More than any river, p.1
More Than Any River, page 1
Praise for More Than Any River . . .
“The war for water has come to California’s Central Valley. When family farmers find themselves in a desperate battle against agribusiness moguls whose greed knows no bounds, the fight becomes about more than survival. In this gripping novel of loyalty, betrayal, and resilience, Victoria Tatum brings the land itself to vivid life as the most powerful character of all.”—Laura Davis, author of The Courage to Heal and The Burning Light of Two Stars
“As with any consequential novel that demands our attention, as this one does, this book highlights the cost of caring, and for that matter not caring, about the resources, natural and otherwise, that give value to our lives. If water makes our very life possible, so too, in a similar way, does reading Victoria Tatum’s More Than Any River.”—Joseph Di Prisco, author of My Last Resume and Subway to California
“If you like reading about people who live in interesting but unfamiliar places, you should enjoy this novel, one of lives flowing onwards, ever-changing like flowing rivers, but linked together, with people who see the Delta as home. It is a good read and can serve as a way to learn about the challenges of farming in the Delta and the importance of fishes in the management of the water that flows through it.”— Peter Moyle, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Center for Watershed Sciences, University of California Davis
“Victoria Tatum’s rich novel, More Than Any River starts off as a low, even, and humming narrative of personal stories and grows into a rich fabric of land, river, and delta, wedded to the folks who work it and give it meaning. Like the tributaries that feed the immense Central California Sacramento River Delta, from Mendota Canal to the Friant-Kern Canal and Millerton Lake, we’re all connected.”—Joe Ortiz, author of The Village Baker and Pastina
“An important read for these times, when the world faces worsening flooding and drought at the very moment that reaching consensus has become harder than ever.”—Ellen Barker, author of the East of Troost series
“In the true center of the Golden State you’ll find not silicon nor movie stars but North America’s largest freshwater swamp, the California Delta. In More Than Any River, Victoria Tatum conjures a story as beautiful as the Delta’s islands, and as dark as the water at the bottom of its sloughs. This is a novel about the profound love for place and community that compels people to fight against the plans of the powerful.”—Joe Matthews, author of The California Crackup and journalist for the Zocalo Public Square and Democracy Local
“This is a story of people and place, revealing how water, history, and human lives are intertwined in ways that are rarely acknowledged but lived every day and carried across generations.
Reminiscent of the geographic immersion of Master Filmmaker Gianfranco Rosi, More Than Any River allows us to slow down and consider what is often overlooked, the systems that shape our lives, and the moral choices that determine who benefits and who bears the costs.”—Mark Manning, CEO of ConceptionMedia Films, Co-Founder ENGAGESTREAM
“More Than Any River is set in a California literary tradition that links history to place, and to watersheds, where human beings work, sweat, dream and die. Victoria Tatum has woven a mosaic that matches the land. It is a must read for anyone who loves California, where gold and greed played a critical role in its founding. But surrounding that history was water, and More Than Any River reminds us of that throughout.”—Geoffrey Dunn, author of The Lies of Sarah Palin
Copyright © 2026 Victoria Tatum
“Introduction: A Semidesert with a Desert Heart” from CADILLAC DESERT by Marc Reisner, copyright © 1986, 1993 by Marc Reisner. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Excerpt of Sixty by Fabian Severo reprinted with author’s permission.
Excerpt of A Concordance of Leaves by Philip Metres reprinted with author’s permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for brief quotations in reviews, educational works, or other uses permitted by copyright law.
Published in 2026 by
She Writes Press, an imprint of The Stable Book Group
32 Court Street, Suite 2109
Brooklyn, NY 11201
https://shewritespress.com
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025919167
ISBN: 979-8-89636-030-8
eISBN: 979-8-89636-031-5
Interior Designer: Andrea Reider
Maps: Erin Greb Cartography
Printed in the United States
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be used to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) models. The publisher and author reserve all rights related to the use of this content in machine learning.
All company and product names mentioned in this book may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. They are used for identification purposes only and do not imply endorsement or affiliation.
For Bumps and Bea, Uncle Brud and Aunt Minnie, whose legacies live on in the Delta.
We came from the border
we go to the border
like our grandparents and our children
eating bread that the Devil kneaded
suffering this end of the world.
We are the border
more than any river and more
way more
than any bridge.
—from Sixty, by Fabian Severo
“In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money.”
—Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert
SACRAMENTO RIVER
1
The day Eiji fell from the tractor and was crushed by his own machine, Kimiko blamed herself for not having been in the orchard to point out the rut.
“I was there,” Takashi told her, “and I didn’t see the rut.”
“Can’t be two places,” Kimiko said, more to herself than Takashi. When the accident happened, she’d left the orchard and had been inside making their lunch.
For weeks afterward, Japanese neighbors and friends came to the house and set dishes on the counter. Asparagus that the Issei, first-generation Japanese, had planted themselves, simmered in fish broth, and a pot of short ribs cooked until tender, with potatoes pulled from the dirt. Mixed into those dishes was the unspoken understanding that farming was dreams realized, hard work, and peril all in one, like nori rolled around sticky rice and sweetened with sesame.
Eiji’s neighbor Wes showed up with a dish of noodles. “Your father,” he said to Takashi, “was happy on Joseph Island.”
Takashi nodded. Eiji had escaped war in his own country and then the hard labor of Hawaiian pineapple plantations for an existence coaxing life from the delta soil. That soil had been nourished by water that flowed from the northeastern corner of California, where the Pit River formed the headwaters of the Sacramento. By the time it passed through the far reaches of the Cascade Range, the McCloud River, along with snowmelt and volcanic springs, swelled the Sacramento. It moved through the northern valley in a series of pools and riffles deep enough for a drift boat and wide enough for the cast of three or four fishermen if their skiffs were lined from bank to bank. Cottonwood and willow hung over the banks, the native pink-striped rainbow trout hiding in their shadows.
As the Sacramento wound through the valley, other rivers fed by snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada dropped in to join it. This made fertile ground for rice and alfalfa growing tall in the spring, for olives and stone fruit ripening in the heat of summer.
Out of the Southern Sierra the San Joaquin flowed north. It was joined by the rivers flowing from the gold country that provided rich ground for heat-seeking crops like almonds and peaches, raisins and grapes. The two rivers running the length of the great Central Valley met in a meandering delta at the mouth of the San Francisco Bay.
At one time the Maidu, Wintun, and other native tribes populated the Sacramento Valley, living near the streams where fish were plentiful and antelope, tule elk, and deer came to drink. In the winter when the river flooded, creating a rich marshland of tules, the Native people retreated inland. Their lives ebbed and flowed with the river.
From the beginning the white settlers were different. They tried without succeeding to tame the Sacramento. Large-scale mining dumped vast amounts of gravel and sand into the rivers feeding into the lower Sacramento. When the Sacramento River flooded, fertile delta farmlands were buried under sand. The sand raised the riverbeds so drastically that they were soon higher than the islands, and every time the settlers built up the levees, a raging river tore through them.
That was how Eiji Kimura found his land, a hundred flooded acres in what the Japanese called Kawashimo, or “down river,” leased from a white banker in the north delta town of Stanton. Eiji’s friends told him rice would be good on an island that might flood again, but Eiji began with fifty acres of potatoes and onions that fattened underground, beans that grew tall on bamboo poles, and fruit trees that blossomed in spring. He saw the bounty and the work that took him from his knees in the soil to a ladder among the trees as being the finest expression of his own name, which meant prosperity and peace.
Eiji’s friend leased another hundred acres next door from the same banker and planted asparagus, which with the high water table didn’t need to be irrigated. The tules and cattails that grew on those boggy islands turned to peat when they died, and asparagus thrived in the airy soil. When Eiji drove high up on the levee road, he looked down at his friend’s fields and saw the crew, mostly Filipinos, with straw hats pulled down over their heads, bandanas covering their faces, and pants tucked into their boots to keep peat dust from lodging in their socks, their hair, their eyes and throats. On land used to grow food, there was always a downside.
Wes was the banker who’d leased Eiji and his friend their land, and as he set the dish of noodles on the counter he said quietly to Takashi, “You’re in charge of the farm now.”
Takashi swallowed his tears and tried to summon the pride he felt at carrying on his father’s legacy. After the funeral at the temple, he and his sisters, along with their mother, buried Eiji on the farm. Eiji had planted a garden of morning glories, asters, and marigolds at the edge of his cherry orchard, and they made his grave there, using stones from the river levee and a headstone with his name—peace and prosperity—carved in Japanese letters.
Sadness lingered like the musky smell of marigolds and flowed with the river washing against the levee. But they got up every morning, pulled up potatoes and onions, and hacked at the weeds the same way they had when Eiji was alive. And they went to family picnics, where Eiji’s friends remembered him with comforting stories.
It was when Takashi saw Keiko at a picnic that he was carried back to the stories their fathers had shared of their labor on a pineapple plantation. Grabbing a little bucket of Brooks cherries he’d picked himself, he walked over and offered her the bucket. And although they’d played together in a gaggle of children and flung themselves down with plates of food at many a picnic, that day when Keiko accepted the cherries he could taste their dark sweetness as if he were biting into one himself.
“My father wants me to get an education so I can do more than labor. But your cherries are delicious, so how can picking be bad?” She tilted her head as if she were teasing, the same way she had when they were nine years old.
“Neither picking nor an education is bad,” Takashi said.
“Next year,” Keiko said, spitting a cherry seed into her palm, “I transfer from junior college to Chico.” But instead, that December their parents’ native country would bomb the Honolulu harbor and President Roosevelt would order all Japanese Americans into internment camps.
The weekend after the picnic, though, Takashi picked up Keiko in the truck and drove her along the levee road where wood ducks perched in the willows, and down into the orchard he hoped would dazzle her.
As he turned off the engine he was thinking about how his father’s trees were watered with the snowmelt from a volcano in the lower reaches of the Cascade Range, and once in the upper limits of that range, farmers had crossed two varieties of cherry to produce the Rainier, named after the volcano they could see from their valley. But that seemed too much to explain, and instead he got lost in a description of the genetic phenomenon that had produced the golden cherry from two dark ones.
Keiko wore a straw hat with a wide brim she pulled down to shade her eyes, and when he looked up she was laughing.
“Sorry,” he said. “Too technical.”
“Not at all. Life is a mystery,” she said, holding his gaze, and it was Takashi who ended up being dazzled.
He started the truck engine, and in that moment the world spread before them like a road running alongside the trees thick with leaves.
The following winter, she and Takashi were stuffing their family’s prized belongings into the Buddhist temple, stacking furniture to the ceiling, when they said their goodbyes. But Takashi didn’t have time to wallow in his sorrow, because when he returned to the house he found his mother wrapped in a blanket, her breathing labored. One of his sisters held her while the other wiped the sweat from her forehead.
Kimiko spoke and her son moved close. “Your father built up this farm from fifty . . .” She stopped, took a breath. “. . . to a hundred acres. Not leaving home.”
Later, when Takashi told his own children Kimiko’s story, he would say she died of a broken heart, after war on one continent took away her first home and war on a new continent took away her second. Takashi and his sisters buried her next to Eiji, near the asters and the morning glories with their bright green leaves and purple flutes she had tended alongside her husband.
With the Buddhist temple filled to the ceiling and most of their friends already departed to internment camps, there was no funeral. But as evening shadows fell on the grave where Takashi and his sisters were tossing the last shovelful of dirt, Wes walked up still wearing his suit from work.
“I’ll watch over Kimura Farm while you’re gone,” he said, and Takashi could taste the dish he had set on the counter after Eiji died, noodles and green beans made slippery and salty with butter. Not better than the noodles Takashi was used to, just different, the kindness offered by a neighbor.
War that had stolen their friends and the dignity of a proper funeral for Kimiko would now separate their family, as Takashi’s bus was bound for the Tulare Basin at the southern end of the valley, while Keiko and his sisters were headed north toward the state line. The only recourse any of them had was what the son of Eiji’s asparagus-growing neighbor had come up with as they were packing their furniture into the temple.
He’d leaned in close and whispered, “Bring seeds.”
As able-bodied men during a labor shortage, he and Takashi were being sent to the cotton fields of Tulare, and their sisters sewed beans and marigold seeds into the hems of their coats.
Packed in with the other sweaty young men, Takashi looked out the window of the bus that rolled into a dusty camp. There were creases between his eyes but determination in the set of his jaw. He felt a heaviness come over him unlike even the grief of losing his father and mother, and he stepped from the bus into air as thick as the hyacinth that would one day choke the shores of the delta he called home.
2
Using a piece of broken pipe to pound the hard-packed earth between the barracks and then break up the chunks into soft ground, Takashi pushed in his beans. Next to the beans he spread the marigold seeds and covered them with a thin layer of dirt. He was sprinkling water on his seeds with a coffee can when his neighbor from home picked up the broken pipe and started breaking up the ground next to Takashi’s. Once he’d prepared the soil, he dropped in the seeds from the hem of his own coat. Then a man they had never seen before picked up the broken pipe. By summer there were vegetable and flower gardens growing on what was otherwise desolate space.
Like those who came before them, Takashi and his Nisei, or second generation, were gifted at coaxing flowers and plants from the ground, even ground less forgiving than the delta soil, and their captors took notice. An army general called Takashi into his office, a boxy wooden structure that was hotter even than the barracks. But unlike the barracks stuffed with bunk beds, the general’s office was nearly empty. In the middle of the space sat a desk, and on a table against the wall rested a coffeemaker holding a drained pot of coffee.
“What messages are you sending with your plants?” the general asked from behind the desk, sweat dripping from his neck onto the collar of his tight, starched uniform.
Takashi blinked.
“You people,” he said, which Takashi surmised meant his Japanese friends since the general was white, “arrange your crops to send secret messages to Japanese airmen.”
Takashi shook his head. “We’re just growing vegetables.”
“Where’d you get the seeds?”
That question cornered him, since what few vegetables were served in camp were canned.
“Tear them out,” the general said.
Every time Takashi passed the ground where their plants and flowers lay uprooted, wilted and browning in the sun, he was reminded of the fear that motivated the general’s suspicions. From Eiji’s youth in Japan to the scope of the war that captured his son, there was no time or place Takashi knew of exempt from such fear. Fear that followed a line of immigrants through the Central Valley and said if they looked or talked differently from you and they had something you needed, they might take it from you. If on the other hand you kept them ignorant and wanting, the ignorance of your own white skin prevailed.
