Cachuma Lake Sans Merci
The desolation of Cachuma, from 2016. Six years later she still hasn’t returned. Photo: Santa Barbara County Public Works Department
Every time Wendy and I used to drive through Santa Barbara County on Highway 154, I’d play a silly game of trying to get her to say “Cachuma” by asking things like, “What’s the name of that lake?” or “What does that sign say?” Because if she’d say “Cachuma” I’d get to shout, “Bless you!”
Cachuma is the largest reservoir in Santa Barbara County. It once filled the snaking contours of the inland end of the Santa Ynez Valley. Highway 154 is a major wine country artery that follows along the lake’s southern edge for several miles.
For years I knew a spot where you could pull off the 154 and park in a concealed location, then jump a fence and hike down through the liveoak savannah to a lakeside meadow. This was the site of trysts, skinny dipping, and laugh-filled times with friends… usually after a long buzzed day of drinking great wine. Lake Cachuma played a part of every great wine tasting trip I’ve taken through Santa Barbara County.
Over time, fences were raised, gates erected, and parking along the road became impossible. I saw the lake only from a distance then, from the periphery of my vision. Soon, flickering glimpses of the lake suggested that the lake itself was changing… diminishing.
To be honest, I was changing too. No more time to loiter in her beauty, I sped along the edge of Cachuma, hurrying past those bucolic shores on my way to meet with vineyard owners, check on grapes, and generally engage in the business of winemaking.
Eventually, Cachuma no longer winked her wild eye at me through the breaks in the trees. As my fascination with her had faded, so had she. Successive years of drought had withered the sedge from the lake and left dry gravel where once had been deep, refreshing pools.
We drove by today. The water has been gone from much of what once was the lake for so long that plants have once again colonized the lakebed. She seems to have not been a lake for so long that she has forgotten that she ever was one.
I hate the term “the new normal.” It took me while to put my finger on why. When I saw the Cachuma today – like a shriveled old woman, frail and lost in her bed, so ravaged by neglect that she no longer remembers that she once seduced princes – I realized why this phrase bothers me.
There is nothing normal about life. There is only life. Throbbing with constant change. Like a child struggling to carry a bucket full to the brim of water and almost too heavy to lift, life spills out joy and tragedy with each rushing, sloshing, stumbling step.
Here, in California, for the first time in a long time, our expectations have begun to be disappointed. We are actually facing the consequences of our choices, and our parents’ choices, for the first time in generations.
Memories of halcyon days-gone-by at the waterside may be all we have left besides hard work and difficult times ahead, and no promise of rest… no promise of honeyed light and evening swims.
This isn’t the new normal, though. This is the world that we’ve been creating all our lives. We just didn’t want to think about it.
Looking at Cachuma today, I was forced to think about it. Its emptiness, despite recent winter rains, held up a mirror to a past of careless and selfish choices. The waters that concealed our prodigal youth have disappeared, laying bare a dire present.
The word Cachuma comes from a Chumash word that means “sign.” A sign of what, I wonder?
As we drove by today, Wendy and I didn’t make any jokes about sneezes. The view of what is left of Cachuma sobered us and made us feel woe-begone. She looked as if she had been taken for granted for so long that she decided to move on. In her absence we can finally see that the void she had always filled was ours.
“And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.”
From La Belle Dame Sans Merci – John Keats