©2015 by John LaTorre
I am happy to report that my front lawn is finally turning
brown.
Ever since last fall, my front lawn has been a brilliant,
nearly iridescent green, the shade of green that one sees in pictures of
Ireland, or Kauai, or Thailand. In most parts of the country, this would be
considered a Good Thing. But this is California, where things are a bit different.
California is now in the fourth year (or fifth year,
depending on whom you ask) of one of its worst droughts in history. The government
has been imploring citizens to cut back on their water usage, and strict
regulations on water use are now in force. Our cars have not been washed since
last year, and look as if they’ve just been over three hundred miles of dusty
roads. We keep them unwashed to demonstrate our commitment to saving water,
because people around here notice these things.
When one of the underground sprinkler pipes in our front
yard broke a couple of years ago, it caused an excess of water to well up from
under the lawn, cross the sidewalk, and trickle into the street gutter. I found
something dangling from our front door knob when I got back from the
supermarket. It was a “fix-it” order from the city, which is not unlike the
sort of thing you get from a cop who notices that you have a taillight out. It
warned me that unless the problem was found and eliminated, I could expect a
stiff fine. So I made the repair the next day. I never saw the inspector who
wrote out the order, but I’m sure that he or she was back to check on the situation.
At any rate, I didn’t have to pay the fine, but I was convinced that the Water
Police really existed, and they were paying attention.
As it turned out, the front lawn wasn’t finished with me. There
are two distribution areas in the sprinkler system for the front lawn, each
governed by its own regulator. The regulator is an “anti-siphon valve,” which
is the sort of thing that you might expect to find mounted on your car’s fuel
filler, to prevent the neighborhood punks from stealing your gasoline, but in
fact it is not. It is a gadget that is connected by wires to a central
programmable timer in the utility room. In some way I am not able to fathom, it
responds to signals from the timer and actuates the sprinkler heads at pre-set
times, and for pre-set intervals. My wife, who is a computer programmer, is
given the task of actually setting up the times and durations, since she is
used to communicating with devices like this.
These valves are not immortal, and I have had to replace two
of them –one in the front yard and one in the back yard -- over the course of
the last twenty years. The second valve in the front yard, which was the oldest
surviving valve and possibly the one originally installed in the system,
finally gave up the ghost sometime over the winter. But this one failed in an
insidious manner, as I shall explain.
As usual, we turned off the sprinkler timer last fall,
relying on winter rains to keep the lawn watered. It seemed to work well, but
in May or so, we noticed that the back lawn was starting to die, so we turned
the timer back on. We also began a program of giving the red maple sapling in
our front yard a couple of hours of trickle irrigation twice a week, because it
had been stressed by last summer’s drought to the extent that it dropped most
of its leaves in July. Trees are an important part of Sacramento’s plant life;
one of the city’s nicknames is “the City of Trees.” Whereas on the east coast,
every clearing marks a spot where trees have been removed, here in Sacramento
nearly every tree has been planted by hand, in a place where trees are not the
default. They give much needed shade against the fierce Central Valley sun, and
we’d planted our tree where, when it matured, it would shade the house from the
sun and save future residents a fair chunk of money in air-conditioning bills. And
the leaves turn a brilliant red in autumn, a fond reminder of my childhood in
Virginia and upstate New York, when entire hillsides would be a riot of red and
orange and yellow in the fall.
When we turned the sprinkler timer back on in the spring, we
(by which I mean my wife) also re-programmed it to meet the specifications of
the city’s latest watering ordinance: twice a week instead of three times a
week. We also cut the watering times in half. The front and back lawn seemed to
be happy with this regimen. In fact, the front lawn seemed as green as ever.
That should have made me suspicious, but it didn’t.
Eventually, our front lawn became the greenest lawn on the
street. As our neighbors’ lawns became gold, then brown, ours prospered. I wondered what they thought of us. Didn’t we
know that there was a drought on? Didn’t we read the papers? Or listen to the
radio? Although they couldn’t catch our sprinklers working on off-days, it was
obvious that our lawn was getting the VIP treatment, while theirs were slowly changing to
a virtuous gold, which is how they describe a dying lawn in these parts. It
would probably have done no good to point out that our back lawn was hanging on
to life by its fingernails, or what ever blades of grass have to hang on to
life with. Ironically, the back yard isn’t visible at all from the street, so
we could have watered it to our heart’s content, seven days a week, without
anybody being the wiser.
One morning, I went out to pick up the paper from the front
lawn. Yes, we still get the daily paper. It’s supposed to arrive on our front
porch, but our delivery person’s aim can be a little off at times, and we have
found it in the bushes and, a couple of times, sitting on the roof of the porch.
So its arrival on the front lawn, where I could at least see it, was well
within the tolerable margin of error. On this particular day, I noticed that
the lawn was wet. And so was the paper. And this wasn’t even a watering day. I
checked the sprinkler heads. There was water oozing out from all the heads on
one circuit, but not from the other.
It turned out that there was a little “bleed screw” on the
offending anti-siphon valve that had stripped, and could no longer be tightened
down properly. This is the screw that you unscrew when you want to actuate the
sprinklers and, in effect, bypass the regulating timer. It had been allowing a
trickle of water to evade the valve twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
No wonder the lawn looked like Ireland. Our particular street is not supplied
with water meters, so there’s no telling how much of California’s most precious
resource had been squandered.
Our local hardware store had replacement valves in stock,
and I bought one and installed it the next day. To do so, I had to saw through
the plastic inflow and outflow pipes, glue some extensions on, and then fit the
new valve over the extensions. After hooking up the wires, we tested it, and
found that water was no longer welling up from the sprinkler heads when it
wasn’t supposed to. Problem solved.
A week later, the front lawn is starting to lose its
iridescence, except in the area right around the tree, which we’re still
watering with an extended trickle twice a week. We don’t want to lose it, and
if watering it means that part of our lawn will still be an embarrassing shade
of green, so be it. It’s a sacrifice we’re willing to make. It’s for the tree,
you see. Really. I mean, just look at our cars!
