"ANYONE GOT MAC?!"

That's what the man said. . .

Why? The secretary of the local acequia [ah-SAY-kya] association had just quit, sending a Mac-formatted floppy disk of the last meeting's minutes along with his letter of resignation. Unfortunately, the gentleman (a rather well-to-do Anglo) had chosen the most critical time of year to quit. As a consequence, because there was no secretary to send out the announcement, few of the residents of the valley learned of the annual "ditch meeting" in time to attend.

It was nonetheless gratifying to see that I wasn't the only one in the small group of a dozen or so raise my hand: a woman three seats to my left was also a Mac user! Considering that perhaps half of the people in the room owned computers at all, the two of us represented a doubling or tripling of Macintosh market share. If only the secretary's untimely resignation hadn't given us all a bad name!

No one dwelt on this, however, because these were critical times. The winter snowpack in the mountains above the valley was well below average and the spring runoff would be minimal. Unless there was a repetition of last summer's unusually abundant rainfall, everyone would suffer: fewer cuttings of alfalfa, little or no water for gardens or trees, and less for drinking. Yes friends, our little valley holds the honor of being the only community in the United States that gets its drinking water untreated out of a ditch! And far from being a shameful state of affairs, this is actually a great and wondrous thing. While many homes have wells, a number of them do indeed receive water from a gravity-fed domestic water system that takes water directly from the acequia. Our pure local water is such an unusual circumstance that the community is about to receive official recognition of this from the federal government! (Whenever this happens, I'll let you know.)

It all has to do with a centuries-old community irrigation system that takes water from a clear-flowing stream originating from a spring high up on the mountain outside my window. It also has to do with the relative simplicity and wholesomeness of the traditional way of life in these parts, and it involves a sense of responsibility arising from the old communal culture. The tragedy is that more places aren't like this, and that what we have here is so threatened. The problem can be summarized as a lack of concern for one's neighbors, and is there ever really any other thing wrong with the world?

The northern New Mexico acequias, many of which are quite old, channel water from mountain sources into ditches that most outsiders would mistake for natural streams. One of them runs about a hundred yards from where I sit, and you'd never guess it had been built by human hands. Over the years the meandering rocky watercourse has acquired an extended surrounding grove of tall cottonwoods, willows, and other vegetation. There are two such "creeks" on this particular piece of land that are turned on and off at different times of the year by opening or closing certain gates upstream. Our landlady doesn't use her water rights for irrigating, but many other people in the valley certainly do. Just who gets water, how much, and when is controlled by the acequia association through the person of the mayordomo. This is quite a complex procedure, as we learned from listening to his three-page handwritten report today. What a revelation! It went something like this:

"On June 12, 1999, Frank Trullijo got water for his alfalfa field from 8:00 a.m. until 6:00 p.m. Frank Jr.'s field was watered from approximately 6:00 p.m. until midnight. Charlie and Wanda Romero had permission to water from midnight until 8:00 a.m. the next day, June 13." (And on and on and on. . .)

The mayordomo's report covered 4 months of this in excruciating detail, and the audience hung on every word. Afterwards there were a host of issues to be discussed, such as who hadn't gotten a chance to irrigate, who had gotten water but not paid their dues, and why there hadn't been any water for gardens and trees in the "lower valley" on certain Saturdays and Sundays like there was supposed to be. Blame for this last item fell on a ranch in the upper valley owned by the PowerBook-wielding former association secretary -- someone there hadn't closed the irrigation gates on Friday nights to send the water back down in time for weekend watering!

As you can see, failure to honor commitments and play by the rules in this situation creates obvious hardships for everyone else. If fields don't get watered on schedule, there's less alfalfa to be cut, and livestock owners have to pay for extra feed. People who can't irrigate may lose their gardens, and so on.. In the old days, these were matters of life and death in this semi-arid region. In the new days, the effects aren't so dramatic, given that few people actually rely on subsistence farming and ranching. But the accumulating lack of courtesy and responsibility could eventually prove to be just as deadly to the local culture. This valley is one of the last remaining cohesive communities of its kind. They even held a community New Year's Eve Party, something I'll wager most of you (like me) have never even heard of before! I would hate to see this wrecked.

Cynics would say the county has already absorbed too many Californians and Texans to survive, and the idiot antics of a few almost lead me to agree. It isn't just refugees from La-La Land, of course, it's any outsiders without the sensitivity to tread lightly, bend, and blend in. When I went to the dump last week, I told the attendant: "Tengo mucha basura hoy, cuatras bolsas!" and the man nearly fainted. He said it was "amazing" to hear an Anglo come up to him and actually try to speak Spanish. This is not a good sign!

For now, at least, life goes on. The local acequia association voted to designate April 29th this year's ditch cleaning day, and on that morning my wife and I will join our neighbors for a long hard day of clearing brush, hauling rocks, repairing leaks, and doing whatever else needs to be done. I'm sure that people who know me who will shake their heads at the notion of my looking forward to doing manual labor on somebody else's land for nothing, but that's how it is. It's like I can't wait.

Consequently, if you've read this far expecting the usual computer industry analogy, I'm afraid you're on your own. Just go ahead and plug in dot-com greedheads, Microsoft indifference, OS wars, Mac community anthems, or anything else that fits (they all do). This week I just can't whomp up enthusiasm for the same old subjects, which frankly don't seem very important in light of what I've experienced.

The reason is that being with those people, hearing my neighbors talk face-to-face with each other about something as absolutely vital and simple as sharing the water that God gave us, has truly spun my head around. The democracy in action I witnessed in that annual "ditch meeting" was a real eye-opener, and I learned a lot!

You see, I've been blown away to hear that I live in a place where the water in the stream runs clean enough to drink, and I'm struck by how important a caring community is to maintain that miracle. If this virtual worldwide community some of us are talking about can learn to care about a few simple, universal issues, well hell -- maybe the guy with the Mac will show up for meetings.

And maybe you'll be able to drink from your ditch too!

John H. Farr edits the Apple Computer News for Applelinks.com and invites your comments. The Farr Site Archives will take you to the past two years' worth of columns. John also writes his WebFaust column for MacAddict.com and a monthly op-ed page column called "El Emigrante" for Horse Fly in Taos, NM. His personal Zoo Zone site may soon transmogrify into a domain for synidcated content, so catch it while you can!

To be notified whenever the column is updated, just send a message titled "Subscribe FSN" to this address.

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November 20, 2008