Centennial

by James A. Michener

  Early Monday morning Paul and Flor drove back to Venneford, where Bradley Finch, one of America’s leading experts on water supply, waited to take Garrett to a meeting of the Water Board. It was to be held at a research station near the headwaters of the Cache la Poudre, and Garrett said, “I think Professor Vernor would be interested in seeing what we’re doing,” and Finch said, “Come along. Might as well start to worry now as later.”

  When I asked him what this meant, he said, “Our citizens seem to be rather worried about gasoline rationing. That’ll be child’s play compared to what’s going to happen when we start rationing water.”

  “Will it come to that?” I asked.

  “It already has. When you see our analog model, you’ll understand.”

  “What’s an analog model?” I asked.

  “It’s easier to demonstrate than to explain.”

  As we drove up the beautiful canyon of the Poudre, Finch told Garrett, “This is your first appearance as a member of the board, Paul, and it’s crucial. We’re looking to you for leadership. You’ve got to make some very tough decisions, and you mustn’t show yourself as wishy-washy.”

  “You make it sound ominous,” Garrett said.

  “It is.” As we parked the car before a low building hidden beneath tall evergreens, Finch concluded, “You and I will have to decide who shall live and who shall not live. It’s as serious as that.” Before he could say more, other members of the Water Board spied the new deputy and gathered to congratulate him.

  “I don’t even understand the questions, let alone the answers,” Garrett protested.

  “You will, by lunchtime,” Welch assured him.

  We assembled in an austere room, one wall of which was painted white. Bradley Finch, as chairman of the board, said briefly, “Our technicians worked all last week to get a slide show ready for you, Garrett, and I think we’d better plunge right in.”

  He darkened the room, and a young woman, who was introduced as Dr. Mary White from Cal Tech, said, “I’m to give the presentation, Mr. Garrett, and if you have any questions, press that buzzer at your desk.” Forthwith she unfolded the dramatic story of water, as it affected all the western states. Slide after slide developed the inevitable theme: population, agriculture and industry were all growing so fast that available supplies of water simply could not keep pace. States like Colorado, Arizona and Utah faced permanent drought conditions.

  Garrett pushed his buzzer and the slides halted. “You keep mentioning the word aquifer. Define it for me.”

  The lights went on, and Finch said, “Dr. Welch, I’ve heard you handle that question rather well. Care to take a crack?”

  Dr. Welch went to a blackboard and drew a heavy, solid line from left to right. At one end he wrote “Rocky Mountains,” and at the other “Nebraska.” Beneath the line he wrote in bold letters “Platte River.” “This is us,” he said.

  With red chalk he drew three dramatic lines leading away from the Platte. The first he labeled “Towns and Other Social Use.” The second he labeled “Agriculture.” The third was “Industry.” “These are the agencies which want our water, and right now they’re prepared, among them, to take away far more than we can provide.”

  Finch, himself an engineer from M.I.T., interrupted. “That shows you rather well the basic problem, Garrett. The three outgoes already exceed the various inflows. Your job ... that is, the job of our committees ... well, we have to apportion our available water.”

  “What’s the aquifer?” Garrett repeated.

  Dr. Welch resumed. “The only inflow we have, really, is fourteen inches of precipitation on the plains out here. Pitifully small. Just barely enough to keep life going. And lots of snow up here in the mountains. It all winds up in the Platte ... or the Arkansas ... or one of our other rivers.

  “Now, as the water comes down the river system, several things happen. Some of it we can see—like the Cache la Poudre outside this building. And some of that is diverted into dams and irrigation ditches. And some of the diversion seeps into the ground and creeps back into the Platte.”

  “That sounds like one of Potato Brumbaugh’s theories,” Garrett said.

  “But what even he failed to take into account,” Welch said, “was the water we can’t see. And having missed that, he missed exactly half the equation.”

  Deftly he sketched in the various inflows into the great system: the snowfall, the rainfall, the dams, the ditches. Then, with a broad stroke of his chalk, he laid down two boundary lines about five miles north and south of the river, and with hasty, sweeping movements filled in the space between so that the river and its intricate relationships could no longer be seen.

  “That’s your aquifer,” he said. “Underground and invisible. Four million years ago, when the Platte was being carved into the silt thrown down from the Rockies, there was this impermeable basement of shale and limestone. On it rested deposits of highly permeable gravel and sand, in some places two hundred feet thick, and as you can see, up to ten miles wide. For millions of years this catchment lay hidden, covered over by whatever topsoil came along. It now forms a lens whose interstices can be filled with water. It’s really a massive subterranean reservoir, and it acts as the balance for our entire Platte system.”

  The lights were turned off, and various slides were flashed on the wall to indicate the operation of this mysterious phenomenon. As Garrett traced the intricate manner in which water seeped down into the aquifer and then escaped upward through springs and artesian wells and filtration—this constant coming and going of the water that sustained all life—he could not help thinking of old Potato Brumbaugh, who had lived his life sitting on top of the great reservoir without comprehending either its existence or its operation. He had plumbed all the secrets except the biggest.

  “We must think of the aquifer as the permanent invisible counterpart of the visible river. Had we left it alone, it would have served us forever, but unfortunately, some years ago we began to sink wells into it, and now it’s in grave danger.”

  Dr. White resumed her slides, showing how ranchers, like Paul Garrett, had sunk artesian wells into the aquifer and were drawing off millions of gallons of water that should have been left in the subterranean system.

  “This invention,” she said, flashing onto the screen a photograph of an ingenious watering device, “has done more harm to the Platte River than anything else in history, for it has almost destroyed the aquifer.”

  On the wall appeared the photograph of a flat, treeless, open range. In the middle stood a steel tower resting on self-propelled wheels. To it came electricity and water, and it moved ceaselessly in a circle, throwing a fine spray of moisture from a set of nozzles on top. Twenty-four hours a day this tower could revolve, watering an immense area.

  That was not all. Eight to thirteen such towers could be linked together, side by side, each with its own motor, each moving around the circle at the appropriate speed. The combined towers thus formed a vast arm reaching out a quarter of a mile and irrigating an area containing one hundred and twenty-five acres. These were the fairy circles that I had seen on my first tour in Garrett’s plane.

  The lights went on, and Finch said, “So that’s our aquifer. And it’s in peril. Not only are present demands on it depleting, future demands threaten to exhaust it. Detlev Schneider has some news on that front.”

  Schneider, trained in demography at Oxford, was a robust man with an effusive sense of humor, and as he spoke, Garrett reflected on one of the most reassuring aspects of Colorado; it enlisted help from the best sources in the world: Oxford, Cal Tech, M.I.T, Harvard, Stanford.

  “We face a real dilly,” Schneider was saying. “Because Colorado is such a popular state, fifty thousand newcomers want to move in each year. We’d like to welcome them, but we haven’t enough water. And within the state itself, twenty thousand of our rural people a year want to move into Denver. Love to have them, but no water. We also have scores of industries that want to establish their he
adquarters here. Executives want instant skiing, and we need their tax dollars. But we simply don’t have the water.”

  Harry Welch interrupted to say that the Colorado legislature had been handed a bill denying permission to anyone from outside the state to move into Colorado. “We’ll set up checkpoints at the borders and turn them back,” he said.

  “Completely unconstitutional,” Schneider retorted. “Any American citizen can move anywhere he likes.”

  “But not into Colorado,” Finch said. “The analog model takes care of that.”

  In a small room at the rear of the building stood a pegboard forty feet long by five feet high, simulating in minute detail all aspects of the Platte system. The river was represented by a heavy copper wire, to which came smaller wires for the contributory streams. Soldered to these were thousands of electrical resistors of varying strength, duplicating the water-bearing properties of the region. Just as rocks impeded the flow of water through the aquifer, resistors impeded the flow of electricity through the model.

  At each junction of four resistors a capacitor was attached, storing electricity the way porous rocks and dams stored water. With everything operating, this complex electrical system reproduced every attribute of the river and the aquifer, and any flow of water that came into the real system was reflected in the model.

  “But what about the outflow?” Garrett asked, and Schneider explained, “You see these small light bulbs scattered about the plan? And these little resistors? They draw off electricity in the same way that irrigation ditches and wells withdraw water.”

  As Garrett inspected the model, Finch said, “It shows you the Platte as it is today. But it can also show you what will happen five years from now if we continue to increase the demand for water. Let’s see what Harry Welch was warning us about with his red outgoes.”

  The electrical input, representing precipitation, was kept constant, but a large light bulb representing increased demand by communities of new people was turned on. “Watch the oscilloscope,” Finch said.

  There, on a screen placed to one side of the model, were graphically shown the effects of the new demand: a shadow-line which had been depicting the even flow of the river dropped dramatically toward the bottom of the screen, forming a deep cone of depression. “It proves what we predicted,” Finch said. “Look downstream. Real shortages down there, but we still have a river.”

  Schneider said, “But now let’s increase the demand for industry too,” and he turned on various bulbs. The line on the oscilloscope dropped ominously toward the bottom of the screen.

  “At this point agriculture is hurting like hell,” Finch said.

  “Now let’s crank in five years of drought,” Schneider said, “such as we’ve often had.”

  Instead of adding new bulbs to simulate increased demand, current was diminished in the mountains, indicating low snowfall, and other current was stopped to show decline in rainfall. The oscilloscope line vanished; the Platte no longer flowed.

  The model was turned off. “There you have it,” Finch said. “If we encourage the population of Colorado to increase, and invite more industry, and continue to deplete the aquifer with agricultural pumps, we shall destroy the state. Your job, Garrett, is to see that this doesn’t happen.”

  “Do we still have options?” Garrett asked.

  “Yes, but you must explain them to the citizens. For example, if we continue to steal water away from our farms, onions will have to cost ten dollars apiece.”

  On the drive home, a much-sobered Garrett reflected on his new job as protector of resources: “I thought the task was to provide the people of Colorado with good air to breathe. Now I’ve got to see that they have water to drink. And when the soil experts get through their indoctrination, I suspect my principal job will be to ensure that we have earth to till. This nation is running out of everything. We forgot the fact that we’ve always existed in a precarious balance, and now if we don’t protect all the components, we’ll collapse. I never knew my great-grandfather, Jim Lloyd—he died before my time. But I’ve heard my Grandfather Beeley tell how Lloyd loved the earth and never wanted to do anything to disturb its balance. He wouldn’t allow one extra steer to graze on a field that might be damaged by close cropping. We’ve got to get back to that sense of responsibility toward the earth. When I think that the people of this state didn’t give a damn when Floyd Calendar shot eagles and bears and turkeys—just for the hell of it, just to titillate some eastern sportsmen ...”

  On Tuesday, November 20, it was the farmers and the financiers who had to bite the bullet. The climactic meeting of Central Beet was held in Denver, with Paul Garrett and Harvey Brumbaugh present as board members, and they sat in silence as the dismal figures were paraded.

  “The beet industry,” droned the chairman, “has fallen on evil times. So many people covet our land for so many new purposes that the farmer can’t afford to reserve it for beets. He’s got to sell to the subdividers, who build new towns for people from the east. And even if he did hold on to his land, he couldn’t find anyone to work his fields or harvest the crop in the fall.” He continued his painful litany until he reached the obvious conclusion: “And so, gentlemen, we have no alternative but to close down our plant at Centennial. We won’t lose money, because a real estate developer from Chicago has made us a most attractive offer. He wants to build ninety-seven Colonial-type houses.”

  Harvey Brumbaugh was the first to react. As the owner of a large feed lot where young steers were assembled for fattening, he had relied on sugar-beet pulp and molasses as a convenient source of feed. Now he would have to look elsewhere and absorb the cost of shipping.

  The chairman listened to this complaint, then said, “The time may be at hand when the cattle industry will be forced to quit Colorado. Our state is so beautiful, and so many people want to live here, that I suspect ranchers like Paul Garrett will no longer be able to run their cattle economically. A whole pattern of life is vanishing, gentlemen. We’re just the first to feel the pinch.”

  The chairman did not say so, but all present realized that in some forthcoming meeting, say within three years, the first topic on the agenda would be: “Shall we dissolve the company altogether?”

  It was incomprehensible to Garrett that this great institution, which had once dominated life in Colorado—“We live and breathe as Central Beet directs,” the farmers had said—should be on the verge of collapse. Even when he was a boy, as late as 1936, Central Beet had dictated to banks and school boards and sheriffs’ offices. For thousands of farmers and small-town businessmen, Central Beet was Colorado, and to watch it fall from that high estate was painful.

  “What went wrong?” Garrett asked Brumbaugh as they rode home together.

  “We didn’t pay enough attention to the relationship of land and people,” Brumbaugh said. “I glimpsed something of the problem when I developed the feed-lot concept. Take the young cattle off the land, herd them in lots and stuff them with feed for market. Well, that idea seems to have run its course. You know what I’m thinking right now?”

  Garrett turned to look at the man who rode beside him. Harvey, like his great-grandfather, Potato, had a far-ranging mind, one that was ever willing to investigate new potentials. Now Brumbaugh said, “I have a suspicion that before long we’ll be raising cattle the way they raise those new-style chickens. Never touch the earth. Live in sanitized pens from birth to death. Cowboys will be city fellers with college degrees, dressed in white aprons. They’ll ship manure away in desiccated pellets.”

  Excited by his vision of the future, even though it entailed hardship for him, Brumbaugh continued: “Time’s got to come when we can no longer afford to keep cows in Colorado. First they’ll move to Wyoming and Montana, but land prices are rising there too. Know what’s going to happen?”

  Garrett had been thinking, for some time, that ranching in Colorado was doomed, but he had not deduced where the business would go, and he listened with fascination as Brumbaugh sai
d, “Within a few years we’ll be raising most of our cattle on cheap land back in states like Indiana ... close to the feed supply. On the other hand, I’ve heard some good reports on cottonseed cake as feed for Herefords. I may move my whole operation to Georgia ... or maybe Alabama.”

  Garrett was impressed by the facility with which Brumbaugh could leap from one alternative to the next, without allowing sentiment to intrude where it could serve no useful purpose. He wasn’t able to do that. If the time came when he could no longer afford to run Hereford cattle, a large part of his life would be shattered, and with these gloomy thoughts of change and the flow of life he dropped Brumbaugh at the feed lot and drove north.

  On Wednesday Paul faced an ugly necessity, one he had been postponing for some weeks. Now he must meet the people concerned and report the bad news.

  When it was announced that he would be chairman of the Centennial Commission, a delegation from Blue Valley in the heart of the Rockies visited him with an elaborate plan for making that historic area a focus for the celebration. When he first studied the proposal he had been offended by its garishness and its pandering to every base item in Colorado’s history, but as the days passed and he heard further details, he was downright revolted. The men and women of Blue Valley did not seem to know that in 1976 a great state and a greater nation would be celebrating their birthdays and that what was required was a rededication to the principles that had made them outstanding in the first place. In Blue Valley they wanted a carnival.