Anya Steinberg
Appearances
Throughline
Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
And I was like, okay. I think I see it. But as we kept going on this walk, it started to click into place for me. And I could see these ditches are sometimes very deep and well-preserved. And sometimes they're just like this faint whisper on the land almost, which is almost cooler to me that he can pick this out and that this has been mapped out by him and others from the tribe. Yeah.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
But it was just crazy to see like once the ditch starts to like pop out of the landscape at you, how they like turn and swoop, the kind of the engineering that was created to move the water without any sort of like pumping power machinery. It's very it is in a way reminiscent of the L.A. Aqueduct itself because the L.A. Aqueduct is runs on on gravity. There's no pumps.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
So I feel like similar ideas were going on when the Paiute and Shoshone people designed their irrigation ditches. As a former environmental science major in college, I was really like nerding out about how they manipulated and used this water in a way that like change the landscape to their betterment and also like fed into the natural water cycle of the valley.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
You know, the water, the snow would melt off the mountains and run through these ditches across the valley. And all the while they're irrigating the land. So there's, it's not like irrigation, like we grow corn in these massive rows. It was more just like soaking water into various parts of the land so that flora and fauna would grow, trees, grasses, and animals would come.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
Animals that you could eat, like plants that you could eat would grow. And then, you know, the water soaks through the ground and recharges the water table. And so that is like how the water cycle works. It cycles through the landscape. So it was very, very cool to see
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
Yeah. Yeah. This is perfect actually, because I mean, I mentioned it's rainy. We're going to be going back in my mind to sunny, beautiful California, which is where this story takes place. And basically this story that I pitched is the story of what happened when Los Angeles decided to build an aqueduct from this place called the Owens Valley all the way to LA.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
that in action and then to also see in the modern day and in the absence of that system and in the presence of a system where the LA Aqueduct is taking water out of the valley never to return, like how that has changed what the landscape looks like. You know, it's dry, it's dusty, it's deserty.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
It was hard to imagine what Noah was talking about when he was describing what it would have looked like in the past.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
Richard. He was one of my favorite people that I met. He's just so kooky, so himself, very California hippie character. When I met him, he rolled up in this big red pickup truck with all these bumper stickers on the back. One of them I remember seeing was, LA sucks, the Owens Valley dry, which I thought was funny. And he was wearing this long sleeve tie-dye shirt That said, furry hippie on it.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
He has like kind of shoulder length, white hair. That's a little bit all over the place. And the kind of person that he is is just the kind of person that's very chatty, can talk your ear off. And actually, when we were like in the parking lot getting ready to leave, he like struck up this conversation with these other people in the parking lot. And we just stood there for 10 minutes talking.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
I was checking my watch, like, are we going to get out on the road? And he's talking their ear off about Owens Valley this, Owens Valley that. You should go here. It was just a cute experience. And what does he do?
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
He's a longtime resident of the valley. And this history of the aqueduct is like a little bit of a passion project of his. Like he showed up with a stack of books and they had all of these sticky notes sticking out of them. And they were just books about the valley's history and about the aqueduct's history.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
And he was like using them to reference pictures and notes and things while we were talking. So... This is definitely something he cares about. And he has researched for a long time, which is why I wanted to talk to him.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
Especially with Richard. Yeah. Tell me about that. Yeah, we a little bit of this is in the episode, but he we had this grand plan to go see like the main sites of the aqueduct, the place where it begins and a couple of historical sites along the way. And a lot of these sites are located down these service roads because obviously the aqueduct is still in operation.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
So LADWP uses these service roads. And we turn onto them. It's very bumpy dirt gravel road. And we very quickly come up against this fence that is seemingly locked. And an outtake from the episode is just the expletives that Richard let out when he thought that our whole day might be foiled by this padlocked fence. But it turns out there was no lock on it.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
It was just a chain wrapped around the fence. So we just unwrapped the chain and... shrugged our shoulders and drove through. And that was how we ended up at the place where the Los Angeles Aqueduct begins, also known as the Aqueduct Intake.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
The LA aqueduct is made up of like some open channels, lined with concrete. There's some large pipes as a part of it. It looks different in different places, but the whole goal is to move water from a place that has it to a place that doesn't. And they did that because they needed water to make the city into the metropolis it is today.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
I think it's an extremely complex moral question. I think you and I came into this episode kind of from different viewpoints. I actually appreciated that because I think that tension helped shape the episode where we were both trying to talk to each other about this and talk through what we thought of this moral question. And that kind of push and pull is really at the heart of the episode.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
But I think... The idea of the greatest good for the greatest number is a question that no matter where we live in the U.S., you're going to have to face at some point in the future. I mean, not to be a merchant of doom and gloom, but climate change exists. And as these effects worsen or intensify...
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
I think people will be asking a lot of questions about like, how do we allocate the limited resources we have to do good? And is it right to be able to take from one place to give to another? I think a lot of people in the Owens Valley don't.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
expressed to me that they felt like a water colony you know a colony of los angeles like something that only existed to be extracted from and i think that that is like the flip side of the greatest good for the greatest number because on one hand when you have need and you want to address that need i think there's very real like humanitarian reasons why we should
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
help people and sometimes taking resources from one place to the other is the way to do that. But that always has an effect downstream. Right. Pardon my pun. Yeah. So if anything, working on this episode made me more confused about what I think of that sentiment, but it is a really interesting way to engage with this moral question that we're all going to be grappling with.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
And a lot of places outside of California already do in different ways. Right.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
Well, to go back to Richard, I was very tired at this point. I had met up with other people before Richard. I'd been working for 10 hours at that point, just talking. So I was kind of like tapped out, ready to go back to the car. And Richard stopped me.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
We were at this site called the Alabama Gates, where in the 1920s, the residents of the valley like occupied the gates for four days and shut off the water supply to the L.A. aqueduct or diverted the L.A. aqueduct to run into the valley. So we were at the Alabama gates and he was like, can you turn on your tape recorder again? I have something else to say.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
And then he just delivered this very beautiful soliloquy to me of like kind of these very emotional reflections that I feel like, you know, he spent decades thinking about this issue and living here. And a lot of it, I don't think made it into the episode, which is why it's the perfect thing to talk about now. But he was talking a lot about like,
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
the humanity of everybody involved, the decisions that people were making, the secret fears and hopes that they were driven by, and how that all gets entangled together to create history. Does it ever make you emotional to stand at these sites and just think about it?
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
I just thought that was beautiful. It almost brought me to tears. And he was he was getting very emotional about it, too, in the moment. So I think about that a lot. And I think that's something that we try and tease out in every episode that we make, whether it's about, you know, the L.A. aqueduct or the history of smell or whatever. It's just the humanity at the center of everything.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
Of history, because at the end of the day, it's it's people facing decisions in the past that we may have to make again in the future or decisions we may have never fathomed of making and the core of every history.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
But when they did that, it had unintended consequences on like a variety of levels. You know, it made people in the valley mad. It affected the environment. There's all this kind of drama that plays out after the aqueduct opens. So that's what this episode is about.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
Yeah. I think you can't understate how much the aqueduct changed L.A. Like you said, it basically went from this dusty frontier town with a couple thousand people living there to this enormous city, the basis of Hollywood, kind of the epitome of the American dream, and that is all because of the water that the aqueduct brought.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
Yeah. Well, like you said, this is not a new story. There's already been a lot done about it. There's been fictional and non-fictional documentaries made about this. So when I was thinking about how this episode was going to work and how to through-line-ify this story... Through-line-ify.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
I really wanted to go somewhere new, and I wanted to meet new kinds of people. And I think the story a lot of times is told from LA's point of view, and it's also told from Los Angeles. Like, what did the aqueduct bring to Los Angeles? What did the people in Los Angeles think of it? Who were the people in Los Angeles that made it happen?
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
And I wanted to refocus that onto, like, what did this take away from the place where the water came from? And what happened there? How did people react? And how were their lives changed by this event? And so, luckily, I got the chance to go there, which I think was really, really important, too. I've done a couple of reporting trips before.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
for the show it's always nice when you have these place-based stories to be able to feel the place that you're going to be storytelling about be able to like breathe the air hear the sounds like meet the people who live there and just get a sense of like the culture the vibes what's happening and I think for this story like You know, the history is so lived in the present in the Owens Valley.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
Like, you can really see the effects of the history that this episode is about, and you can also, like, feel it when you talk to people who live there, you know? Like, a huge consequence of this aqueduct building is that the L.A. Department of Water and Power owns a lot of the land in the valley, and, like, there's signs everywhere that say... You know, no trespassing. This is LADWP property.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
There's LADWP trucks everywhere. A lot of the people in the valley work for LADWP. And a lot of people in the valley, like I mentioned, have opinions about the aqueduct in the present day. They have feelings about it. There's a lot of emotion. Like, I think I was surprised by...
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
How many people there were brought to tears when they were talking to me about this story and like what it meant to them.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
Well, I started in the Bay Area in Oakland and I drove the seven hours on paper to the Owens Valley. And I say on paper because I'm a really slow driver. So it actually took me like 10. That's embarrassing to admit, but everyone who knows me knows that I'm a grandma behind the wheel. So I took my time and it's one of the most beautiful drives I've ever done in my life.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
The Owens Valley is, it's in Eastern California. It's bordered by the Sierra Nevada mountains. It's very close to Yosemite. It's just gorgeous. And you basically drive through Yosemite to get there. So the roads are extremely hilly, very twisty, very turny. There were a lot of points that I had to pull over and just like breathe for a second. So it's a bit precarious, but it was also gorgeous.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
And you pass through just a lot of classic California forests, cool mountain air, beautiful streams.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
Yes. And I was there in the late spring. So I feel like it was a time when the snow melt was just starting to melt.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
So I met Noah at an event that I went to in the valley. This was my first day there. And it was an event being hosted by something called the Owens Valley Indian Water Commission. And a big piece of the contemporary story of the valley is that indigenous people have lived in the valley for thousands of years.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
And when the aqueduct was built, it was at this very complicated time in American history for... native people. And without going into all of the details, of which there are many, and you can listen to the episode to find out, the aqueduct was a raw deal for a lot of the valley's indigenous people, the Paiute people, the Shoshone people. And they still live there today.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
There are several reservations in the valley, and they still have a lot of negotiating that they want to do with LADWP. They believe that their water rights are not being respected. In the modern day, they believe they are owed more from LADWP and they believe LADWP is doing environmental harm to the valley through the operation of the Los Angeles Aqueduct.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
So I was at an event hosted by this commission to basically raise awareness for residents of LA about the LA Aqueduct and the history. So they invite like groups of people from Los Angeles to come on like a weekend long retreat and they walk around, they have presentations, um,
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
They let people experience the valley and where their water comes from in this way that they have never experienced before. So it was a really cool event. And that's where I met Noah because he was there giving some talks because he's the water program coordinator for the Big Pine Paiute tribe. So...
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
Yeah, because I had arrived in the dark after my 10-hour drive. Driving to this event in the morning was kind of my first glimpse of the valley in its totality. And It was just breathtaking. I mean, there's there's like one major highway that runs through the whole thing. And then all around you is just this vast expanse of like beauty.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
I don't know what how else to put it, but there's mountains on all sides with these huge, jagged, snow covered peaks. There's like desert scrub vegetation, which there's not a lot of buildings because Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, like I said, owns a lot of the land and they keep it undeveloped because they're not really interested in the lands.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
How's it going? It's going good. I'm here in rainy Seattle talking to you. So nice.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
They're more interested in the water rights associated with the land. So it's essentially just like mostly empty of buildings. So you can see all around you. And when I got to this event and I met Noah off the bat, he was just very, very intently focused on like telling me his story and the story of the valley and the story of his people.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
And so I, I mean, I spent like an hour with him that day, just grilling him on this hike that we went on, uh, which kudos to him because hiking is And talking is a whole other can of worms, and he was a very good sport about that.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
So I met him on this hike, and then we arranged to meet up later that week so that he could show me some traces of his ancestors, these ancient irrigation ditches that exist all over the valley that Paiute and Shoshone people used to irrigate the valley before the Los Angeles Aqueduct existed.
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Going to the Source of L.A.'s Water
And that was exactly my experience. I went on this hike with him and I was being skeptical about what I would see. And at first on the hike, I honestly didn't get it. He kept pointing out these things and he was like, this is a ditch. And I was like, what are we looking at? I kept having to have him describe or literally go stand where he was talking about. This is the middle of the ditch.