The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (23 page)

“Maybe the wind’ll bring some rain.”

I could hear a deeper harmonic in the wind. An irrigation well was running nearby. I wasn’t surprised. In this drought, there wasn’t enough subsurface moisture to plant corn without prewatering. Our farm manager, Ron, had told me that we might break the three hundred million gallon mark on our farm this summer.

Would I be able to hold my own the next day? I didn’t have a very good track record talking to bureaucrats, not when they slung their wonky policy lingo and all their acronyms around.

Ward’s voice rumbled again. “I know how strange it must have been, seeing Wilbur’s place on the Web.”

It was brave and good of him to return to the topic despite the dangers it now posited, and I liked the familiar way he’d said my uncle’s name. “The worst thing was the graph. The line would jut up once in a while but never as high as at the beginning. You know, big down, little up, big down.”

“Like those monitors they have in ICUs,” Ward said.

“Yes. When the patient is dying.”

5

T
HE WATER DISTRICT DIRECTOR TURNED OUT TO BE A TALL, LEAN, SLIGHTLY BALDING MAN IN HIS EARLY FIFTIES.
He seated me across from him in one of the beige offices of the district headquarters. Nothing fancy here, just desks and files in a tin building shared with the Colby Bowl Fun Center and the Carousel Beauty Shop.

The first thing I did was almost knock over the Styrofoam cup of coffee his secretary brought me. He handed me a tissue, and I wiped off his desk and my miniature tape recorder. I am so inept at this, I thought. I turned on the recorder and asked my first question, about his background.

“I’m an outsider,” he said. “A lot of people up here think I’m a little bit crazy, but that’s neither here nor there. We’ll keep personalities out of this and stay with the facts, and I think that’ll be the safest thing for everybody.”

Okay then. All he would tell me was that he was from Oklahoma and his degree was in geology. Scientific objectivity was seldom as pure as its proponents claimed. I’d hoped to learn a little about his influences. But who was I to complain? Armed with a tape recorder, an amenable expression, and an inquiring tone, I, too, was hiding behind an objective guise.

Figuring out “what the water table’s doing” was the primary challenge, said the director. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.” The most difficult problem was “data variability.” He handed me a graph that showed virtually no drop overall since 1980.

I began to point out that his newsletter had said the aquifer went down seven feet on average during that period, but he cut me off. “Now I don’t know which database I used to get these numbers. Like I said, every time I look at this, I make another assumption.”

The water level in the observation well on our land had fallen fifteen feet since 1980. I knew that we didn’t irrigate at rates higher than other farmers. In fact, Ron was careful to turn the sprinklers off after rainstorms and was critical of those who didn’t. He used water
only when he needed to. Was this “data variability” a handy quagmire in which to lose critics of the district’s minimal regulatory measures? If no one could figure out how much the water table had actually declined, then sensible controls couldn’t be imposed. I wondered how the director could be the same man who’d come up with the idea of zero depletion. Had his idealism declined, as the wells had over time, depleted by the pragmatic necessity of keeping his job?

Whatever his intentions, it wasn’t going to be easy for him to dampen my alarm. All I had to do was close my eyes to see the personally incriminating evidence—that plummeting line on the graph of our well. What if it were a bank account? Anyone would be upset to see their financial resources dwindling so fast. In fact, there was a direct link between irrigation and finances, for both the farmers and the local economy. But we weren’t only talking about money; we were talking about life for virtually all time to come. This water had grown Aunt Vernita’s garden and fruit trees. It had hydrated her, Wilbur, and their children, my cousins. If we kept pumping at current rates, they were likely to be the last humans the water would ever sustain on that particular land. Because the springs would disappear, no wildlife would survive either. Assuming a water table two hundred feet thick, which it was in many places, and less than half an inch of annual recharge, it would take at least five thousand years for the aquifer to replenish itself once it was drained in an area.

Remembering the Kansas Geological Survey scientist I’d talked to, I asked the director if he’d included any alluvial wells in his averages. Wouldn’t those wells in the sandy creek valleys have risen a lot during the nineties, an exceptionally wet decade? Wouldn’t they skew the averages upward? He dismissed their significance, saying that only fifteen out of three hundred wells were in alluvial areas.

Did his board have the ability to reduce farmers’ water rights? I asked. It did, he said.

“What would the politics of that be?”

“Oh boy,” he said, as if such action were so extreme as to be unimaginable.

“I mean, you’ve got a board that is mainly irrigators.” A tactful misstatement. They were all irrigators. “I like the idea of local control, but you have to wonder—”

“Well, you do wonder,” he conceded, “and we’ve been accused of being the fox guarding the henhouse, or drunks guarding the liquor store.”

I laughed at the colorful imagery, eager for him to admit that the bureaucracy was rigged.

“Well,” he said again. “I don’t know how to answer that. If you were on this board, what kinds of decisions would you be willing to make?”

I couldn’t run for the board because I didn’t live in the district, but the question was still a legitimate one for a part owner of the Bair Farm, one who benefited yearly from its profits. I tried to imagine myself standing up to other rights holders and suggesting cuts. Curtailing water rights would curtail yields, reducing the size of every check farmers deposited in their bank accounts. Still, it was what I believed should happen, and the question troubled me more than I wished to let on.

Before I could compose an answer, the director said, “We basically shut down new development. We’re the toughest district on tail-water control, bar none. We have promoted water-use efficiency more than any area in Kansas so far.”

Was this his own defensiveness showing? When I asked him what had happened to his zero depletion plan, I began to understand that regardless of what he’d said about avoiding the personal in our discussion, his emotional investment in the plan had been huge. His official duty was to serve his board of directors. They were the ones who made the real decisions, he insisted. Yet his degree was in an earth science. Ideally, scientists sought and served only Truth.

He said, “The eligible voters of the district didn’t like it as well as the board did, and the board didn’t like it a lot.” He still liked the idea. Zero depletion, he explained, had been “sustainable yield,” that sweet spot where any water irrigators took out would be replaced by rain and snowmelt. The beauty of his plan was that it could have been “as aggressive or passive as you wanted.” You could set it to go into effect over any number of years, ranging from ten to sixty.

But when I asked my burning question—how much irrigation would have to be cut back to achieve zero depletion—the timeline got longer. “Well, it happens over ninety years, well over eighty years of time.” I could see why he would want to set the doomsday moment as far into the future as possible. Saying any of this to his board would have been like walking into last night’s windstorm, with all the dust it carried blowing straight into his face. It amazed me that there had been a time when he was not only idealistic enough to suggest such a plan but naïve enough to believe that irrigation farmers would have gone along with it. It hurt my heart and made me miss my own idealistic youth, when I also believed that people could be persuaded to do what was right regardless of their own self-interest. What happened to those times? I wanted to believe that way again.

He said that to compute the curtailment necessary, he would first have to estimate annual recharge. I told him I understood this.

“Well,” he said, “I, we, figured the long-term recharge is 150,000 acre feet a year comin’ into the system.”

I nodded slowly. An acre foot was 325,851 gallons, enough to bury an acre one foot deep. A football field was about an acre. Imagine glass walls around it. I later computed that to hold 150,000 acre feet of water, the walls would have to be twenty-eight miles high. The total current water rights in the district were 866,000 acre feet per year. Imagine that aquarium rising 164 miles into the sky. The director had just told me that to stabilize the Ogallala in our district, water rights would have to be cut by over 80 percent. The answer sickened me because I knew what that goal would mean to farmers.

As bad as that would be, and as impossible as it would be without citizens putting their collective foot down, I knew that even that large a cut would not be enough to save the springs. I mentioned that the Kansas Geological Survey scientist I’d talked to had said that the springs needed the natural recharge that came from precipitation. Meaning that if irrigators were allowed to use even that limited amount, the springs would still dry up eventually. How could I communicate the value of those springs, when the director was likely to dismiss my
arguments as anecdotal or mere sensory data? Unscientific and subjective perceptions of sunlight on water. The diaphanous wings of dragonflies. The vibrant-orange plastron shields of turtles.

“If your end goal is no impact on stream flows,” the director responded, “we’d have no water. I mean none! But if you want more than eighteen people in northwest Kansas . . .” He left it to me to conclude the obvious.

Later I would wish I’d thought to mention the four thousand Indians who, along with thousands of horses, had drunk from Big Spring during the 1857 sun dance. And what about the many native populations that had preceded the Cheyenne? How had the springs managed to sustain them and millions of bison?

Yet despite my inability to speak my heart, some invisible shift had taken place between the director and me. I’d underestimated the power of face-to-face discussion. I might have been the first person who’d ever sat across from him and asked him such earnest questions from an ecological perspective.

He now admitted that the current drought was taking a toll. “These last two years are a wake-up call. We’re going back to those heavy declines again. In fact,” he added, “our water table’s still dropping three or four inches a year.”

That didn’t jibe with the optimistic graph he’d given me at the beginning of the interview. If in such a brief exchange, I could cause this well-positioned bureaucrat to increase his estimate of the water’s annual decline, perhaps I had more power than I thought.

•   •   •

W
ITH HIS BREAD,
W
ARD WIPED UP THE
remains of balsamic vinegar and sesame oil I’d marinated and cooked the chicken breasts in. “Larrupin’ good,” he said.

“Larrupin’?”

“Cowboy talk for ‘I hain’t never had nothin’ gooder than this,’ sweetheart.”

Normally his self-mockery made me laugh, but tonight I mustered
only a wan smile. My failure to answer the director’s question about what I would do if I served on his board still bothered me. Was it time to go public? Did I need to become an activist, a role that suited me about as well as sunshine suited a mole? Standing before an audience and announcing that we were pouring the planet’s precious water down the drain of oblivion would assuage my conscience a little. But as long as my family was part of the problem, what legs would I have to stand on?

I got up and scraped my uneaten baked potato into the trash barrel, then returned to the table to gather my silverware.

“Don’t bother,” Ward said. “We can do dishes in the morning.”

There was a spot on the oilcloth that wouldn’t come up, no matter how hard I scrubbed.

“Julene,” Ward said.

I sat down and tried to look at him.

“What’s eating you?”

“I don’t want to sell the farm, but I don’t want to be a party to this anymore either. Ron isn’t getting any younger or healthier. We’re going to have to make a decision soon.”

“Selling would be the worst thing you could do. Your dad would haunt you all the way to your grave.”

“And beyond, if there is a beyond. I don’t know how I could live with myself. But I can’t live with this either.”

I fought the urge to get up from the table. I wasn’t one to leave dishes, but I would have preferred leaving this conversation. Tracing the squares in the yellow-plaid tablecloth, I said,“I just wish he’d never gotten started irrigating. I wish he’d stuck with wheat. And sheep, or cattle, like he was raising near the end. There wouldn’t be nearly as much money to spread around, but I don’t think I’d be contemplating selling now either. Isn’t that ironic?”

Ward dropped his big hand over mine and bunched our fingers together in one fist. “I could help if you wanted.”

I looked at him. “You mean help turn it back to wheat?”