The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (27 page)

The Cheyenne had been starving and in tatters when they came through this part of Kansas. So much had been sacrificed for our settlement. And most of those who’d made the sacrifice did not choose to make it. The same was true of the water and all of the animals that depended on it.

It occurred to me that at the board meeting I had failed to advocate for what I loved most. The emotional tone, within me, had been avoidance. And instead of staying after the meeting to mingle and speak my mind, I’d left immediately.

I had definitely been an anomaly, probably the only woman the men had ever seen at a meeting, unless the director’s assistant brought coffee or came in to take notes. I sensed that they were flattered by my presence.
Is this little ol’ meeting really that newsworthy? Well then, how are we doing? Are we funny? Are we important?
The ordinary things men look into women’s faces to discover. But I’d seen more in their looks than ordinary things.

To me, it seemed as if the men knew their water board was a smokescreen, an empty pretense at stewardship.
Is this whole affair as
ridiculous as we suspect? Can you see a way out of the compromised predicament we find ourselves in, mining the water while pretending to protect it? Mining it and undermining ourselves, slowly destroying the way of life we were born into and that is supposed to sustain our children and grandchildren?

For any answers to appear, those questions had to be asked. I was the ideal person to draw them out. I was living with the same disconnect, between what my own family was doing and what I knew needed to be done.

9

H
AVING INVESTED SO MUCH HOPE IN PRIVATE SOLUTIONS AND IN A ROMANTIC RELATIONSHIP THAT HAD GOTTEN ME NOWHERE, IT WAS TIME TO FOCUS MY ATTENTION OUTWARD.
The need to do this was met when I received an invitation to speak at a symposium in Wichita on the Ogallala. If I was ever going to outgrow my antiquated Kansas reticence and own my true feelings, it had to be now.

The moment I stepped into the crowded room, I saw the director of our farm’s water district in the audience. Although this frightened me, I was grateful for the opportunity. I still kicked myself for being so mealymouthed when I’d interviewed him. Instead of pretending to be an objective journalist, I should have told him that even as a member of a farm family who irrigated, I believed what we were doing was wrong.

While listening to the other speakers discuss the technicalities of new sprinkler technology and Kansas water law, my anxiety inched up like barometric pressure on a bruised-blue plains afternoon. No one questioned that pumping at high rates out of a declining aquifer should continue. It would be solely up to me to unleash that storm.

Too soon I found myself standing at the podium with shaky knees. Could others hear my voice quivering over the resonant PA system? But as I announced I was going to offer a more personal take on the
Ogallala, I saw relief on several faces. It had been a morning of PowerPoint presentations and charts.

So I told them my story, of growing up on a sensible farm aligned with the realities of the region’s climate and soil. Of the land trade that saw us move to town and begin a life radically different from the one we’d left. Of the erasure of the original farmstead and its replacement by a circle of irrigated field corn. And of how my family still owned a farm although none of us lived there or worked on it anymore. Only my elderly mother still lived in Sherman County.

In this, I told my audience, my family was not unusual. Nearly half of the people who owned farmland in our county didn’t live there, and most who did lived in town. Very few were engaged in anything like the way of life that had made farming a noble profession in the past. That life had vanished along with most of the farms. Once there were thirty million farms in America. That number had now dwindled to fewer than two million, many of them very large. The integrated livestock, grain, and haying operations of the 1950s were gone. The plains farms of today were corn, wheat, and soybean factories.

“Each year, the few hundred irrigators in one Kansas county, Finney, pump half again as much water as used by all one million customers of the Denver water utility. How is this conscionable?” I asked. “The news is full of stories of impending national and global water crises. Worldwide, more than eight hundred million people suffer from chronic hunger. Yet we are squandering the majority of our Ogallala water on a crop we feed to cows.

“The farm lobby argues that increasing any regulations on agriculture would hinder farmers’ ability to feed the world. But if we really want to feed the world, we should eliminate feedlots and grind the corn into flour for human consumption. The soybeans should be made into tofu and other foods for direct human use. Livestock production is a notorious waste of protein, converting the plant source to a meat source at a ratio of eight to one.

“Regardless of whether we feed corn and soybeans to humans or to animals, we should leave the growing of those crops to midwestern
farmers. It rains enough in the I states—Indiana, Illinois, Iowa—and in the eastern parts of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas to grow them without irrigating. We should return the High Plains to dryland crops and to grass.”

I described the many times I’d walked down dry creek beds where past floods had undercut the native sod and saw roots trailing all the way to the ground, “like Rapunzel’s hair. You don’t have to be a prairie zealot like me to appreciate the nutrient and ecological value of plants rooted that deeply. We should replant as much grass as possible and let it do the job it did throughout all conceivable time before us, sequestering carbon from the atmosphere with its immense root systems and supporting a diverse ecology.

“Let bovines eat the grass, doing the job that bovines have always done, their hooves aerating the soil and their manure fertilizing it. Then eat that meat, instead of going through the convoluted, fuel-intensive process of removing the grass, plying the soil with chemicals, and draining the water out from under it”—I paused to take a breath that came off like panting, and was gratified by my audience’s laughter—“to grow crops we then ship to feedlots, where the cattle need antibiotics in order to survive in the cramped conditions and must consume grain that their stomachs were not intended to digest”—pant, pant, laugh—“and then feeding ourselves the resulting ‘marbled,’ that is, fatty beef that contributes to our nation’s diabetes, heart-disease, and cancer epidemics.” Some of the audience were still laughing, but many were shaking their heads at the idiocy I’d described. “Oh yes,” I added. “Then there’s the twenty percent of the corn crop that ends up in processed food, mostly in corn syrup, which also causes health problems.

“To grow these irrigated crops, farmers apply huge amounts of nitrogen fertilizer. Only about one third to one half of the fertilizer is absorbed by the plants. But the rest of it doesn’t just vanish. Much of it makes its way into rivers or slowly trickles downward, into the aquifer. Same with pesticides. An Environmental Protection Agency study concluded that farming accounts for seventy percent of the contamination of U.S. rivers and streams.”

Was it possible, I asked, to arrest our suicidal course and protect the water that was left? Not, I answered, as long as we cling to our irrational faith in local control.

“People will not buy into policies that are handed down from on high, we are told. They won’t vote for legislators who would curtail their property rights. Yet the water of the state of Kansas belongs to all of the people, not just farmers. Meanwhile, the irrigation boards are manned by irrigators. They express views such as this one in our district’s newsletter, the
Water Table
:
How is it fair to give up profit now for the benefit of future generations?

“How is it fair?” I repeated incredulously, careful not to let my gaze stray onto the director’s sector of the room. “Better to ask why a hundred years of our now disintegrating and increasingly dismal plains civilization merits draining an aquifer that has supported ten thousand years of humanity before us. We are depriving the next ten thousand years of humans and animals of the water they will need to survive.

“There is something we all need to realize about the predominant mentality of farmers. My father having been a farmer, I know that mentality pretty well. He waged unblinking battles against coyotes with cyanide, drought with irrigation, soil depletion with chemical fertilizers, bugs with pesticides, weeds with herbicides. What he didn’t foresee, or understand, was the threat his growing technology posed to the balance of nature, or that there was such a balance in the first place.

“When my brothers and I were children, my father would hold us up to the stars at night. He appreciated stars as much as the next person, probably more. He took great pleasure in pondering them. But if he’d had the wherewithal and it had been profitable and legal, he would have harvested those as readily as he did his wheat. And he would not have stopped until he’d harvested every last one.

“The Ogallala Aquifer seemed as vast as the Milky Way when he first began pumping it. But he went to college. He knew, as did government geologists even back at the turn of the last century, that the water was finite. He understood that it would not last forever. He fully expected that his rights would one day be curtailed by the government,
and
he was okay with that
. He didn’t want to destroy his land or what was under it, but he didn’t believe it was his responsibility to quit and turn his back on those profits either. It was up to the government to protect natural resources.

“In this capitalist society we share, which elevates individual financial success over the common good, we cannot expect farmers to self-regulate any more than we expect other businesspeople to do so. They will work within the law to get rich, and they consider profits their due. They won’t change methods until they are required to. And the only one in a position to require them to is a government that governs.

“To govern, according to my dictionary, is ‘to exercise a directing or restraining influence over, to guide.’ It is also to ‘hold in check; to control.’ Isn’t it ironic, then, that instead of directing, restraining, guiding, holding in check, or controlling the use of the aquifer that makes life here possible, the federal Farm Program encourages and enables the waste and pollution of that aquifer?

“The effect of farm subsidies is circular. The draw of federal dollars drives production up, which, in turn, drives prices down, creating the need for more subsidies. Even if most irrigators don’t like the idea of curtailment, they would be far outnumbered by the other citizen owners of the water if only the awareness of those citizens were expanded by open and honest public debate.

“We have to subsidize farms if we want to keep any vitality at all on the rural landscape, but the practices that taxpayers pay for should protect the water, not lay waste to it. Plains farmers, whether real ones or absentee owners like me, should not be subsidized for growing irrigated crops. We should not be able to get government crop insurance for them either. Instead, we should be reimbursed for retiring our water rights, for returning our acreage to dryland crops and to grass, and for adopting nonchemical methods that will protect instead of pollute the aquifer.”

•   •   •

L
ATE THAT EVENING, THE ELEVATOR
I
WAS
riding opened at the same time as the one opposite me. The director and I made brief eye contact, but
instead of acknowledging me, he dashed down the hall. I surprised myself by calling his name. He ducked his head and walked faster. I jogged to catch up and called his name again. He stopped, turned, and looked down at me impatiently. “Hello, Julene.”

He was a tall man, and I barely reached his shoulders. My sudden courage must have come from the high I was still on. After my talk, several people had come up to me and thanked me for my honesty. Some had told me their own stories—of dried-up creeks and failing irrigation pumps and plowed pastures.

I told the director that I understood how frustrating it must be to do his complex job in the face of criticism like mine.

“Why won’t you work within the system?” he asked. “Why don’t you run for our board?” He complained about another critic who, instead of doing this, “sneaked around behind our backs and went to the legislature.”

It stunned me to think that he might actually see me as a threat. That possibility frightened me, with the onus of the responsibility it implied. If I were to become more politically active, I would have to learn much more than I’d been able to absorb so far—about water law, cropping alternatives, and the gargantuan Farm Program. I reminded him that I didn’t live in Sherman County. “I don’t think I’d be allowed on the board, would I?”

“Well then,” he said, “dryland farmers can serve. A lot of them are opposed to irrigation. For the life of me, I can’t understand why they won’t get involved.”

“Because they don’t want to rock boats. They have to live there.” Was it possible he really didn’t understand this? But I appreciated that my speech had broken through his professional reserve. We were on emotional ground, and he was talking like a human, not a wonk.

“I’m in the middle,” he said, “halfway between those who want to go full out and people like you who want no irrigation.” He held his hands up to indicate the two extremes.

“In your job I guess you’d have to take a neutral position,” I said.

“This is nothing to do with my job. It’s how I feel personally.
Somehow these two ends have to come together. Is that what you want? Are you arguing this position in order to get us from out here?” He drew his hands together. “To here?”