The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (26 page)

“He just couldn’t do it, Bair,” Beatrice said. Knowing this didn’t help. The thought that I had somehow become a daunting chore only infuriated me. During Beatrice’s visit we browsed through a Laramie antique store, where she picked up a beautiful little carved wooden box. On the lid she pasted a picture that I had taken on a canoe trip down the Green River in western Wyoming. The water in the foreground was pale green and so clear that you could see the boulders underneath, a surface netting of sunlight drifting over them. A slightly opaque strip of turquoise water mirrored the turquoise on the box’s sides. And the ripples where the water reflected the shoreline glinted gold, the same color as the metallic paint on the box’s rim. The water
had flowed out of the base of Flaming Gorge Dam, so cold I didn’t think I could go in at first. But that strip of turquoise had been irresistible. Of course I’d gone in, every time we’d beached the canoe. “Remember who you are,” Beatrice seemed to be telling me with that gift.

Another friend, Susan, who’d grown up in Iowa farm country and felt stifled there, told me simply, “He’s a settler. You’re a seeker. Settlers don’t like seekers. They ask too many unsettling questions.” She also observed that until I met Ward, I’d centered so much on Jake and work that it was as if I’d forgotten I was a sexual being. Loving Ward had awakened that part of me again, and however painful losing him was, that would be a good thing in the long run.

The wisdom of friends like these—the community I had built up over the years through that forceful urge to connect with the like-minded or like-spirited—would settle in after this crisis in my romantic affairs ended. But the road to acceptance has no shortcuts. I had to walk the distance step by step.

8

I
N THE DISTRICT’S NEWSLETTER, THE
W
ATER
T
ABLE
,
I
READ THAT OUR BOARD WAS GOING TO HOLD AN ANNUAL MEETING.
It would be open to the public, an opportunity to learn how decisions were made. And who knew? I might run into Ward. He warehoused his livestock equipment in Colby. And he sometimes shopped at the grocery store there.

The director greeted me with courteous surprise and ushered me to a row of empty seats reserved for the public along one end of the small conference room. Ten board members, all of them men, sat around the table.

I was forced to sit almost sideways to avoid knocking my knees against the back of a chair occupied by a red-faced cowboy farmer
with a handlebar mustache. He was the man who’d once rented our pasture from Bruce. He looked the same today as he had when I’d first met him, at a party Ward had taken me to—Wranglers so crisp and indigo they must have been brand-new, his chest prominent and proud under a starched-white, snap-up shirt. At the party, he made it clear to me that he’d felt hoodwinked when Bruce sold the pasture after getting him to install all new posts and wire. “You owe me,” he said, quite seriously. “What are you and your brother going to do with your farm?”

“I don’t know. Run it?”

“Really?” he said, holding my eyes with an amused look on his face. “How are you going to do that when that man of yours, Ron, quits?”

“Well, hello, Miss Bair!” he said now, a little jokingly. As the meeting was called to order, he took out a pen and scribbled something on the back of his copy of the agenda. He passed it to me and watched while I read it.
I want to rent your farm
. I gave him a wan smile and nodded mere acknowledgment. After the contentiousness between him and Bruce, there wasn’t a chance in hell we’d choose him as a renter.

Ward had told me after that party that I’d rattled his friends by hanging out in the room where the men gathered and striking up my own conversations with them. Men and women normally formed separate clumps at Kansas get-togethers. Now those tables had turned. It was I who felt rattled. Women did not participate in public farm business, I knew. With pad and pen, I pretended to be a journalist, but as a member of a farm family who irrigated, I would normally be thought a partisan. Truth be known—and I believed that some of the men present did intuit this truth—I was a turncoat. They were kind to me anyway. The director introduced me and offered me coffee, and the men smiled and said hello, extending their welcome to the daughter of an old-timer many of them had known.

The cowboy farmer turned in his chair every so often to stare at me unabashedly, like an overconfident suitor undressing the object of his desire. Except his lechery was not sexual. It was fiscal. I thought I
could read his mind as he multiplied our acreage times yields and dollars per bushel and estimated our annual Farm Program subsidies.

He knew that heirs usually sought a renter first. Then they sold to him. He and the other board members and their fathers and grandfathers had gotten big this way. Like my own forebears, theirs had made it through the Depression and the droughts, adding sections of land to their holdings as their neighbors either failed or died, leaving nonfarming sons and daughters. Each acquisition reinforced their confidence in their families’ special mettle, their plains hardiness, their survivability. I knew that pride well and had basked in it my whole life. This suitor presented no immediate danger, but he clearly smelled opportunity. He traveled in Ward’s circle and must have known that we’d broken up. Now that it was certain I would not be coming home, there would be spoils.

The men around the conference table kept stealing glances at me. The looks on their faces seemed to go beyond mere curiosity. Was it suspicion? Guilt? These men were some of the area’s biggest irrigation farmers. A few of them grossed more than a million dollars annually and were among the top twenty government-subsidized farmers in their counties. Ron told me that one of the board members had thirty-eight sprinkler systems on his land.

Ron was an opinionated man, and he believed in playing by the rules. Each year he called me with accurate meter readings so we could properly record the amount of water we’d used. He didn’t like the fact that most irrigation farmers weren’t even required to have meters, whereas we’d had to have them ever since Dad cut a deal with the district allowing us to use water from any of our wells on any of our land. Once, Ron had told Bruce and me that he would run for the board himself, except if he did, and tried to get stronger meter controls passed, he couldn’t step outside anymore without wearing a bulletproof vest.

“What if they shot you in the head, Ron?” Bruce had asked. He never missed an opportunity for a joke, although he favored uniformly fair enforcement also.

These big irrigators on the water board tended to be less regulation
friendly. They had killed zero depletion and every other attempt to reduce pumping. So now Topeka had enacted a new protocol. The boards were to determine the areas in their districts where drawdown of the Ogallala was most severe. These areas would then become candidates for more aggressive management. It was a plan to plan.

The director suggested that 1996 through 2002 provided a good mix of wet and dry years from which to pull data. But the board members had a lot riding on irrigation continuing unabated, and their biases were showing. “Yeah but we’re takin’ the last three droughty years that make the thirties look like a walk in the park!” one complained. Of course. If they chose years when it had rained more and farmers had irrigated less, then the drawdown would be minimal, and no one would be asked to cut the amount he pumped.

“We should throw out the dry years,” another man blurted. He and several others glanced at me, as if taking the measure of my reaction.

“That’s going to skew the whole picture, Max,” said the director. “That’s not going to be fair.” I could see what he was up against. If these were “drunks guarding the liquor store,” he was the man hired by the owner, in this case the people of the state of Kansas, to keep them from guzzling every last drop. But how he did this was up to the drunks, who had voting power over their own water rights.

Perhaps to ameliorate them, the director complained about the knee-jerk regulations handed down by the state. “We always tell ’em they won’t work, but they go ahead and do them anyway.”

“You sound like my wife,” said one. “Course I don’t know what you’re anglin’ for.” Laughter filled the room like bowling pins toppling after a strike. The cowboy farmer gave me a vulturous leer.

At adjournment, as the men rolled their agendas into their fists, I leaned forward, my hands on the sides of my chair. But the director had one more tidbit to offer. He announced that Harley Owens had called his office wondering why he never received a refund check for his required donation to a cloud-seeding project that had been canceled.

I knew Harley. Because he was thought to be gay, he’d often been
the brunt of humor between my father and the men who hung out around the popcorn machine down at the Farmers’ Co-Op gas station. Harley’s request for a refund seemed reasonable to me because the project had been called off, but laughter resounded once again.

“Probably wanted to buy his wife a present,” someone said.

“He doesn’t have a wife,” announced another, to a general titter.

“Oh, so he doesn’t swing that way. I didn’t know that.”

Almost every eye in the room strayed onto me. I pretended I didn’t get the joke.

•   •   •

A
FTER IDLING DOWN
M
AIN AND PAST THE
feed stores, I lingered over lunch, my car parked prominently in the strip mall near Ward’s warehouse, but no luck. I imagined a barricade across the highway leading out of Colby in the direction of Plum Springs. “Road Ends Here.” It was like being in a
Twilight Zone
episode and having a significant part of your past suddenly erased.

I wasn’t ready, yet, to drive to Goodland and put on a good face for Mom. Needing some time to absorb the finality of all things Ward related, I decided to explore some countryside I’d never seen before. At first it proved to be an unremarkable drive through horizon-to-horizon corn and wheat stubble. Almost all of it had that telltale drab color indicative of no-till. Only when I saw mist rising from a valley up ahead did I understand what had drawn me this way. The road hit the valley’s rim, and the bleak view out my car windows transitioned abruptly into a world of grass.

The Smoky Valley returned me to sanity, to wild land instead of factory land, to the winter-yellow, cougarlike pelt of the Pleistocene instead of the raw-brown, exposed flesh of the Anthropocene. When I reached the bridge, I pulled onto the shoulder, turned off the engine, and stepped into a state of anachronistic grace. The mist stood thicker in the low places, so that the blond grass glowed more brightly on the hills. Through immemorial time, this mixture of native grasses, wildflowers, shrubs, and trees, and all the creatures that lived in, on, or
under them had coexisted in what the renowned plant geneticist and ecologist Wes Jackson called “nature’s wisdom,” while up above, the gray-brown, sprayed-dead tablelands displayed “man’s cleverness.”

You didn’t have to be a genius to feel the difference. Up above, I’d been depressed, not only by the destructive farming practices but by the conclusion it was taking me so long to reach, that Ward and I indeed “had no future.” Down here, this island of hilly terrain, spared only because tractors would topple traversing it, instilled the simplest kind of happiness—the kind the hunter-gatherers must have experienced so much more completely, knowing the grass never ended.

The fog prevented me from seeing the water until I’d walked halfway across the bridge. I hadn’t expected to see any this far west, but the Smoky was still alive here, unfurling gray-blue below limestone outcrops, like a forgotten veil snagged on the quivers of yucca poking up beside it.
The valley spirit never dies
, wrote Lao Tzu in the
Tao Te Ching
. What I knew to be happening here belied that assurance. The Smoky was the spirit of this valley, but like almost every other stream on the High Plains all the way from here to Texas, irrigation had so diminished it that it hovered on the verge of extinction.

This was farther west than Ward and I had ever ventured. Could this crossing be the one that Dull Knife and his Cheyenne had used in 1878? Ward always meant to show me where they crossed the Smoky, but somehow he never got around to it. Like so much else we would never get around to now.

The Cheyenne had come north in September, the month of the Plum Moon. The plums I’d planted in our farm’s windbreak were descendants of those native plums and, like them, ripened in September. October meant “Moon When the Water Begins to Freeze on the Edge of the Streams.” The name had reminded Ward of the cool, musty smell that rose from the valley in the fall. We’d marveled at these surviving touch points—fruit that tasted like a month, frost that smelled like one.

This was December,
Makhikomini
, the month of the Big Freezing Moon. Last year, when I’d spent those nights at Ward’s house after Christmas, the moon had not been big. It had been a scythe cradling
one star. What had I really loved about him? If he owned a place outside of Laramie and I’d met him one night when my girlfriends and I went dancing at the cowboy bar, I doubted I would have been that interested. Even if I entertained a relationship with him for a while, I would have ended it when I found out how little he cared about wild land. He hadn’t even felt a thrill standing on Sheep Mountain and looking over the Laramie Valley. In Willa Cather’s Nebraska novels, I read somewhere once, “men changed land.” In her southwestern novels, “land changed men.” Ward hadn’t experienced the desert like I had.

Yet whenever I took the long drive from Wyoming to his house and stepped onto his mud porch and breathed those smells—of dried mud, but also of old house, rolled oats, wool horse blankets, aftershave, hay—it was always as if he’d reentered my cells through the permeable walls of my capillaries. Those were the smells of my childhood. It was Kansas I’d been having sex with, melding with, re-fusing with. My love for him was my love of home.