Shipwrecks and the logic of abandonment

While many aspects of the Delta’s physical and cultural history have been documented here at the DNP, one sometimes must look beyond the Delta’s attributes (or the state’s policy discourse on water) for spatial and social inspiration.

In India, especially during the dry season, one sees many shipwrecks—or in this case, building-wrecks—old vessels left high and dry by the retreat of water.

These shipwrecks suggest to the DNP many new scenarios for the Delta’s future—particularly scenarios related to the logic that led to Gov. Schwarzeneggar pulling the plug on law implementing so-called “co-equal goals” of water supply security and ecosystem restoration—it is the logic of waiting, of abandonment, of unregulated groundwater pumping, of Proposition 13 and the state’s 1/3 majority rule.

A recent seven-day excursion through Rajasthan and Gujarat, in western, arid, India, yielded a number of examples of building wrecks that, much like the predicament California’s water future faces, suggest how time affects decisions about investing in technology and settlement.

Among the world’s most beautiful water infrastructures is the Indian stepwell, or baori in Hindi. Stepwells are dug wells like other dug wells, except that these wells were made into permanent constructed pieces intended to be occupied by people, and are therefore social, spatial and architectural.

The stepwell, the Chand Baori, is in Abhaneri, a few kilometres north of the road between Jaipur and Agra. It is over 30 metres deep, and is today used for movie scene backdrops, not water supply:

The vav (“stepwell” in Gujarati) at Anuraj is of another type, axial, with a single broad and long stair leading down many stories to the pool.

At the end of this journey downward toward water is this, a deep hole. Imagine a rope with a bucket at the end, descending:

Like many stepwells, the Anuraj well was constructed by a queen. The quarters of Queen Padmini of Chittorgarh were constructed in a reservoir in the hilltop fortress between Jaipur and Udaipur, just a short boat ride outside of her palace walls.

India’s water infrastructure is spatial in other ways as well. Reservoir lakes, mostly dry now, are occupied by quarters like Queen Padmini’s, but also by temples, shrines, stepped terraces, and swimming pools.

The town of Bundi, home to dozens of stepwells (including to another built by a queen, very similar to Anuraj), most of them behind the walls of its fort (think under siege 1000 years ago, and water supply) has a lake with many such shipwrecked structures.

Another dry lake is found at Udiapur, once considered the most romantic city in India. Lake Pichola is a good example of how climate change and the immediate, desperate demand for water by an expanding population have permanently changed India’s great water spaces and artifacts.

Everyone one speaks with in India agrees that the days are hotter, and the monsoon season shorter. Once a glamourous enough spot to film a Bond flick there, Lake Pichola has, just before the start of the monsoon season, been reduced to this:

Palaces shipwrecked in the middle of a dry lake, cows grazing on the lake bed—hard to see Bond here…:

It is highly unlikely that any of these remarkable treasures, whether reservoir lakes or stepwells, will ever be filled again, unless the state decides that they are to be artificially maintained in order to fulfill the expectations of the tourist.

The above stepwells, palaces, and other utilitarian and spiritual shipwrecks are among the more exquisite artifacts of India’s water history. A more common sight these days, and a more quotidian one, are these water towers, all built to this or similar design:

And for less populated places, all through India, the state is frantically drilling thousands and thousands of “tubewells.” Tubewells are 30-metre deep artesian wells distributed according to population. These rationally distributed water sources solve an immediate problem of water scarcity, and have taken the place of the collective stepwell and lake water sources.

Like the extensive groundwater pumping operations of California’s agricultural regions, tubewells are relentlessly lowering the groundwater level. Tubewells are the necessary present and future other of India’s water past.

Tubewells now extend approximately 30 metres, sufficiently deep to ensure that no lake or stepwell will ever again intersect with groundwater. Inevitably, as India’s aquifers are drawn down, this infrastructure of water supply will need to extend ever deeper.

And other infrastructures, equally finely distributed and even more base and instrumental, will continue to be relied on by a population that just needs water.

The DNP team is coming back to North America with new ideas about how the stepwell (among other things encountered), a most public and spatial work, might inspire a new group of speculative projects for the Delta.

These projects will focus to a greater degree on the likelihood of an abandoned Delta. The recent decision to postpone the November vote on the co-equal goals proposition is a clear indication that the state is headed toward a bottom-line set of decisions about what it will and will not fund.

Funding the side of the “co-equal” goals that are an expression of the state’s commitment to environmental stewardship will be abandoned, as will the Delta landscape.

The stepwell, an artifact of an earlier age, reminds the DNP of the Delta, in itself an artifact of an earlier age. At the bottom of these fantastic spaces today one finds little more than a puddle of fetid liquid, home to pigeons and bats.

Shipwrecks in the form of abandoned Delta levees, meandering strings of riparian habitat occupied by brave shack cabin owners, fishing and hunting clubs, marinas, camps and the varied marks of the once cultivated polder interiors.

California-scaled stepwells, public elaborations on the vertical access points of an underground twin-bore tunnel sending water from the North Delta to the pumps near Tracy.

Shipwrecked shrines, the pleasure and practices of the transient types who will occupy the Delta’s watery future. One supposes that through them there will be new ways to imagine the Delta’s future.

The light side of abandonment—of failed levees, ruins, saltwater intrusion and the attendant ecosystem and lifestyles of such places as the Delta seems destined, in large part, to become.