The Resurrection of Tulare Lake

CORCORAN — Crisscrossing the dry flatlands of the San Joaquin Valley last week, I drove along a narrow country road just outside this small agricultural town known as the “Farming Capital of California,” tilled dirt fields on either side of me as far as the eye could see.

And then, suddenly, water.

A vast inland sea rose beside the pavement, and the waters glittered far out into the horizon. A crane flapped its snowy white wings along the banks of the newly formed lake. Shorebirds twittered and blue-gray waves lapped and whooshed, bringing the sounds of the beach to the Central Valley.

For the first time in decades, Tulare Lake had returned.

Once the biggest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi, Tulare Lake was four times the size of Lake Tahoe, home to bands of Yokut Indians and millions of birds and other wildlife, but it was sucked dry by farmers before fully disappearing by the mid-20th century. The lakebed is now home to some of the planet’s major suppliers of cotton, tomatoes and other crops.

But occasionally, during an especially wet winter, the lake comes back to life.

After the barrage of atmospheric rivers that have swept through California over the past three months, Tulare Lake has not only reappeared, but it has also grown to cover 30 square miles — and could expand to 200 square miles in the coming months.

As my colleague Shawn Hubler and I recently wrote, the arrival of warmer spring weather will melt the massive snowpack in the southern Sierra Nevada and dump even more water into the nascent lake, a slow-motion disaster for the region’s farmers and residents. The flood will most likely slam the $2 billion agricultural industry here in Kings County and endanger homes and prisons in Corcoran, a town of roughly 22,000 where the swelling lake has already begun to push against the levees intended to keep the community safe.

“We know we’re at the shoreline of the old Tulare Lake, so naturally it floods there,” Greg Gatzka, Corcoran’s city manager, told me. “We all kind of think that we’ll be able to go on with our lives and not worry about it, but it’s a reality.”

Along Corcoran’s main drag, where I spotted the snow-capped Sierra in the distance, past the town’s freight train tracks and an abandoned steel feed mill, locals sipped craft beers at the aptly named Lake Bottom Brewery & Distillery. They joked about having to kayak or wear rubber overalls to grab a drink at the bar this spring.

Fred Figueroa and his wife, Margaret, who opened the brewery four years ago, were born in Corcoran; their families relocated decades ago to work in the agricultural industry that emerged in the lakebed. To them, Tulare Lake’s resurrection and the scramble to protect property and farms feel like an inescapable part of life here.

“Mother Nature at work,” said Margaret Figueroa, sitting beside decades-old sepia photos of the lake hung on the brewery’s exposed brick walls. “This is the nature of this place.”

The rebirth of the lake has brought back wildlife that once relied on the Tulare Lake ecosystem. American coots, herons, ibises and blackbirds are flocking to flooded farmland and roads, said Miguel Jimenez, who oversees the Kern National Wildlife Refuge, at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley.

“The birds are just loving it,” he told me.

As I stood at the edge of the lake last week, a tufted heron sitting on its banks, Elmer Johnson, 61, pulled up beside me in his white pickup truck. The road in front of us slipped beneath the spreading waters and seemed to disappear.

Wearing boots caked with mud and his black hair tied into a small ponytail, Johnson, a welder who lives in Corcoran, said he worried about the economic impact on the region as flooding inevitably worsens and farmworkers lose jobs. But he still gazed at the lake in awe and pulled out his phone to take photos of the spectacle.

For a few minutes, we both marveled at the sparkling Tulare Lake, seeming to stretch out before us forever.

For more:

Where we’re traveling

Today’s tip comes from Joe Gayk:

“My partner and I live in San Francisco and love traveling up to a little town called Boonville. It’s nestled in the Anderson Valley in far northern Mendocino. The town itself is pretty small, yet it has everything and more you need for a quintessential NorCal escape. We love staying at the Boonville Hotel — an updated roadside inn with California’s best breakfast — marveling at old growth Redwoods at Hendy Woods State Park and enjoying the dry gewürztraminer at Husch Vineyards. With all of this year’s rain, it’s more verdant than ever!”

Tell us about your favorite places to visit in California. Email your suggestions to CAtoday@nytimes.com. We’ll be sharing more in upcoming editions of the newsletter.

Tell us

What foods do you consider quintessentially Californian? Sourdough bread? Chardonnay? Oranges? California burritos?

Tell us your favorite Golden State dish, drink or snack, and include a few sentences about what it means to you. Email us at CAToday@nytimes.com.

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And before you go, some good news

The New York Times recently invited students to suggest words to fill in gaps in the English language, and we published 27 of our favorite words invented by teenagers. The suggestions are fun and weirdly specific — take “fidogevity,” a new word for the average life span of a dog.

Here’s one of my favorites.

locabore (noun) by Nola, of Mill Valley:

An iconic landmark that is frequently seen by locals and therefore loses its magnificence, becoming commonplace. Each year, millions of tourists flock to the Golden Gate Bridge, but for many San Franciscans, this world-renowned structure has become a locabore.

Thanks for reading. I’ll be back tomorrow. — Soumya

P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword.

Briana Scalia and Maia Coleman contributed to California Today. You can reach the team at CAtoday@nytimes.com.

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