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The Hollywood Reservoir is nestled in a basin surrounded, usually, by dusty brown hillsides, broken up by the occasional dry wisp of shrubbery. Not these days. After yet another burst of rain the other day, the hills were transformed into lush fields of knee-high grass, spotted with purple flowers. And the reservoir? As high as it has been in years. In Northern California, snow could be seen on top of Mount Diablo outside San Francisco last weekend. Across the state, dams are under siege and reservoirs are overflowing.

California’s biggest lake, about 350 square miles, is dying. It’s not the first time. The Salton Sea, straddling the Imperial and Coachella Valleys, is the latest incarnation of a body of water that has been drying and refilling over eons with water from the Colorado River. Native Americans once fished and camped on Lake Cahuilla, a prehistoric and larger version. The Salton Sea was born in the early 1900s after a canal burst sent water from the Colorado flooding into the valley over a period of two years.

At Heritage Oak Winery, acres of 10-year-old grapevines are still underwater. It’s been days since Lodi’s last rainfall, but for Heritage Oak’s owner, Tom Hoffman, it may be a while before the flooding brought by two wet months begins to recede. Plenty of farmers still have fields, vineyards and other land covered by standing water. Not Hoffman. “I don’t have standing water, I have running water,” he said. Heritage Oak’s property in Acampo includes about 60 acres of bottom land along the Mokelumne River, and 10 acres are planted with grapes, he said.

Here’s a cold, wet reality: the more water in California’s reservoirs, the less urgency there is to build new ocean-water desalination plants that became a major talking point during the state’s long, parched years of drought, an ultra-dry period some folks insist has still not ended despite months of heavy rains. Those record or near-record rains have replenished everything reservoirs lost over the last few years of drought, and sometimes more.

When a market for trading water rights opened in central Nebraska last year, one of the initial bidders wasn’t a corn farmer, or even a water user at all in the traditional sense. It was the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program, a conservation group investing to replenish the region’s major river, the Platte. By buying some water and then not using it, the group is allowing more to stay in the river. The move bucked tradition, for sure. Typically, water rights aren’t traded at all or they are swapped among farmers.