By David E. Bay, High Councilor

Recently my sweetheart Coleen and I traveled to southern Utah to my ancestral home in Piute County. One thing that we noticed immediately was that the Piute reservoir was full. We had begun to be used to it looking like a great big giant mud hole. However, with adequate rain and snow this year, the reservoir was filled to the top.
I thought about my great-grandfather James Willard Bay Junior, who helped settle the town of Junction before the dam was built. He chose to settle in this arid high desert valley and he struggled to eke out a living to care for his wife and eight children.

I can imagine the excitement when as his oldest son Ellis turned 10, there was an announcement that there would be a dam built upstream on the Sevier River. Four years later it was completed and he could have access to water throughout the entire growing season. What a sense of satisfaction.
Seven years later, when my Grandpa, H. Earl Bay, was 10, they started to build the Piute Dam in 1908. It was with the idea of paying back those who had built the Otter Creek Dam which blessed them every day, that the entire town of Junction did what they could to help make this earth-filled dam a reality to help the people downstream. I can imagine my Grandpa as a blonde barefoot kid wearing overalls and driving a big wagon filled with dirt being pulled by a team of strong horses back and forth from the side of the mountain to the dam. When he told me about those days, I could feel his pride in being able to do the work of a man even as a kid. There was a string of wagons on the road because the town was using every available wagon and anyone who could drive a team. They created the dam that holds the water filling the reservoir we see today.
It was my Grandad, O. Martel Anderson, who showed me the value of stored water. I spent a lot of time in the summer with my grandparents in the little town of Junction. Many evenings we would sit and listen to Grandad tell stories. But on nights when there was a “water turn”, the stories had to wait. Grandad pulled on green hip waders and gave me some black rubber boots to pull over my sneakers and we headed out to the fields in his pickup truck with a smooth bench seat, gearshift on the floor, and no seatbelts. On an irrigation day before we started, the alfalfa fields were dry, and dust got all over my black overshoes just from walking across the field. Grandad adjusted gates or dams in the irrigation ditches to get the water to the top of the field. Then he handed me a shovel. “This is an automatic shovel” he always told me. “It will do all the work you need it to do. All you need to do is give it a little bit of guiding.” A little later he commented, “Guiding a shovel can take a lot of effort and it might be powerfully hard sometimes.” My task was to watch the water flowing down each furrow in the field and open any blocks that kept the water from flowing to the end of the row. If the water did not get to them, the plants would die. As the water flowed by the dry earth, it would soak in turning it dark brown. When we finished one field we went to the next until the time for our “watering turn” was over. The alfalfa would grow and thrive with these weekly snatches of water and lots of sunshine in this high mountain valley.
It is the same way in our lives when our resources and reserves are full, we have a lot more ability to be responsive. When we are prepared for a possible emergency, it is the same as filling our reservoir. We can be responsive and make choices based on actual needs. When we have emotional strength and are emotionally resilient, we can respond favorably and be helpful rather than be without and entirely lacking.
In our recent Preparedness and Self-Reliance Fair we learned how to prepare gardens, store food, prepare for emergencies, and become more prepared. We learned how to fill our reservoirs for those times when we might need to draw down on those resources that have been saved and prepared in advance.