The Waters of Bali

 

They say water has memory. That’s what the old-timers believe, anyway—the wizened Balinese farmers with skin like cracked leather and eyes that have seen a thousand monsoon seasons come and go. They’ll tell you, if you’ve got the patience to listen, that the water remembers its journey from those volcanic lakes high up in the misty mountains, down through the veins of their island paradise.

Maybe that’s why they worship it.

The thing about Bali that tourists miss—the sunburned masses with their poolside mai tais and resort packages—is that beneath the postcard perfection lies something older. Something that’s been there since long before Instagram influencers discovered Ubud. The Subak. That’s what they call it. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Just a word. Five little letters that hold the fate of an entire civilization in their grasp.

I learned about it from a taxi driver named Wayan on my third day on the island. His dashboard was cluttered with small offerings—tiny banana-leaf baskets filled with flower petals, rice grains, and smoldering incense that made my eyes water.

“You see those rice terraces?” he asked, nodding toward the emerald staircases climbing up the hillside, where water glinted like broken glass in the afternoon sun. “Beautiful, yes? But not just beautiful. Sacred.”

Sacred. That’s the word they all use. As if irrigation could be holy.

It wasn’t until I met Ketut, a pekaseh—a water priest, for Christ’s sake—that I began to understand. His office wasn’t some temple or ornate palace. It was a simple wooden shack perched at the junction of several canals, where the sound of flowing water never stopped, day or night. A constant whisper, like the island itself was telling secrets.

“UNESCO,” he said with a prideful smile, his English halting but clear. “World Heritage. Since 2012.” As if that validation from the outside world somehow mattered more than the thousand years his ancestors had spent perfecting this system of water temples and shared irrigation.

The Subak isn’t just pipes and water flow; it’s a goddamn religion. They’ve got a philosophy with a name that sounds like something out of a fantasy novel: Tri Hita Karana. The Three Causes of Well-being. Harmony with God, harmony with other people, harmony with nature. Simple as that. Simple as breathing.

Except it’s not simple at all.

I watched Ketut preside over a meeting of farmers—a Paruman Krama Subak—where they debated water allocation with the intensity of senators arguing over the national budget. Men and women with dirt under their fingernails democratically deciding who gets what, when, and how much. All under the watchful eyes of stone deities whose faces had been smoothed by centuries of reverent touches and tropical downpours.

“Mapag Toya,” Ketut explained later, showing me photos of a ceremony where dozens of farmers stood knee-deep in water, their hands pressed together in prayer. “We welcome the water. Thank it.” He looked at me with those obsidian eyes, searching for understanding. “The water gives life. We must give back.”

That night, I dreamed of water. Not the gentle lapping of Kuta Beach or the chlorinated blue of hotel swimming pools, but ancient water. Dark water. Water that had seen the rise and fall of kingdoms, that had flooded rice paddies since before America was even a concept. In my dream, it rose and rose, carrying temples and tourists alike on its back, patient and terrifying in its slow, inevitable consumption of everything man-made.

The Democratic Deluge, someone might call it. Spiritual Hydrology. The politics of precipitation.

In the morning, I hired a motorbike and rode out to the Pura Ulun Danu Batur, the highest water temple, perched above Lake Batur like some Southeast Asian Olympus. Mist clung to the volcanic slopes, shrouding everything in mystery. The temple itself seemed to float above the clouds, its multi-tiered pagodas like alien spacecraft about to ascend to the heavens.

An old man sat cross-legged in the courtyard, weaving palm leaves into intricate patterns. His fingers moved with the muscle memory of someone who had performed the same task tens of thousands of times.

“You American?” he asked without looking up.

I nodded.

“In America, you control water with money, yes? With laws and lawyers?” He chuckled, a dry sound like dead leaves skittering across pavement. “Here, we use gods.”

That’s when it hit me—the terrible, beautiful genius of it all. The Subak isn’t just an irrigation system; it’s social control wrapped in spiritual packaging. It’s crowd management. It’s resource allocation with divine authority. It worked when kings ruled Bali, it worked when the Dutch colonized, it worked when Indonesia claimed independence, and it works now in the age of mass tourism and climate change.

At least, it did.

Ni Ketut Ratini—a university researcher with thick glasses and a no-nonsense ponytail—showed me the figures in her cramped office at Udayana University. Nearly 5,000 hectares of agricultural land lost in just four years. Water diverted from ancient rice fields to fill the infinity pools of five-star resorts. Young Balinese fleeing agricultural work faster than tourists fleeing a monsoon shower.

“The system is under threat,” she said, her voice tight with controlled anger. “When water becomes a commodity rather than a shared blessing, the entire foundation shakes.”

I thought about that as I watched sunset at Tanah Lot later that day—another temple, this one perched dramatically on a rocky outcrop in the ocean, surrounded by tourists taking selfies. The tide was coming in, slowly cutting off access to the temple, isolating it once more as it had been for centuries during high water.

A metaphor too obvious to ignore.

The thing about traditions is that they only survive when people believe in them. When the Tri Hita Karana becomes nothing more than a slogan on eco-tourism brochures, when water priests are reduced to photo opportunities for cultural tourists, when rice farmers abandon their fields for jobs as hotel bartenders and tour guides—that’s when thousand-year-old systems begin to crack.

But here’s the twist, the part they don’t put in the guidebooks: the Subak has faced threats before. It evolved under Shaiva Siddhanta, Hindu Samkhya, Vajrayana Buddhism, and who knows what else. It adapted. It persisted.

I met Jero Dodo, the leader of Subak Bena, on my last day in Bali. Unlike the others, he wasn’t pessimistic. His face, weathered by decades under the tropical sun, creased into a smile when I asked about modernization.

“New technologies come, we take what works,” he said, showing me a modern water flow monitor installed alongside traditional bamboo water dividers. “But awig-awig—our customary laws—these remain. The balance remains.”

Balance. That’s what it all comes down to in the end. Balance between tradition and progress. Between individual desire and communal need. Between the sacred and the profane.

As my plane lifted off from Denpasar Airport, I looked down at the patchwork of rice terraces, the thin silver threads of irrigation canals weaving them together. From above, they resembled nothing so much as a vast circulatory system—the veins and arteries of an island that has managed, against all odds, to maintain its beating heart.

Water has memory, they say. But perhaps more importantly, water finds a way. It always does. Through tunnel and canal, through ceremony and corruption, through ancient tradition and modern crisis. The water flows. The Subak endures.

For now.