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BEFORE THE DAM
 

Words By Jim Robbins, Music by Jim Robbins and Chris Burriss
 

We trudged on the cliff down the trail into the canyon
with jewels in the grass gleaming all around us.
We brushed lips as dippers rose and fell,
diving and submerging. A shadow flowed
through brilliant leaves and merged
on bare arms. We sprawled, half-dressed,
in a shallow house pit, near a pounding stone
with deep mortars--like eyeless sockets
gazing up at the sky before a shadow
submerged the canyon. The last
eagles glided over and spiraled high,
roots pulling tribes up from the soil,
high into branches, to flow in an ocean
of breath, as night flooded the gorge.


                     

Suite No. 5, Second Movement:

BEFORE THE DAM
 

   My wife’s brother Chris and I one day started jamming together and ended up writing the first chord progressions and part of the melody for this song. I was on guitar and he was on keyboard. My wife joined in on vocals. This was my first serious attempt to write a song with lyrics, and since my wife and I practiced it often, I believed that it held a special place in her heart. The song was originally about a trip to the Kaweah River, but after I discovered that a favorite haunt on the San Joaquin River was in danger of being drowned by a dam, I changed the lyrics. I assumed that my wife was just as shocked about the possible destruction of the river gorge as I was, and I believed that the issue would bring us even closer together.















 

Trail down to River Bottom
 

   The Dumna and Kechayi Native Americans once occupied the San Joaquin River Gorge and surrounding lands. The Pa'san Ridge Trail loops around on the west side of the river--the word pa'san is derived from their language and means “pine nuts,” a food source that exists in abundance on the hillsides (1).  In spring the ridge trail provides an opportunity to experience a breathtaking array of flowering trees and plants: redbuds, lupine, poppies, fiesta flowers, goldfields, owl’s clover, fiddleneck and popcorn. At one point the ridge trail forks south, dipping down to the edge of the inundation zone of Millerton Lake, where rotting flotation devices, driftwood and trash are strewn upon or near Native American pounding stones. In spring, baby blue eyes blanket the grass between the river and the trail near indentations, the size of house pits, in the ground. The small piece of level land at the bottom of the gorge is the only place where the Native Americans could have set up their huts and buried their dead. Across the river, rocks left over from the construction of a small hydro project rise on the slope like a barricade.











 

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Pounding Stone in Inundation Zone of Friant Dam

 

   Sometimes under water, sometimes exposed, the ancient Native American site remains in a water-logged limbo where pristine public land transitions into wasteland. The conflicts related to water in California have often been described as a war--other than a dam, only a war could have created a no-man’s land of similar proportions. The denuded slopes of the gorge reveal the high water mark of Millerton Lake, the reservoir created by Friant Dam. Only a crop of cockle-burrs flourishes there. Reservoir water has destroyed the root systems of the native plants and trees, leaving unstable rocks and soil. Unlike a war zone, however, this no man’s land will not renew itself as long as Friant Dam stands.
  The main problem with the proposal for a dam at Temperance Flat: It would not develop more water. The State Water Resources Control Board has determined that no more water rights are available on the San Joaquin River. Moreover, according to a recent study, the water from the river has been over-allocated by a whopping 861%. Very little new water would be created because other dams already capture and divert almost all of the river’s flows. The trickle of new water that would be created by the dam would be diverted to landowners and corporations with the water rights. So, in another twisted form of socialism for the wealthy, the public would pay billions of dollars to destroy its own public park so that landowners and corporations could have more water for unsustainable crops like almonds and pasture grass and grapes.
  As and adjunct instructor, I discovered that I had no job security at all. I wrote an op-ed piece in opposition to the dam, and a few weeks later I experienced an unscheduled evaluation at the small, rural community college where I was teaching. The administrator who evaluated me begrudgingly marked "excellent" in every category but refused to hold a post-evaluation meeting with me. I was not rehired the next semester—after twelve years of working every semester, with a rating of excellent in every category on every evaluation. (I had worked there longer than any other employee at that campus.)
  After I lost the job, my wife lost interest in the issue and stopped going to the gorge with me. Losing a job because of a position on an environmental issue to her was not a heroic sacrifice but an unforgivable mistake. The family always had to come first even though our children were grown up and living on their own. In one way, she was right, of course, but most if not all of us in the precariat class must take this risk when speaking truth to power here in the San Joaquin Valley, where most of the rivers and wetlands are dead or dying.
  When she kept insisting that I work full time despite my atrial fibrillation, I responded badly. I told her that I was dying from heart disease. I made it clear that I could end up having a stroke and surviving, leaving her to care for a vegetable. Every time I experienced A fib, my heart beating erratically, beat, beat, beat, pause, pause, pause, beat, beat, pause, pause, beat, beat, beat, pause, pause, I felt hopeless. The A fib would often continue for hours. And every time, I was keenly aware that there was a pretty good chance that I was going to have a heart attack or a stroke. My father, after all, had died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-five, and I was the same age. I didn't know at the time that gluten was causing the A fib. Unfortunately, the more it happened, the more I withdrew from other people, including my wife.
  Finally, I went gluten-free, which alleviated most of my problems, but the damage had already been done to the relationship: I had given my wife the impression that she should let me go.
  Even after I figured out that gluten was at the root of my physical problems and my depression, I was still experiencing A fib regularly because gluten exists in just about everything, from products labeled “gluten-free” to chickens injected with a plumping solution. The industry standard for the amount of gluten allowable in a "gluten-free" product is not adequate for people who are extremely sensitive. My heart had become a gluten gauge that reacted to the most miniscule amount of what to me had become a toxic substance, and I often felt depressed because even though I had attempted to go totally gluten-free, I still suffered from A fib, which suggested to me that my heart and my digestive system had already been so ruined by gluten that I was doomed. I thought I wasn't going to make it much longer.
  Through a process of elimination, after my wife left me, I removed gluten completely from my diet and no longer suffered from A fib. Every now and then I would become adventurous and include something new in my diet. More often than not, the new item contained a miniscule amount of gluten. Every time that happened, I believed again, for a little while at least, that my heart and digestive system were ruined and that I was dying from heart disease. Now I maintain a very limited diet and no longer suffer from the chronic disease known as celiac disease.