Staying away from public places due to pandemic concerns, one can read only so many books, watch only so many movies, write only so many emails, check in on only so many friends and send only so many hours preparing the gardens before taking a break to find refuge in memory.
Here’s one such memory; it’s suited to this blog since it involves water.
As a Peace Corps volunteer in southern India in the late 1960s, I surveyed and designed small irrigation canals.
The single biggest irrigation project that I oversaw involved the construction of a dam perhaps 40 feet across and three feet high that interrupted the flow of a small stream in the little town of Dachepalle in the state of Andhra Pradesh.
The impoundment behind the dam fed a narrow canal that had to be blasted through rocky terrain; the dam construction and canal blasting were handed by a group of several farmers whose 15 acres of marginally productive land was the intended recipient of irrigation water.
The canal ran about 150 feet before it came up to a two-lane road on the other side of which lay the targeted 15 acres. A culvert was needed. To get the culvert installed per local government tradition would require time, more time, still more time, and, in order to move things along, a bit of cash placed in the right hands.
The farmers had put considerable time and their own money into building the cement-topped stone dam and then blasting the canal. They really had nothing left. All they had, ultimately, was a combination of resourcefulness and courage; in the dark of one night, with an efficiency that few if any local public works officials would have been capable of imagining, the farmers dug up the road, installed the culvert and repaved the road. Immediately water began flowing to the 15 acres.
During the remainder of my Peace Corps term of service, there were no government reprisals against the farmers for this independent initiative.
I returned to the area six years later and was happy to reconnect with the farmer whose land was now supporting profitable rice paddy cultivation.
I did not ask the farmer whether he'd gotten into any trouble after I had left, nor did he mention any such a thing as having occurred. It struck me (and perhaps him) that it was best to leave the matter of the midnight culvert unacknowledged, lest any attention be drawn to it even in the privacy of our own minds.
The other day I returned to Dachepalle. My means of travel this time was Google Earth.
Dachepalle has clearly grown in the last 50 years. The settlement has expanded in all directions. I went looking for the little dam but I could not spot it, perhaps due to its small size. Still, I could make out a small impoundment that seemed to be where I remembered it, and then I followed what would have been the course of the canal that the farmers had built.
I came to the road, and on the other side of the road I saw acreage that was green.
I noticed one other thing, which was that the road had been widened quite a bit in the intervening years – an engineering feat that surely would have required the replacement of the original pipe.
I am left to wonder how that new, longer culvert got installed, and at what time of day – or night – it got put in.