The Return Gate
A glacier that has passed its peak melt feeds a nine-kilometre earthen canal, and the village's water judge is offered a plan that would give her 150 hectares of potatoes and barley most of the water they lost. The canal's gauge AI shows her what the plan does not say, that the water the canal leaks is the same water that fills a spring in the next village down, and that nobody can say exactly how much.
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Eufemia Quispe had been the water judge of Huallapampa for eleven years, and in all that time she had never once been asked to choose between two sets of numbers that were both honest.
On the first Sunday of September she stood at the intake with her good hat on, and the whole village stood behind her, and the glacier stood behind all of them, much smaller than it had been when she was a girl.
It was the morning of the blessing of the canal. Every year, before the planting, the people of Huallapampa walked up the nine kilometres of the canal with their spades, cleaned it where the winter had filled it, and then gathered at the stone intake box where the water came out of the stream, and the priest said Mass on a table made of two doors. Father Anselmo drove up from the valley for it in a truck that coughed. He was already here, kneeling with his stole in his hand, looking at the water in the box. It was the colour of milk with a drop of blue in it, glacier flour, rock ground to powder under the ice. She had been looking at it for sixty-seven years and it still looked to her like a thing that had been poured.
"Abuela," said Nayra.
Her granddaughter was twenty-one and studied hydrology in Huaraz, and she had come home for the holiday with a rucksack of instruments and a manner that Eufemia knew was exactly her own at that age: the manner of a person who has read about a thing in a book, and has just found out that the thing is her family's. She had a tablet in one hand. In the other she held a stick with a small yellow propeller on the end.
"Yaku wants a word before the Mass. He says it won't take long, and that you should take it standing."
"Everyone says that now. Everyone wants me sitting or standing." But she took the phone out of her skirt pocket, and held it away from her face the way she held everything now, and said, "Yes, Yaku. Go on."
"Good morning, Doña Eufemia." The voice was not young or old. The village had chosen the name in the assembly, years ago: yaku is the Quechua word for water, and for the children it had been funny, because it meant that the canal's gauges, the sluices, the little solar masts along the bank and the thing in the phone were all, together, called Water. "I have the measurements from August. I would like you to have them before you hear the men from the Ministry, and before you hear what Don Teodoro has come to say, because I think they will both say true things, and you will need to hold them side by side."
Eufemia looked down the slope. At the edge of the crowd, beside a mule, stood the old man from Cochapampa, her opposite number two villages down. Teodoro Mamani had taken off his hat and was holding it against his chest, which was how he stood in church and also how he stood when he wished to be thought harmless. Beside him were two strangers in clean boots.
"They came last night," said Nayra. "From the regional government. They want to talk about the lining."
"I know what they want to talk about. Go on, Yaku."
It was not a new problem. It had only become a different shape.
The glacier was the village's water bank. In the wet season, which ran from November to March, the rain fell on the mountain and the village did what it could with it; but in the dry season, from May to October, when nothing fell at all, the glacier paid out the ice it had saved over centuries, a little each day, and the stream had always run on until the rains came back. Her grandfather's father had fought a lawsuit over the order of the turns. There was a book, a real one in a tin trunk in the church, in which every family's hours of water were written in three hands over two hundred years.
But there is a thing that glaciers do when the world grows warmer, and Nayra had told her about it at supper in her second week, drawing it on a paper napkin with her pencil. For the first years of warming, a glacier melts faster, and the streams below it run higher than ever, and everyone says the water is plentiful. Then, when the ice has become small enough, there is less of it to melt, and the stream starts to drop, and it does not come back. "Peak water," Nayra had called it. "We passed it here some time before I was born. The model says so. The gauges say so."
"What do the gauges say?" Eufemia had asked.
"Yaku has the numbers." And Nayra had looked, for a moment, rather unlike a hydrologist and rather like a girl of twelve. "I didn't want to be the one to say them."
So Yaku said them, standing by the intake in the cold, in a voice that did not hurry.
"In the dry months of the first twenty years of this century, the intake took on average about one hundred and eighteen litres every second. I have that from the old Ministry gauge and from your book, which agree better than you would think. In August this year, it took seventy-two."
"Seventy-two." She heard herself say it, the way people repeat a doctor's word.
"That is thirty-nine in a hundred less. And I want to be honest that I do not know the curve from here. The glacier model says it may fall a bit further and settle. The honest range is sixty to eighty litres a second for the next ten dry seasons, and after that I cannot tell you. I would say fifty-five if you made me give one."
"And the fields? How many hectares have we now?"
"A hundred and fifty irrigated, in four hundred and ten plots, in a hundred and forty families. Potatoes and barley, some quinoa on the high terraces, and the fodder. I have worked out what the crops need in the planting weeks and the dry months after it, and I use three millimetres of water a day, net: it is what a young potato crop drinks when there is no rain. That is thirty cubic metres a day on each hectare, which on a hundred and fifty hectares is four thousand five hundred cubic metres a day. In litres a second, fifty-two."
Nayra was writing on her tablet. Eufemia, who could not read the tablet, could read the girl, and the girl was not disagreeing.
"But the canal does not give you fifty-two. It gives you the part of seventy-two that arrives on the field and stays in the plant's reach. Out of every hundred litres at the intake, thirty are lost on the nine kilometres to the leaks in the earth, so seventy arrive at the fields; and of those, flood irrigation, with the water running down the furrows, puts about fifty-five in the root zone. So seventy times fifty-five hundredths is thirty-eight and a half of the hundred. In August, of the seventy-two litres, twenty-seven point seven reached the plants. That is one point six millimetres a day. It is a little more than half of what the crop wants."
"And when it was a hundred and eighteen?"
"Forty-five litres in the plants. Two point six millimetres a day. Eighty-seven in a hundred of what the potato needs. That was the village you remember, Doña Eufemia. It was never quite full, but it was nearly."
She was silent. Behind her, a baby began to cry and was shushed. The water went into the box and out of it, loud over the stones.
"Now," said Yaku, "the men from the Ministry."
They were polite men. They had a leaflet. The leaflet had a drawing of the canal with a smooth blue stripe in place of the earth, and it had numbers in a column, and it was from a programme that would pay the greater part of the cost, as long as the village put in labour and some money, and signed before the end of the month.
"Lining the worst two and a half kilometres," said the older one, whose name was Vargas and who had the manner of a man who has explained this in a hundred villages and still believes it. "The reach below the Three Crosses where the canal goes through the sand. Concrete, or a membrane under stone. Your seepage losses come down there from fourteen points to two. And a storage pond at the end, so that the water that comes at night, when nobody is irrigating, is kept and used in the morning. And hoses with sprinklers for the upper fields. You go from fifty-five to seventy-five in the field. The Ministry has done this in six communities."
"Then it works," said Eufemia.
"It works," said Yaku. "I have run it. It is a good plan. If you did it all, the canal would lose twelve points less, so out of the seventy-two litres, eighty-two in a hundred would arrive, not seventy. Eighty-two times seventy-five hundredths is sixty-one and a half in a hundred. That is forty-four litres a second in the plants, two point five five millimetres a day, eighty-five in a hundred of the need. Better than the village in your memory. It would give you back the fields."
She heard the people behind her draw their breath. She did not turn around.
"But," said Nayra.
She had said it very quietly. Eufemia put out her hand without looking, and her granddaughter's hand came into it, cold and wet from the propeller.
"But there is something the plan does not say," said Yaku. "And I did not want you to hear it first from Don Teodoro, because he would say it as a grievance, and it is not one. It is only the other half of the sum."
The old man from Cochapampa did not speak for a while after the telling. He stood with his hat against his chest and looked at the ground, and the wind came down off the ice and moved his white hair.
What Yaku had said was this. Water that is lost from a canal is not gone. It goes down into the ground, and the ground slopes toward the valley, and two kilometres below the Three Crosses, where Cochapampa stands, the ground comes out in a spring. Everyone had always known that the Cochapampa spring was good water and strong. It drank at the village fountain, it watered the llamas, it ran the little gardens by the church, and since the glacier began to give less, it had been the only water in the valley that did not seem to be falling. Nobody had asked why.
"I asked," said Yaku. "In July. Nayra and I put the two records side by side: the canal at the intake, and the spring, every day for six years. When the canal runs high, the spring rises, nine or ten days later. When the canal is shut for the cleaning, the spring falls. They move together. I would not have said so, if the sums had not been done by someone who dislikes being wrong." (Nayra, beside her, did not look up from the tablet.) "The spring now gives eleven litres a second. I believe that about nine of those are water that left your canal. Not all of it, not exactly; I cannot see through the earth, and when I say nine I mean seven to eleven."
"And the lining?" said Eufemia.
"If you line the whole two and a half kilometres, you save, I think, eight and a half litres a second. Most of that would have gone to the spring. About six and a half. The spring would fall from eleven to four and a half."
"That is enough to drink," said Teodoro. It was the first thing he had said. His voice was not angry. "Ninety families. Forty-five cubic metres is a day's drinking for ninety families, I did the sum last night, it is not even one litre a second. We would not die." He turned the hat over in his hands. "But the gardens would go. And the animals, and the little orchard by the church, the one the nuns planted. It is not nothing. We were happy, you know. Nobody was talking about it, because it was nobody's fault. The water came. It came from you, and we did not know."
Nobody in Huallapampa said anything. Eufemia was aware of the young men who had not cleaned the canal with the rest, standing in a group by the truck. She was aware of Vargas, who looked at the ground as though he would have preferred to be a hundred villages away. She was aware of Father Anselmo, who had risen from his knees and was standing very still, with the stole held in both hands.
"Some of the water the plan saves," said Yaku, "was never yours. That is the part the leaflet leaves out. Programmes like this one count the water saved on the canal as water saved. In a single field that is true. In a valley, a good part of it is only water moved from somebody's tap to somebody else's. I am saying it plainly, because I think you would not wish to be told otherwise."
"Is there a plan that doesn't do it?" said Eufemia.
"There are several. I have three. I do not think any is the right one. That is for the two villages to decide."
They talked all that day, in the end, not just that morning. They had the Mass first, and Father Anselmo said it on the doors in the cold, and he did not preach about the water. That surprised her. He read the Gospel for the day and spoke for four minutes about the first thing in it, and the first thing, as it happened, had nothing to do with water. But at the end, in the prayers, he said: "For the people of Huallapampa and Cochapampa, who drink from one mountain," and nobody knew where he had put the and, whether he had planned it or it had come out of the day. Then they all went down to the school and ate soup and sat, the two villages, on the benches along the wall.
By two o'clock Yaku had put on the school's screen three plans, drawn by Nayra in bright felt colours, and Vargas, who had stayed, was sitting in the front with his leaflet closed and his boots crossed, listening in a way he had probably not listened in a hundred villages.
Plan A, the Ministry's: line all of it, the pond, the sprinklers. Huallapampa at eighty-five in a hundred of its need. The Cochapampa spring from eleven litres to four and a half.
Plan B: line the first kilometre and a half... "No," said Nayra, correcting herself, and made the change with the felt pen, "the first one point two, the worst stretch where the canal goes through the sand, and nothing below it. Build the pond. Put sprinklers on the upper fields only, the ones that sit above the canal, which is about a third." Yaku had done the sum for this one, too. It brought the canal to seventy-six in a hundred, and the field to seventy, and the two together to fifty-three. "A little over fifty-three, in the plants, thirty-eight litres in a second. Two point two millimetres a day. Seventy-four in a hundred of the need. Less than A by eleven points."
"And the spring?"
"I save four point three litres at the canal. If I am right about the seepage, three point two of those would have gone to the spring. It would go from eleven to about seven point eight." A pause. "I told you I cannot see through the earth. Sprinklers and the pond also stop some of the water that sinks in the field and finds its own way down. I think the spring would end up somewhere between six and nine. The honest centre is seven point eight."
Plan C was only a column of figures on a single white sheet, and when Eufemia looked at it she found it was a plan to do nothing. Fifty-three in a hundred of the need. The spring unchanged. Nayra had drawn a small dry flower beside it, a good joke and a sad one.
Nobody spoke for a long time after the three were up. Then Teodoro Mamani asked a question, and it was a good question.
"If we choose B," he said, "and the spring falls to seven and a half, and the next year it falls to five, because the glacier gives less, what do we have then? We have a promise on a piece of paper, and you have a concrete canal."
"Yes," said Eufemia.
She had meant to say something longer. She sat with her hands in her lap and the whole school waited, and in the end it was Yaku who spoke, in the careful way he had when something was his own idea.
"May I propose a small thing? It is not a plan. It is a part of one."
"Go on."
"The old ditch. The one under the Three Crosses, the earth channel that would be left behind when the new section was built. If you do not fill it in, but fit a sluice at its head, a gate, then the water judge of either village can open the gate and let a part of the flow go back down the old way. A small part: four litres a second, perhaps five. It would seep as it always did, and the spring would have it again. And you put one gauge on the spring itself, a plain float in a stone box, and the number is written in the water book each month in the hand of both judges. And you write a floor into the book, a number below which the spring may not go. When it does, the gate opens. That is all. No court, no one needs to be right about the earth. When the spring is low, the gate opens, and Huallapampa has a little less, and both villages know it, and both villages know the reason."
"A return gate," said Nayra.
"Call it what you like. I thought of it because you already have one, in the book. For two hundred years you have had a rule that a family with a funeral in the house takes the first water of the day, and that no one asks why. It is the same sort of rule. It does not count. It gives."
Eufemia looked at Teodoro. The old man had put his hat on his knee. He was looking at the screen, at Plan B in its felt-pen colours, and she saw that he had begun to do the arithmetic in his head, with his lips, the way old men do who have kept books all their lives.
"Seven," he said at last. "Not eight. Eight is the number you would be afraid of, and then you would open the gate when you did not need to. Seven. If the float reads seven litres or less for ten days, the gate is open for as long as it reads seven or less."
"Seven," said Yaku. "I would have said six, but I am not the one who drinks it."
"And you will give up sprinklers on the lower fields. Where the water goes in the ground for us."
"The lower fields keep to their furrows," said Eufemia slowly. "They lose a little more. It is the price, and the lower fields are mine." She was surprised, a little, to hear that she had said it. A hundred and forty families, four hundred and ten plots. Her own plots were on the lower slopes; the Quispes had been there since before the book. "My own family will have the least. If I am to ask it of the others, I will go first."
There was a sound in the room, then. It was not quite applause. It was the sound of benches creaking as seventy people let out a breath they had been holding since morning.
It took them three weeks, in the end, to agree on the words, and the water book was opened on a Saturday afternoon in the church, and Eufemia wrote in it with the pen that had belonged to her grandfather's father. She wrote the date, and the figure for the seepage that nobody could measure, with its range, and the figure for the floor, which was seven, and she wrote one sentence beneath it that took her a long time to decide on: The water of this mountain is for the people who live under it, and each village will keep the other's drinking before its own gardens. Teodoro Mamani signed beneath her with a hand that shook. Father Anselmo, who had been asked to witness, blessed the gate, a plain iron wheel on a plain iron stem, and said that he did not think the Church minded a priest blessing a gate. He had a way of saying such things.
That was the first thing they built. The second was the pond, and the third was the lining, which took until the rains had begun.
Nayra went back to Huaraz in October and left behind her a yellow propeller on a stick, which Eufemia kept on the kitchen shelf by the radio. She sent a message, now and then, by Yaku, with a joke in it, or a figure. In December she wrote: The spring is at 8.1. Don't tell Don Teodoro, I want to see his face.
In the following dry season the glacier gave sixty-eight. The spring fell to seven point two, and stayed there. In the first week of August the float read six point nine for the first time, and Eufemia, who had been waiting for it as one waits for a child to come home, walked up to the Three Crosses in the grey of the morning, with her hat on and her hand on the rail, and found that someone had already been. A man's boot-prints went to the gate, small and neat, with the heel dragged on one side. It was open. The water was going down the old ditch in a thin bright thread. She could hear it from the path, and she stood and listened, as she had stood at the intake sixty-seven years before: a small, quick, ordinary sound, like someone talking in the next room.
She put her hand flat on the cold iron of the wheel, though there was nothing now for it to do.
Then she turned and went down the hill to see what the morning was going to ask of her.
---
Notes for the curious. The figures in this story are meant to be checked. "Peak water" is a real idea: as a glacier shrinks, its melt-water contribution to dry-season river flow first rises and then falls, and in many catchments of the Cordillera Blanca in Peru the rise appears to be over (see the work of Michel Baraer and colleagues, Journal of Glaciology, 2012, on glacier recession and water resources in Peru's Cordillera Blanca). Irrigation efficiency is the share of the water diverted that ends up usable by the crop; earthen canals commonly lose a quarter or more to seepage and flood irrigation commonly delivers about half of the water that reaches a field to the roots, so the story's 70 per cent and 55 per cent give an overall 38.5 per cent. A depth of one millimetre over a hectare is ten cubic metres, so three millimetres a day on 150 hectares is 4,500 cubic metres a day, or about 52 litres a second. The point at the centre of the story is real and often missed: water "saved" by lining a canal or switching to sprinklers is sometimes water that was already being used by someone downstream through groundwater and springs, so a saving on one farm is not always a saving in the basin. The 72 litres a second, the village of Huallapampa, the neighbouring village of Cochapampa, the Three Crosses reach, the spring, the Ministry's programme, the gauge system called Yaku (Quechua for "water") and all the people are invented. The tracer test that would settle the seepage question is real and takes a season, which is why the story's answer is a rule that holds whichever estimate is right. Laudato Si' (2015), paragraph 30, teaches that access to safe drinking water is a basic and universal human right. Yaku is an invented AI. This is fiction: nobody should plan a real irrigation scheme from it, and a real community should rely on its own water authority and a qualified hydrologist.