Texas

by James A. Michener

  ‘You’re saying that we’ll enter campaigns in all the states?’

  ‘Wherever there’s a man who votes against the interests of Texas. To accomplish this cleansing of public life we must spend money … and I mean a great deal. We’re fighting for the future of this great nation.’

  In the present election he had, by various intricate devices, poured contributions into different campaigns across the country. The bulk of it went to support Ronald Reagan, a most attractive man who had often lectured to Texas business groups on the dangers of communism, the need to muzzle our central bureaucracy and the absolute necessity of eliminating the national debt, but Rusk had also pinpointed various Democratic senators, real crazy liberals, who had to be defeated, plus a variety of notorious congressmen who had spoken against what he called Big Oil.

  All of them were to be expunged, and as the long day wore on, he spoke with various allies around the nation: ‘Ranee! Looks like we might oust them all. Glorious day for the Republic!’

  Before the sun had set in Texas he was assured, as he sat alone in his Larkin mansion before the two television sets, that Reagan had won, but he was startled by the ineptness of Jimmy Carter in handling the situation: My God! He’s conceding while the Western polls are still open! That must damage his people in tight races out there. He threw down the newspaper whose tabulations he was checking off: That poor peanut grower never had a clue. How did we ever allow him to be President?

  Still the resplendent night rolled on, and during an exulting phone call to friends in Houston, he shouted: ‘By damn, we showed them how to win an election. We cleaned house on the whole damned bunch.’

  He did not go to bed, for he wanted to hear the final Alaska returns, and when he learned that candidates he had backed so heavily retained a slight lead, with prospects of a much larger one when the rural districts came in, he leaned back, stared at the ceiling, and reflected: A man works diligently for what he believes in, and when the fight grows hot, he’d better throw in all his reserves. What did we contribute, one way and another? Eleven million dollars, more or less. Small price to pay for the defeat of known enemies of the people. Small price to ensure good government.

  Toward morning he learned that the Democrats had held on to their seat in Hawaii, but he dismissed this with a growl: ‘They’re all Japs, anyway. They’d bear some looking into. Maybe next time we can fix that.’ Of nine Democratic incumbents that his team had targeted, seven had been defeated, and as the sun rose on Wednesday morning he told his fellow conspirators on the conference call: ‘We’re going to rebuild this nation to make it more like Texas.’ When an oilman in Midland asked what that meant, he said: ‘Religion, patriotism, the old-fashioned virtues, and willingness to stand up and fight anybody. The things that make any nation great.’ His father, Fat Floyd, had voiced exactly those sentiments sixty years earlier.

  But then, when Texas seemed impregnable, changes began to take place in all aspects of Texas life, subtly at first, like a wisp of harmless smoke at the edge of a prairie, then turning into a firestorm which threatened all the assumed values.

  The Sherwood Cobbs, at their cotton farm west of Lubbock, were one of the first families to detect the shift. One afternoon an event occurred which seemed a replay of that day in 1892, when a former slave ran to the plantation house at Jefferson with the startling news that boll weevils had eaten away the heart of the cotton crop. That information had altered life in Texas, and now another virtual slave, brown this time instead of black, Eloy Múzquiz, the illegal Mexican field hand, came running to the Cobb kitchen with news of equal import: ‘Mister Cobb! Deep Well Number Nine, no water!’

  ‘Electricity fail?’ The 1952 Chevy engines were no longer used.

  ‘No, we tested. Plenty spark.’

  ‘Maybe the pump’s gone.’ Cobb said this with a sick feeling, because for some months he had been aware that the water table upon which the Lubbock area depended had dropped toward the danger point. Could the failure of #9, a strong well, be a warning that the mighty Ogallala Aquifer was failing? He did not hazard a guess.

  During the first ten years on their cotton farm in Levelland, the Sherwood Cobbs realized that they had, by some fortunate chance, stumbled upon a paradise. Of course, it had required a special aptitude for anyone to appreciate that it was a paradise, for their land was so flat that even when the slightest haze intervened, no horizon could be identified; it started level and went on forever. Also, it contained not a tree, and what locally passed for a hedgerow was apt to be six inches high and covered with dust. Distances to stores and towns were forbidding, and when the sun went seriously to work in June, the average temperature stayed above ninety, day and night, for nearly four months. In 1980 there had been twenty days, almost in succession, when it soared above one hundred.

  But with air conditioning it was bearable, and during the winter months there were about a dozen inches of snow; ‘white gold,’ the farmers called it, because it lingered and seeped into the ground. Of course, extreme cold sometimes accompanied the snow, with the thermometer dropping to minus seventeen on one historic occasion.

  Only rarely did the year’s total rainfall exceed sixteen inches, but with deep pumps working, water from the aquifer was poured out in a stream so reliable that the cotton really seemed to jump out of the ground. ‘The part I appreciate,’ Cobb said, ‘is that you can lay the water exactly where you want it, when you want it.’ He also mixed fertilizer and needed minerals in the flow, so that while he irrigated he also nourished.

  ‘You might call it farming by computer,’ he told his sons. ‘We calculate what we’ve taken from the soil and then put it back. Same amounts. Properly handled, fields like ours could go on forever.’

  The results were more than gratifying. Back east, a bale of lint to an acre; here, two bales, and of a superior quality. This area around Lubbock was the dominant producer in America and one of the best in the world. A gin like Cobb’s on the road from Levelland to Shallowater produced five-hundred-pound bales of pure silver, so consistent was the quality and so assured the value. Brokers in Lubbock often dominated the world’s markets, for what they supplied and in what quantity determined standards and prices.

  ‘Imagine!’ Cobb exulted one night after finishing a long run with his gin. ‘Finding land where there’s always enough water and a boll weevil can’t live.’ It was a cotton grower’s dream, which explained why so many of the plantation owners in East Texas had made the long leap west.

  But now, as he jumped in his pickup to inspect #9, he had a suspicion that the great years might be ending, and he inspected the silent well only a few minutes before telling Múzquiz: ‘Go get the Ericksons.’

  When the brothers drove up to the well, Cobb clenched his teeth as they delivered the fatal news: ‘Same everywhere. The Ogallala has dropped so fast … these dry spells … the extra wells you fellows have put in.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘For the present, we can chase the water.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Deepen all your wells.’

  ‘How much deeper?’

  ‘The Red Bed, on which our part of the Ogallala rests, is two hundred feet down. The wells we dug for you back in 1968 go down only one hundred feet.’

  ‘What did they cost?’

  ‘Thirty-five hundred dollars per well.’

  ‘How many must I deepen?’

  ‘Twenty,’ and the estimates they placed before him showed that the cost of merely deepening an existing well was going to be more than twice the cost of one of the original five: ‘To do the digging, fifteen hundred dollars. To install the submersible pump, five thousand. To wire for electricity and protect the system, one thousand. Total per well, seventy-five hundred. Total cost per twenty wells, a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.’

  ‘Have I any alternative?’ Cobb asked, and the brothers agreed: ‘None.’ Then the younger added: ‘Each year the aquifer drops only slightly. But the rate of fall is steady,
and soon it’ll fall below your present pumps. But if we go down to Red Bed, you ought to be safe for the rest of this century.’

  The older brother summed it up: ‘Stands to reason, Cobb, you wouldn’t want to call us back to redig your wells two or three times, just to keep pace with the drop. Dig ’em once. Dig ’em right. Dig ’em deep.’ So Cobb chased the aquifer downward.

  Even those farms which used windmills to work their pumps, and many did, had to deepen their wells, but when the pipes were safely down, these farms had assured water, because the winds on the plains could be relied upon: ‘And sometimes they can be trusted to blow the whole mill flat as a freshly plowed field.’

  Weather in the Lubbock area was rugged, no doubt about it, with the blazing summers, the frigid winters and now and then a tornado to keep people attentive, but the challenges could be rewarding, and the warm social life of the area diverted attention from the hardships. The Cobbs were especially appreciative of the local university. Texas Technological College it had been called when they arrived, but with the hard practicality which governed so much of Texas life the legislature had listened to the complaint of a West Texas representative: ‘Hell, ever’body calls it Texas Tech, and that’s how those who love it name it. I propose that the name be officially changed to Texas Tech, and while we’re about it, let’s make it a full university.’

  So there it was, Texas Tech University, with a curriculum of agricultural, mechanical and modest liberal arts programs. Its students were sought after in the oil fields and in Silicon Valley, but what residents like the Cobbs especially appreciated were the cultural programs it sponsored: a string quartet now and then, a choral presentation of an opera—no sets, no costumes—or a series of three Shakespearean plays. Challenging lectures were available, with notable conservatives like William Buckley applauded, and farmers like the Cobbs could easily arrange casual meetings with the professors.

  But what gratified Nancy Cobb, and attracted her most often to the university, was the unequaled ranch museum it had put together: a collection of houses and buildings assembled from all over the state, showing how ranchers had lived in the various periods. Thirty minutes among these simple structures, with their rifle ports for holding off the Comanche, taught more of Texas history than a dozen books.

  One hot afternoon in 1981 when Nancy had taken a group of visitors from the North to see the open-air museum—it covered many acres—she was standing before one of the box-and-strip houses built by the 1910 pioneers and explaining how the settlers, deprived of any local timber, had imported it precariously from hundreds of miles to the east, and had then used it like strips of gold to shore up their mud-walled huts, and as she talked she began to choke: ‘It must have been so hellish for the women.’

  One symposium series gave the Cobbs a lot of trouble, for a lecturer predicted that the day would come, and possibly within this century, when the rising cost of electricity and the constant lowering of the water table would make agriculture on the Western plains uneconomic:

  ‘And I do not mean marginally uneconomic. I mean that you will have to close down your wells, abandon your cotton fields, and sell off your gins to California, where their farmers, because of sensible planning, will have water. We would then see towns like Levelland and Shallowater revert to the way they were when the Indians roamed, except that here and there the traveler would find the roots of houses which had once existed and the remnants of towns and villages.

  ‘We could avoid this catastrophe if all the states dependent upon the Ogallala Aquifer united in some vast plan to protect that resource, but all would have to obey the decisions, because any one state, following its own selfish rules and depleting the aquifer, could defeat the strategy.’

  Cobb, extremely sensitive to the problem of which he was a vital part, and interested in possible solutions, raised enough donations from local farmers and ranchers to offer Texas Tech funds for conducting a symposium on ‘Ogallala and the West,’ which attracted serious students from across Texas and representatives of the governments of all the Ogallala states.

  It was a gala affair, with Governor Clements giving the keynote address and with two lectures each morning and afternoon on the crises confronting the Western states. As the talks progressed, especially those informal ones late at night, several harsh and inescapable conclusions began to emerge:

  … The Ogallala was not inexhaustible, and at its present rate of depletion, might cease to function effectively sometime after the year 2010.

  … Diversion of rivers and especially the snow-melt from the eastern face of the Rockies could be let into it to revitalize it, but such water was already spoken for.

  … Strict apportionment at levels far below today’s usage would prolong its life.

  … State departments of agriculture were prepared to recommend more than a dozen ways in which farmers and ranchers could use less water.

  … Texas would soon see the day when it would be profitable to purchase from surrounding states like Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, and perhaps from those as far away as Colorado, entire rivers and streams whose water would be piped onto its thirsty fields. (Delegates from the named states hooted this proposal.)

  … Commercial desalinization of Gulf waters plus great pipelines west might well be the answer, if nuclear energy were to become available at low rates.

  … Every state, right now, must organize itself on a statewide basis to ensure the most prudent use of every drop of water that fell thereon.

  It was in the working out of this last recommendation, which the conference adopted unanimously, that Cobb learned how divisive a subject this was insofar as Texas water users were concerned, because when the Texas delegation met, these points were stressed by the more active participants:

  Ransom Rusk, Longhorn breeder: ‘Every word said makes sense. But what we must take steps to ensure is that cattle raisers be allowed to retain the water rights on which they’ve built their herds, often at great expense.’

  Lorenzo Quimper, operator of nine large ranches, some with serious water deficiencies: ‘Regulation and apportionment are inescapable, but we must protect the backbone industries of the state, and in them I include ranchin’. Cattle cannot live without water, and from time immemorial their rights have been predominant and must remain so, if Texas is to continue the traditions which made it great, and I must say, unique.’

  Charles Rampart, cotton grower, north of Lubbock: ‘You need only look at the level of the aquifer year by year to know that something must be done, but the prior rights of our wells in this agricultural area, and I drilled mine in the 1950s, they’ve got to be respected. All the wells in this region will have to be grandfathered. If they’re in, they stay in.’

  Sam Quiller, farmer, Xavier County: ‘The irrigation ditches that lead off the Brazos River to water my fields date back to 1818. Any court of law would support my claim that those rights, and in the amounts stated, are irreversible. Read Mottl v. Boyd and you’ll find you cannot impede the flow of the Brazos.’

  Tom and Fred Bartleson, fishermen, mouth of the Brazos: ‘Water must be regulated, we all know that. But I would ask you to keep in mind that Texas courts have said repeatedly and confirmed repeatedly that a constant flow from rivers like the Brazos must be maintained so that a proper salinity in the waters just offshore be protected. That’s where we catch our fish. Those are the waters our restaurants and supermarkets depend upon.’

  At the end of the conference it was pathetically clear that Nebraska, Colorado and all the other aquifer states would repel even the slightest attack upon their sovereignty, and that every user in Texas appreciated the need for others to conserve water so long as his inherited rights were not infringed. Almost every drop of water inland from the Gulf Coast had been spoken for, usually in the nineteenth century, and to reapportion it or even control it was going to be impossible. Since the Ogallala Aquifer was a resource which could not be seen, the general public had no incentive to protect it; the
Brazos and the Colorado and the Trinity were already allocated and could not be touched. Arkansas and Louisiana needed the water they had, and would repel with bayonets anyone who attempted to lead away even a trickle. So all that could be done was to continue exactly as things were, and then sometime in the decade starting in 2010, when disaster struck, take emergency measures.

  ‘No!’ Cobb cried when the insanity of this solution hit him. ‘What we should do right now is build a huge channel from the Mississippi into Wichita Falls, and pipelines from there to the various Texas regions.’ The idea was not fatuous, for millions of acre-feet of wasted water ran off each year past New Orleans, but when he seriously proposed such a ditch as a solution, experts pointed out: ‘Such a channel would have to run through Arkansas and Oklahoma, and that would not be permitted.’

  When Cobb checked the water level at the new pumps the Erickson brothers had installed, he found that it had fallen by an inch and a quarter, and it was then that he decided to seek nomination as a member of the Water Commission.

  • • •

  A second Texan to become personally aware of the big shifts under way lived at the opposite end of the state. Gabe Klinowitz, the real estate operator who had sponsored Todd Morrison when the latter drifted down from Detroit, was immensely informed concerning land values. His last big venture had been with a group of seven Mexican political figures to invest the massive funds they controlled.

  They had stunned him with the magnitude of what they wanted to do, but in obedience to their orders, he had quietly assembled the costly land and then watched as they spent $170,000,000 on The Ramparts, an interlocking series of the finest condominiums in Houston. Irritated by this brazen display of wealth by citizens of a nation which sent a constant stream of near-starving peasants into Texas for food and jobs, Gabe consulted with a University of Houston professor who specialized in Latin-American finances: ‘Tell me, Dr. Shagrin, how do these people get hold of so much money?’