The Stream That Came Back From the Dead

This is the best story on this road, and it's true, and I'd tell it slower if I could.

You heard Quinn: since nineteen forty-one, the creek below Grant Lake dam — Rush Creek, the same water those Bodie men built their tramway over — was taken. Los Angeles owned the rights, the tunnel under the craters carried it away, and for most of forty years, the creekbed below that dam ran DRY. A creek that had carried snowmelt to Mono Lake for ten thousand years was simply... switched off. The trout died. The cottonwoods died. And Mono Lake, out there with no river left to feed it, dropped forty-five vertical feet and grew so salty its islands became peninsulas and the coyotes walked out to eat the gull colonies.

Everybody knew it. Nobody could stop it. The city had the paper, and the paper said the water was theirs.

Then came the wet winters of the early eighties, and Grant Lake did something the paper hadn't planned for: it overflowed. Real water came down the dead creekbed for the first time in a generation — and here's the miracle — TROUT came with it, spilled over the dam, and they LIVED. Brown trout, thriving in a stream the maps had written off.

And some local fishermen stood on the bank looking at living fish in a dead creek, and they had a thought that changed California: if the fish are alive, the law protects them. There was an old doctrine — the state holds its waters in trust for the people, and fish have a right to the water they live in. Fishermen, birdwatchers, a little committee formed to save Mono Lake — they took the mightiest water empire in the American West to court over a creek you can wade across.

It took more than a decade. But in nineteen ninety-four the State Water Board handed down Decision Sixteen Thirty-One, and the empire was ordered to do the unthinkable: leave water in the creek. Keep the stream alive. Let Mono Lake rise. The city's diversions were cut to a fraction, permanently.

So look at Rush Creek where it runs below the dam — willows back, cottonwoods back, wild brown trout holding in the current like nothing ever happened. Almost nowhere else on Earth did a piped-away river get UN-piped. It happened here, because a handful of people with fishing rods and binoculars refused to accept that dead was permanent.

And I want to give the fight itself its due, because it wasn't quick and it wasn't clean. The city's lawyers argued, correctly, that they held every permit ever written for that water. The fishermen's side argued something older — that some things are held in trust for everyone, and no permit can sign them away. Case after case, appeal after appeal, through most of the eighties: injunctions won on Rush Creek while the lake kept dropping; scientists counting gulls and brine shrimp entered into evidence; college kids in a Lee Vining storefront running a campaign against the biggest municipal utility on Earth on donations and bumper stickers. SAVE MONO LAKE — you've seen the sticker, even if you never knew where the lake was. This is where the lake was.

The lake out north is still rising toward the level the court ordered. Slowly. But the creek beside this road came back from the dead in my lifetime — and every trout in it is a legal precedent with fins.