Undercurrents

1Reading the WaterUndercurrents Powering My Journey in Practical Activism

Life is like the sea. Its tides and currents sometimes take a man to distant shores that he never dreamed existed.

—Jocelyn Murray, The English Pirate

I STARTED OUT as an unlikely candidate for global activism: a kid from a rural town of 4,000 people, most of them deeply conservative and proudly isolated from many of the comings and goings of the wider world. I grew up in the ranching community of Dillon, Montana, in a high mountain valley rimmed by stunning peaks running along the Continental Divide. There, the land and the water ruled supreme. So, like many boys in Dillon, by age 13 I had my first job: irrigating our fields of alfalfa and barley. This was in the early 1970s, before industrial‐grade sprinklers were widely available, so my Uncle Roy would plow the land, and then we'd walk it, surveying to determine its slope and where water might pool. Next, we'd dig a network of ditches to capture the water streaming from one of the valley's main creeks, and into these ditches I'd drop canvas dividers that worked like temporary dams, diverting the water into still more ditches and pushing it farther into our fields. The trick was getting adequate water to flow over the largest possible area without washing out and drowning our crops.

By high school I'd become quite good at “reading the water,” as Uncle Roy used to say, so for several years I was anointed “the Irrigator.” Old farmhands sometimes used ...