20 minute read
Richard Jarrette: Poetic VOICE
Poetic VOICE
By Richard Jarrette
Landscape At Eighty
Dan Gerber, Hound Dog Press
NIGH ON EIGHTY
YEARS, our own Dan Gerber’s grave joy became a poem. Limited to 150 hand-sewn copies, Dan and his publishers allow me to gift the full text here. He writes, “The poem came over a period of four years. A line or couplet would occur to me that didn’t seem a part of the poem on which I was working. I went back to collect these lines and see what they had to say to each other. I got the Dan Gerber poem in its final form just before I learned of the death of Russell Chatham, my friend of almost fifty years, whose great landscape paintings have deepened and informed my life. This poem was written in their presence. Russ died last October, ten days after his 80th birthday, so, naturally, the poem is dedicated to his memory.” I love that he quotes his other gone beyond friend of fifty years, Jim Harrison, on “last meals,” and that the chapbook is graced with two watercolors by his friend Jack Smith.
Landscape At Eighty
I cannot think or tell what hurts or helps me more after I gaze upon your face— the end of nature, or this happiness. —Michelangelo A lifetime burning in every moment, Eliot wrote of his life in old age, but when does old age begin? do we know? We seem to agree on the ending. The blue reaches of a summer afternoon. A turkey vulture tilting on its wings. A crow finishes its drink and flaps off, like old leather, to an oak. When I look up again, the hawk, hovering in winds aloft, has faded into the sky, and the lizard hasn’t budged from the rocks since I first spotted him there. We’re always watched by familiar eyes, the countless windows in which we appear, the spider on the pillow taking in all eight of me at a glance. Beauty still lies in wait, whispering under all the noise— lurking in ambush behind a distraction, seducing with a breeze, scent of spruce, gardenia, subtle rose, warm fragrance of sleeping dog, a whistle off the end of each snore.
Luminous blue rivers shuttle through the Greenland glacier, never swift enough to suit themselves. Bananas passing from green to brown, barely pausing at yellow. Poet: a worm whose words might make a butterfly. Li Po drowned embracing the moon of illusion in the river, reflecting the moon of illusion in the sky, loving both equally, but the moon in the river was closer.
Nepenthe will keep you from weeping. I carry my claws with care. Coruscating light all day on the river— all night on the walls of my room. I find myself nostalgic for the last time I was feeling nostalgic. I used to be there all the time looking back on it now. All night, the quiet night of California, freeways full or filling up. One certain liberty— to be patient and eventually, leave. I ward off death reviving drowned bees and carrying errant spiders out of the house. Cirrus clouds stacked up for beauty, nothing else to account for it. This joy needs no reason to reach me. Cézanne subjected himself to the landscape every day and drew his religion from it. The horse sees the two nearly identical worlds in which we live.
My late afternoon shadow, fifteen feet tall.
Do you fear the world will die and leave you behind? A landscape is the abstract, of every hill, shadow, and mystery it comprises in the self-forgetful moment of a mind not striving to define it. The landscape is a complex being; its survival may depend on our demise— more urgently watching what Earth is doing with its atmosphere, things we’ve never seen before, becoming a cliché, the news, a daily booster shot of leaden-eyed despair. Sometimes the only green left in the tree is the mistletoe that siphoned it off. Hatred of Knowledge has a life all its own, as anything addicted to extinction must. Time wouldn’t miss a tick if we were gone. And who would there be to remember?
Without poetry the visible and invisible worlds wouldn’t be aware of each other, would obscure the mind’s invention of knowledge between a cloud of dust and cinder.
Three deer on the hilltop, their ears keeping watch while they doze. The high step of the blind dog testing the air he walks into. Waxing moon, swelling each night, gobbling a hundred more stars. The poppy flourishes to beguile the bee and, by its nature, catches me. Hummingbird buzzing a foot from my face, wondering if I contain nectar? When I realize I’m dreaming, I know I’m not asleep. How words you courted half your life arrive on their own one summer night when you’re doing nothing with all your might. Poetry is the part you can’t explain. We won’t blame ourselves for making so much of a little construction of words.
Sanity is waiting here outside your door. It might be raining sanity, or blowing sanity, or the sanity of silence with just a few birds. Pärt said his music, like white light, contains all the colors and only the prism of a listener can make them appear. How many times have you tried to explain the earth to a worm? Sphere: energy and gravity in divine embrace. When the I who am not I meets the you who never arrived. Ryōkan, on the secret of his art: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Counting to a billion will take you thirty-four years, if you don’t lose your concentration. These Things are empty, and when you become empty, they become luminous. No one who has seen a quark has ever forgotten it. I spent years waiting for patience and found it in no time at all.
‘I don’t believe in last meals,’ Jim said. ‘I believe in lots of last meals.’
Nights we sat out under the stars while the lights in the hills blinked out. Pole: place from which anywhere you step will be in the right direction. When we die we’ll be what we’ve always been, an urn of dust on loan from the stars.
My breath would keep a lion alive. My blood would nourish an eagle. Ages ago, I surrendered to nature so this page could be here and not be blank. Wishing I could introduce my grandson to my father. God so loved the world he gave himself up and became the world.
Richard Jarrette is author of Beso the Donkey (2010), A Hundred Million Years of Nectar Dances (2015), The Beatitudes of Ekaterina (2017), The Pond (2019), and Strange Antlers (2021).
Montecito Water District Board Nears Historic Vote “Water Security Team” is set to raise rates to buy an expensive yearly supply from Santa Barbara through 2071.
By Melinda Burns / Contributor
PROMISING TO “DROUGHT-PROOF” MONTECITO
AND BANISH RATIONING – if not forever, at least for the foreseeable future – the Montecito Water District board on Thursday is poised to approve the purchase of a multimillion-dollar supply of water from the City of Santa Barbara, every year for the next 50 years; and sign off on a five-year schedule of rate increases to help pay for it.
Under the proposed “Water Supply Agreement” with Santa Barbara, which is six years in the making, the district’s 11,400 ratepayers, primarily in Montecito but also in Summerland and Toro Canyon, would effectively fund 46 percent, or $33 million, of the city’s $72 million desalination plant over 50 years, plus interest and a share of the plant’s operation and maintenance costs.
In return, the city would guarantee a supply of 1,430 acre-feet of drinking water to Montecito Water District customers, year in and year out, through 2071. That’s 46 percent of the current desalination supply, and it’s enough to meet 40 percent of the district’s customer demand.
“If it were up to me, I’d sign up for 100 years,” said board President Floyd Wicks, who was elected in 2016, when Montecito residents faced per-parcel caps on water use and stiff fines for over-watering. “The community needs to have a plan in place that provides for a reliable water supply that’s predictable in cost. We haven’t had that for a long time.”
Not since county voters approved bonds for the construction of a state aqueduct branch to Lake Cachuma in 1991 has a water vote had such import for Montecito.
Once again, the vote comes on the heels of a severe drought.
Under rationing from 2014 to 2017, Montecito, a wealthy community of one-acre lots, big estates and luxury hotels, and golf courses, cut its water use by 50 percent. At the same time, between five and ten percent of district customers regularly paid the fines instead of cutting back: they included the San Ysidro Ranch; the Biltmore; and Ty Warner, their billionaire owner, at his tropically-landscaped estate on Channel Drive.
“Those penalties were really a thorn in the flesh for many people, and for our new board,” Wicks said. “I don’t want to go through it again. People made some very serious long-term changes to their irrigation habits. I don’t see how the community can do much better than what they already did.”
On a mission
The annual bill for the Santa Barbara supply would be about $4.6 million through 2038, at which time Montecito’s share of the capital cost of the desalination plant would be paid off. For the remaining 33 years, the district’s annual bill would drop to $2.3 million. Rain or shine, the supply would be delivered and the bills would be due.
To help pay for the water, the board proposes to raise district revenues by 2.8 percent per year for the next five years by raising rates and meter service charges. As is the case now, higher water users would pay higher rates. The August 1st bill would reflect the new changes. Under the agreement, Santa Barbara would retain full ownership of its desalination plant. It provides the surplus that is available for sale to Montecito; but the city would be able to send water from any source to its next-door neighbor.
With memories of rationing still fresh, the Montecito Water District is expected this week to buy into a 50-year supply of water from the City of Santa Barbara; the initial cost would be $4.6 million per year. The city’s $72 million desalination plant provides the surplus that makes the deal possible, but the city would be allowed to deliver water to Montecito from any source.
“The whole strategy has been, ‘How do we increase reliability?’” said board Director Tobe Plough. “We campaigned on it. What we said we were going to do is what we’ve been working on.”
But several prominent board critics, including Bob Roebuck, a former general manager of the district; Charles Newman, a Montecito planning commissioner; and Dick Shaikewitz, a 12- year water board veteran who was voted out in 2018, contend that the district’s plan is unreasonable. Conservation, these critics say, is a better alternative than locking ratepayers into a 50-year debt for landscaping water that, most years, they won’t need, even in a community where the median household income is nearly $150,000.
“It’s crazy,” Roebuck said. “The board’s on a mission. The average customer lives within their means, but there’s a group of customers who just want to have all the water they can possibly use during the worst year of the worst drought, and they want everyone to pay for it. I’m sort of despondent about the whole thing.”
Newman, who lost his seat on the water board in 2016, believes the district should set its sights on a supply of wastewater that can be treated to drinking standards, a technology, formerly called “toilet-to-tap,” that is still a few years away. Newman worries that sea level rise may flood the city’s desalination plant before the proposed 50-year agreement has expired.
“A far better path to water security for MWD’s customers is to continue with the successful conservation efforts and to distribute water that is treated to the highest standard allowed by law, which will soon be potable recycled water,” he said.
Kira Redmond, executive director of Santa Barbara Channelkeeper, agrees. The desalination plant, she said, was supposed to be a supply of last resort; the technology is energyintensive and, hard on the marine environment.
“We’re feeding the cycle of climate change and drought that forced us to resort to ‘desal’ in the first place,” Redmond said. “Those are old times. The future is different. We live in a Mediterranean climate. Conservation is a way of life, and it needs to be so always, not just in times of drought. Now, through this water supply agreement, we’re going to be stuck with ‘desal’ forever. Recycled water is where we should all be headed.”
But Joshua Haggmark, the city water resources manager, calls the agreement with Montecito “an example of good partnership” and says it is “fair for both communities.” If Santa Barbara ever wanted to expand its desalination plant, Haggmark said, Montecito would pick up part of the cost, and both communities would enjoy the resulting economies of scale.
“In the future, it does help address risk and helps stabilize water supplies on the South Coast,” Haggmark said. “I’m a fan of regional projects. I just think the momentum is headed this way.”
“Saving” Montecito
After the 1991 vote to import aqueduct water to Cachuma, the Montecito Water District ordered as much state water as Santa Barbara did, with 80,000 fewer people to pay for it. Montecito’s share of the $575 million capital cost of the aqueduct branch is due through 2035; it totals $5.5 million yearly and represents more than a quarter of the district’s $20 million annual budget. Beginning in 2022, the payment will drop $1.8 million, to an annual $3.7 million.
During the recent drought, the state slashed its allocations from the aqueduct to member agencies. But it’s widely agreed that the aqueduct branch “saved” Montecito; through the pipeline, the district was able to import supplemental water from other agencies around the state. The extra water cost more than $7 million district officials say, and more than $10 million in delivery and treatment costs. Some agencies demanded payback in water as well as cash.
But the district believes it can no longer rely on supplemental state water when the chips are down. The community faced a triple whammy during the drought of 2012 to 2018: Lake Cachuma, normally the district’s largest supply source, dropped to seven percent of capacity; Jameson Lake, the district’s small reservoir upstream of Cachuma, shrank to an undrinkable “dead” pool; and, in 2014, state water allocations were reduced to five percent of entitlements.
Today, there is no water shortage in Montecito: after two years
Courtesy Photo Jameson Lake, a small reservoir owned by the Montecito Water District on the Santa Ynez River, spilled over the Juncal Dam in April. The lake is 98 percent full; during the recent drought, it shrank to an undrinkable “dead pool.” of average and above-average rainfall, the district is flush with water and is storing surplus supplies. But, Wicks said, “Looking back to the recent drought really caught my attention. We just can’t leave a community in that kind of dilemma.”
Roebuck and other critics believe that the state water market, combined with conservation, could again bail out the community in future droughts, especially if the district stores more of its surplus underground during wet years.
“During most years, we have all the water we need in surface reservoirs,” Roebuck said. “We’re already paying for the infrastructure of the State Water Project. In a drought, we keep our consumption down. That’s the ecological way of living, being sensitive to the environment.”
Today, Montecitans are using 40 percent less water than they did before the drought, district records show, but it’s still a lot of water: 210 gallons per capita per day, compared to 60 in Santa Barbara and 57 in Goleta. An estimated 85 percent of Montecito’s water goes to landscaping, compared to 50 percent in Santa Barbara and 55 percent in Goleta.
But the present Montecito water board, elected in 2016 and 2018 as a “Water Security Team,” and backed by more than $100,000 in campaign funds, including large donations from members of the Birnam Wood and Valley Club golf courses on East Valley Road, has repeatedly said that any further demands on conservation would change the semi-rural feel of Montecito, with its high hedges, broad lawns, lush gardens and dense woodlands.
“That intangible, which is why I live here, is in a way almost priceless,” Director Ken Coates said at a May 26th board meeting.
At a June 15th workshop, he added: “What we’re dealing with here is the way to protect the character of Montecito and Summerland. It’s critically important that we keep in mind why we live where we live and why property values are as high as they are. That character is largely created by landscaping, and landscaping takes water.”
Startup in 2022
If the board approves the water supply agreement with Santa Barbara on Thursday, the City Council would initiate its approval process on June 30th; but water would not start flowing to Montecito until January 1st, 2022. In the interim, the city would build a pipeline from the desalination plant to the Cater Water Treatment Plant off Foothill Road, where the South Coast Conduit, a high-pressure pipeline, would carry the water to Montecito.
There is no water shortage in Montecito today. Cachuma is at 79 percent of capacity, and Jameson spilled in both 2019 and this April. But Santa Barbara water, the board says, would be “100 percent reliable”: that is, it would not be dependent on rainfall, and it would come from “this side of the mountains.”
In a recent study, an engineering consulting firm backed up the district’s plan, concluding that climate change will bring more frequent, longer, and more intense droughts; reservoir and aqueduct supply will be reduced, and supplemental state water will be more expensive and harder to obtain on the “spot” water market. Only the agreement with Santa Barbara would avert significant water shortages in another serious drought, the study found.
Beginning next year, the state is expected to allow agencies that are hooked up to the aqueduct to buy supplemental supplies without incurring a water debt as well as a monetary debt. But the Montecito board believes it would still be risky. Under new state regulations, farmers in the Central Valley will be forced to reduce their pumping from severely depleted groundwater basins, and they will likely be competing for extra supplies, the board says.
“In the future, there’s going to be such a battleground for surplus water that might be out there in the system,” Wicks said at a recent meeting. “It’s going to be a bloodbath.”
Plough said that during wet years, with a supply from Santa Barbara coming in, the district would look for ways to market surplus state water and Cachuma supplies, becoming a seller instead of a buyer.
Plough and Wicks were elected to the board in 2016 on a platform to bring recycled water to Montecito. They will run for re-election in November.
Carolee Krieger, a longtime Montecito resident and critic of state water who is president and executive director of the California Water Impact Network, a nonprofit advocacy group, supports the proposed Water Supply Agreement with Santa Barbara.
“What we need is local, real wet water, not ‘paper’ state water,” Krieger said. “When there is water in the State Water Project, we have no place to put it. When you need it, it’s not there. It’s always been a bad investment for Montecito. We have to stop depending on water outside our county.”
But Shaikewitz, who voted for rationing and supplemental state water supplies when he was on the board, says the deal with Santa Barbara “doesn’t make sense.”
“This is about insurance, and I don’t see it as being necessary,” he said. “It’s an awful lot of money. None of us know what the water situation is going to be for the next 50 years. It’s an absolute blind spot. The water board may be absolutely right. If there’s no water, more power to them. But in the last three years, they’ve had more water than they know what to do with. Do you need to tuck away four to five million dollars a year, extra? If you look over the future, there’s water out there.”
The price of new supply
The board says the initial $4.6 million annual price tag for Santa Barbara water would be partially offset by a $1.8 million drop in the district’s annual state water debt, starting in 2022. The district, it says, also could save on the delivery cost of state water that it doesn’t need, and could sell off some of its aqueduct supplies.
The proposed 2.8 percent increase in yearly district revenues for the next five years would cover the annual cost of the new supply from Santa Barbara as well as more than $2 million in pipeline replacement. The revenue would be generated from increased water rates and water meter service charges, and changes in the rate structure itself.
The new residential rate schedule provides for three tiers of water use, each with progressively higher rates.
Tier 1, with the cheapest rates, would chiefly cover indoor use. For thrifty residents in this tier, using just nine hundred cubic feet of water (hcf) monthly, the water rate would go down during the first year, from $8.85 to $6.56 per hcf. (One hundred cubic feet of water equals 748 gallons.)
Property owners using 25 hcf on, say, an acre of land, would see a seven percent increase in their water bills on August 1st, from $265.54 to $284.14 monthly. (The largest single bloc of district ratepayers are property owners with one acre of land.)
Google Earth Photo The Montecito Water District says too much conservation would alter the semi-rural character of the wealthy community. The Birnam Wood Golf Club, shown here, is one of two luxury golf resorts on East Valley Road.
The district claims that 56 percent of customers would see a decrease or no change in their bills for the next 12 months under the proposed changes. But Roebuck and others have noted that the new rate schedule would incorporate the “Water Shortage Emergency Surcharge” of $3.45 per hcf that the board imposed during the drought. The surcharge was supposed to be temporary and should be eliminated now that the drought is over, Roebuck said.
Without the surcharge, which is still listed as “temporary” on the district’s website, the current monthly bills for those residents using 25 hcf of water would be $179.59; their proposed August 1st bills would represent a 58 percent increase from that amount.
Wicks said that when district customers sharply cut their demand during the drought, district revenues dropped, yet the district still had to pay for the fixed costs of dams, reservoirs, pipelines, pumping stations, and the aqueduct branch to Cachuma. A supply from Santa Barbara would represent another large fixed cost.
“The sales never returned, so the surcharge has to remain,” Wicks said. Melinda Burns volunteers as a freelance journalist in Santa Barbara as a community service. She offers her news reports to multiple local publications, at the same time, for free.
Experience The Beauty of The Santa Barbara Waterfront on Stearns Wharf
Stearns Wharf Merchants Celebration Cruises and Lil’ Toot Char West Conway Deep Sea Wine Tasting Room Deep Blue Sea Great Pacific Ice Cream Company Harbor Restaurant Longboards Grill Madame Rosinka
