Stream Living

Water rights are often the most important asset a farmer has. This psalm says that believers are not located near wells of water, but streams of water.

They are like trees, planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season.

--Psalm 1:3a.


California is a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see,
But believe it or not you won't find it so hot,
If you ain't got the do re mi.

--Woody Guthrie.


California did sound like the Garden of Eden to 1930s dust-bowl refugees in Woody Guthrie's famous protest song. The "do" (dough), of course, is money -- which the hardscrabble farmers of Kansas and Oklahoma didn't have. "Better stay home," is the song's message, "if you don't have a little dough for a grubstake." The homesteaders' dream of wringing a living from the land by dint of hard work and little else seemed to the folksinger to be rapidly receding.

Today, it would seem, the tables are turned. It's California that's suffering unprecedented drought. The snowpack in the Sierras -- whose annual melting is the source of much of the state's fresh water -- is smaller than in recorded history. There's real concern that, if present...