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There are ways to tell if someone is from the same area as you. I haven’t lived everywhere, but for the places I’ve lived since being able to form complete sentences and paragraphs I am quite familiar with the litmus tests.

In St. Louis, you would volunteer the name of the high school you went to, and if you don’t, they’ll ask anyway. Why? It is my understanding that it tells people a lot about your upbringing: St. Louis public schools have a LOT of problems now, and have for some years – so most people have gone to either Catholic or secular private schools in the region – sometimes single-sex, sometimes magnet schools, all of this data which generally indicates something about your history in the city.

In Colorado, people often volunteer how many years they’ve lived here, but I prefer testing the reflex reaction to the following statement to indicate if I’m talking to someone who has lived in Colorado a long time:

“We’ve gotten a lot of rain recently!”

For those who aren’t already thinking it, the correct answer for Coloradoans is, “Yeah, but we can use the moisture.” And we can. Much of Colorado is technically speaking a desert. The annual moisture here is small enough that you better xeriscape your lawn or face months of intensively watering your foreign-conditions based bluegrass lawn. Gardens need daily watering for most of the summer, and farmers depend on irrigation systems that are the basis for some pretty crazy water laws in the state. It wasn’t until this year that rainbarrels were legalized…and even then, it is for people on well systems only. According to law, the rainwater falling on your roof isn’t yours, except, in some cases, if you own your well water rights. Water rights are really intense in the West for good reason: much of the water that falls in the mountains and trickles down rivers in Colorado goes to lawns in Arizona, golf courses in Las Vegas, and water fountains in California. A lot of Coloradoans bristle when thinking about lakes in the mountains dropping levels past sustaining their native animal life so a golf course a thousand miles away can be green. This is vastly oversimplifying the situation, but I’m always interested in learning more. I grew up on an irrigation ditch system – it’s where me and my elementary friends hung out (after swimming lessons and lots of rules about the swift water in the 8 ft. deep ditch). Neighbors must work together and obey seasonal rules to keep a ditch system working, and loss of water rights is cause of many a lost friendship and intense litigation.

This is relevant to a book I’m reading right now called Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico by Stanley Crawford about an irrigation ditch system in Northern New Mexico, and it certainly reminds me of the ditch I grew up with. It’s unlikely that water rights will simplify or become better distributed anytime soon, but it’s a good reminder of what it looks like when the water is the power.