out in the flats used deep aquifer wells, the farms near my home used canals, and the hill farms relied mostly on mountain creeks filled with winter run-off. Because I was small and liked to swim, cleaning the canal pumps became my responsibility. For a long while, it was something my father and I did together, but one summer I decided to work on my own. The initial dives went fine; the pumps sat above a concrete intake filled with canal water, the mainline stretching ten feet deep. I had to shut down the pumps, dive, and bring up handfuls of debris. No problem. But at this particular pump, sitting solitary at the edge of a hay field, my trunks caught on a broken edge of the metal screen and held me deep enough to just break the surface with my fingertips. I started to drown. Panicking, I wedged myself upwards, pulling on the concrete and mainline, and tore free, the metal ripping off my shorts and opening up skin from my lower back to butt cheek. I drove home naked and wincing, in search of Neosporin and clothing.

<>

One summer, the water ran out on the Antelope Creek farm, so a few workers and I climbed into the mountains to find out why. On that farm, an earthen dam had been built to stop the creek and collect the run-off. At an elevation of six thousand feet, most of the neighbors dry-farmed hard grains, but here we’d planted seed potatoes. Due to the weak winter and dehydrated summer, we’d run out of water in early August, six weeks before harvest. The crop was thirsty.

That day in the pickup, we climbed the road along trickling Antelope Creek. I could see the bottom rocks; there was not even enough water to cover the three-foot bed. We crossed the boundary of the farm and traveled the road until the fields disappeared, replaced by stretches of sage and quakies, then pockets of pine. The road butted against a thick stand of timber. I took two shovels, one worker carried the axe, and another slung the five-foot iron bar over his shoulder. We climbed into dark, unknown territory. Blistering August, even in the shade. By noon we were lost in blotches of tree shadows.

We hiked and climbed for a while. In a moment of near bitching, as I plotted my next dry words to encourage a trek back to the pickup and a drive straight to the gas station for cold Mountain Dews purchased on my dime, we came to the first beaver dam.

The soupy pool stretched across the clearing, creeping out in the gullies and filling the draws. The creek sounded a sporadic and minimal weeping of water, an underpinning to our heavy breathing. Not large or impressive, the dam stood four feet high and equally as long, a rats’ nest of sticks and pokes and points. We gathered our tools and then went out on the dam and attempted to wreck it. We chopped and pried and hacked with all we had, but were thwarted by an impenetrable criss-crossing of branches and logs. We worked an hour to remove an inch, and even then didn’t free any of the water. We removed one stick only to find ten—damp and solid—in its place.

The trick came not in pulverizing, but circumventing, the construction. We dug a canal into the swampy ground next to the dam and watched the water drain out in liquid rush. We left the first dam and continued upstream to find more ponds, a chain of ten escalating up the creek like stepping stones. We made quick work and gouged out the trenches in thick shovelfuls. The entire afternoon, we spotted only one beaver, massive and graceful in the water, before it disappeared below the murky surface.

At dusk, we shouldered our tools and slogged downhill, exhausted but pleased with our success. With air conditioning full-blast we traveled back to our dam and, to our surprise, saw that the water level had not risen at all. Later, Parker said that all-told we gained less than a foot of water. We talked about going up again, perhaps taking more men and more shovels, but then came a better idea: dynamite. I wasn’t in the hills the day the workers exploded the dams, but a dark part of me admits to having wanted to see how the beaver’s construction measured up against gunpowder and blasting caps.

A neighbor turned us in to Idaho Fish and Game, and the agency ordered us to cease beaver dam destruction. We were fined, as that sort of destruction was unsightly and wrong. We knew it, too, but what else could be done? Our crops were dying of thirst. Regardless, our work was all for naught: the potato crop stunted and valued nothing. Eventually, my father sold the farm for its lack of production. The new owner trenched out the canals and added three feet to the dam, erected irrigation pivots and replaced the pump. But even that seemed meaningless: if I had learned anything, it was that sweat alone could not water a crop.

<>

Through the binoculars, I follow the green line of creek flora and find the lake. It is tiny, maybe fifty feet by a hundred, relatively a drop in the bucket. The way Parker and my father jawed, I figured the lake would at least be sizeable enough for a motorboat. A man would be hard struck to take out a canoe on that pond.

“Doesn’t look like much of a water feature,” Parker says. “According to the real estate agent, the lake was going to make or break this place.”

“Come on,” my father says. “Let’s go down and see what this creek does.” The two tromp into the brush and disappear.

I stay near the pickup and ruminate over the jaundiced land. I can’t understand why anyone would want to live up here. All this dust and heat. These California investors must have different eyes than me. When I see dirt, my considerations turn to farming scenarios. Try as I might, it’s impossible for me to envision these hills dotted with mini-mansions and manicured lawns.

This proves my mistake. According to a recent Associated Press story, our government is considering a resurgence of western dam building in response to the nearly twenty percent increase in the population of western states during the 1990s, which now totals upwards of sixty-four million people.

John Redding, regional spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in Boise, says, “The West and the Northwest are increasing in population growth like never before. How do you quench the thirst of the hungry masses?”

<>

Unlike the first era of dam building that hinged around irrigation and power production, our next will focus on providing freshwater for western residents. Doing so creates an obvious conundrum: without our first dams, the west would be unlivable; now that it’s inhabitable, what end result will come from too many people? Although other ideas are in the mix—including conservation, storing water in natural underground aquifers, constructing water pipelines from the mountains, further metering water usage, and desalination plants—dam construction is once again in the forefront. Major water storage talks concern Colorado’s Yampa River, California’s San Joaquin River, Nevada’s Colorado River, and even hint at rebuilding Idaho’s Teton Dam.

I think that, like the beavers, the only reason investors are building here is because they have the ability to divert the water. Perhaps they develop from the need to move and shake. Or maybe that echo of empty land—the eminent silence that reigns here—is just too much for them to bear, and they have to cover it completely. Full of wonderment, I sit on the tailgate and wait for the men to return.

“Three beaver dams,” my father says when he arrives at the rig, panting from his hike. “Nothing else blocks the creek.”

We load into the pickup.

“I don’t have a problem with their lake,” my father continues. “They can boat and fish it. They just can’t use it up. I need it.”

We look out over the development one last time. My father says, “Guess I’ll call my water lawyer. He’ll know what to do. He’s the best in the State.”

Parker says, “Imagine they’d at least file for aesthetic right.”

“Well,” my father replies as he shifts the pickup into drive, “I’ll probably fight that too, just out of principle.”

We take off on the gravel road and disappear in a cloud of grit, headed down into the valley in search of something cold to drink.