The next morning I got up, pulled on Manuels old work gloves, took a shovel out of the barn, walked down to the creek, and dug up the rusty coffee can Manuel buried in the bank beside his stone dam in 1986, the year he came home from Sacramento smiling and would not tell me why, and inside that can was the reason he smiled.
The vineyard man from San Francisco had driven his side-by-side up to my porch and told me his water attorney said Manuels little dam was diverting water he needed, that he had senior rights, that Id take the dam out or the county would, and then my pond would dry and my cattle would go and Id sell.
He had it exactly backward, and the proof had been buried by the dam for thirty-nine years.
In 1986 my husband drove to Sacramento and secured our senior, adjudicated water rights to that creek, rights that predate the vineyards by decades, and he sealed the state certificate in a coffee can by the dam, so the water the vineyard man swore was his has been legally, provably ours since before those grapes were ever planted.
Manuel never bragged, but he was no fool about water, and in California water is everything. He went to the state, filed, and got our rights adjudicated and recorded, first in time, first in right. That is why he came home smiling. He knew that someday somebody upstream would get greedy, and he had made sure that when they did, we would win.
The vineyard man had senior rights to nothing. His attorney had never pulled the adjudication, or he would have found our name on top of it. Manuels dam does not steal his water. Our water rights mean the vineyard has to leave enough in that creek for my stock pond before it takes a drop for its vines.
I took the certificate to a water lawyer in Paso Robles, and he grinned and said, maam, your husband handed you the whole creek in a coffee can.
When the vineyard man drove up again, I did not argue. I handed him a copy of our 1986 adjudicated rights and I said, well see, I told you. Turns out we see just fine. My husbands rights are senior to yours by decades. Take out my dam and youll answer to the state, and youll still owe me my water. You might tell your attorney to read the file next time.
He backed his side-by-side out through the gate slower than he drove it in. The dam stays. The pond stays full. The cattle graze.
That water is coming to me, he had said. It has been coming to my family since 1986, because Manuel drove to Sacramento and made it law, and buried the proof by the dam he built with his own two hands. My sons are in Fresno, but the cattle and the creek and the pond were Manuels whole life, and now they are safe, because he thought of this long before the man from San Francisco ever built a tasting room to look down on my cows.