Locking horns over water
The mayor is at Raul’s Striper Cafe for breakfast.
Because he’s here every morning.
Really, we only came in to eat. But I heard someone say, “So, Norman, you have your council meeting tonight?”
Soon, we’ve met everyone at the diner’s counter. Norman Richardson, the mayor. Dave Falk, the city volunteer who says Rio Vista is the “greatest little town you’ll ever find.” Mary Ellen Lamothe, who spearheaded those new droughtresistant planters up and down the main street, and her husband, Howard Lamothe, who says his “grandmother’s grandfather is buried up the road — we’ve been here a long time.”
Howard remembers when Rio Vista had three restaurants that stayed open 24 hours a day filled with workers picking pears and asparagus and manufacturing farm equipment.
“The whole delta was isolated from the outside world. You had this incredibly rich soil, you had Chinese, Hindus, Mexican, Filipinos, Portuguese, Italian and New Orleans — everybody got along because everyone was just trying to make a living,” Howard says.
Now the delta has an afterhours feeling. The islands are sinking, the levees are strained and the water is growing too salty for farming. About a quarter of the freshwater flow is diverted to the Central Valley for agriculture.
The sides in the fight over who should get the fresh water are largely regional. I live in the Central Valley. I’ve crossed into the land of “the other guys” from the land of “folks I know.”
Howard says we have to see his bar.
We walk down the street to Foster’s Bighorn, a bar and restaurant where there are 253 heads of wild animals mounted on the walls. Bill Foster, who founded the bar in 1931, hunted all over the world, accompanied by his taxidermist.
The moose, deer and bison of North America are on one side, the water buffalo, cats, giraffe and massive elephant from Africa on the other. There’s a rare black rhino — a species nearing extinction because the animals are being poached and their horns ground up for an elixir promising male potency. “All my friends are always up there with a potato peeler,” Howard jokes.
Howard’s cousin Lisette White says she was creeped out when she first started working as a waitress here two years ago.
“It’s like they’re all staring at you, kind of sad and accusing,” she says.
Beneath the heads are old black-and-white photos documenting Foster’s many hunting journeys. The one that bothers Howard the most is a rhino standing in front of Mt. Kilimanjaro.
“Look at the ice pack on the top of that mountain. People always think it’s a cloud. But it’s a glacier that’s gone now.”
How many days ago was it that I was in the Sierra, where the snowpack is missing?
In the back room, there are the interlocked carcasses of two moose that died in a fight.
I think about the delta and the Central Valley.
“They locked horns and the winner dragged around the loser until they were both dead,” Howard says.