by Bair, Julene
“That bad?” Ward said. “You’d think they’d need permission to publish stats from a private well.”
Of course he would think that, but this wasn’t the moment to begin a property-rights debate. What I’d seen on the Web had sickened me and I wanted his sympathy. I said, “Our well went down fifteen feet just since 1980, and some nearby wells went down thirty.”
He said, “It isn’t right, is it?”
“Thank you for seeing that.”
“Everybody who’s irrigating is probably showing big declines.”
“Apparently not. When I called the director to set up the interview, he said it would be a mistake to conclude that things were bad everywhere just based on a few wells. His numbers in the newsletter show only seven feet of average decline since 1980.” I had then called a Kansas Geological Survey scientist, who said the district probably got its modest estimate by averaging in wells from low-lying, alluvial areas. To show Ward what the scientist meant, I held up my hand and wiggled my fingers, to indicate the streams.
Ward took hold of my thumb. “This’d be the Smoky.”
“Right.”
“And this would be the Sappa.”
“Yep.”
He skipped my forefinger, which would have been the Middle Beaver, and grabbed my ring finger. “And this would be your creek, the Little Beaver.” He slid his grasp to the base of my finger and squeezed. That sensation would tantalize me for weeks to come. Had he been imagining placing a ring there? I fantasized the ceremony we would have, in the little white church in Plum Springs. I saw myself in a simple, loose-fitting satin dress the color of Wyoming lake water. His buddies would marvel that a woman had finally managed to land him, while my Laramie friends would congregate in the old hotel. It would be the greatest clash of cultures to hit Plum Springs since the Cheyenne ambushed pioneers on the Smoky Hill Trail. Maybe Jonas would catch the bouquet.
Ward let go of my finger and I dropped my hand onto my stomach. I said, “The soil in the eastern creek valleys is sandy, so rain filters down to the aquifer faster. But that recharge will never flow uphill and west into the rest of the aquifer. I’m really not looking forward to confronting the director about this.”
“Don’t worry,” Ward said. “He probably deals with those types of questions all the time. You’ll be no more trouble to him than a gnat on a bull’s back.”
I contemplated that for a minute. “I kind of hope you’re right, and I kind of hope you’re not.”
There’d been a picture of our well on the Web too, with the pump in the distance and the edge of Wilbur’s Quonset and just the tail end of an old pickup that belonged to my father’s sister Bernice, the only one of my parents’ siblings who still owned her land. She lived in Colorado and stored her equipment with us.
The place looked barren in the winter photo, the weeds around the big engine brown. But in my girlhood, Wilbur’s wife, Vernita, had kept a lush yard full of vegetables and flowers. Following the calendar in The Farmer’s Almanac, she’d planted by the moon, a practice that my scientifically minded father pooh-poohed, but he admitted he couldn’t argue with the plumpness of her tomatoes and strawberries.
Vernita wore pretty print dresses, and her skin gave off the scent of bottled flowers, while Wilbur was one of those farmers for whom overalls had been invented. A big round belly, hangdog features, a rustic sense of humor. The exact opposite of his brother, my father, he’d put jokes before farming, right after playing the guitar.
A decade or so after my family acquired Wilbur and Vernita’s farm, the house became the sleeping quarters for Mexicans Dad hired to hoe weeds from the sugar beets he was growing then. They had a mishap with the gas heater, and the house burned down. No one was hurt, but after the fire, only the Quonset and a small grove of fruit trees gave testament to my aunt and uncle’s past there.
“Vernita was Wilbur’s second wife,” I told Ward. “Dad said that his first wife had a violent temper. When I drove tractors in that field, I’d see pieces of china scattered here and there and imagine Wilbur dodging plates.”
“That’d be me,” Ward said, “if I’d married that first girl I was engaged to. Dodging plates.”
First girl? I took this as proof. He had been imagining slipping a ring on my finger. We lay silently for a minute. “Ward?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“It was shocking seeing our well on the Web. But they have every right to measure that water and publish the findings. You can’t really own water, or land, for that matter.” I knew this would sound radical to Ward, and maybe that’s why I’d said it. Let’s have it out.
“I’ll give you this, sweetheart. You always have a unique take on things.”
I suspected this was not going to be as easy as convincing him that Jonas could be both happy and queer.
“You know what I think,” Ward said. “This country was founded on the right to own property.”
“Okay, but we don’t have the right to destroy it.”
“No, now. We have the right to do whatever we please. That’s what owning means.”
Ward had rearranged his pillow, and we were sitting up in bed. No, now? What made him think he could take that tone with me? “Some of the water we’re draining today is recharge from ten thousand years ago, Ward. The notion that it could belong to us is pure hubris.” For some reason I forgot to mention that having deeds to our land didn’t mean we also owned the water. We had rights to it, but the state could reduce or rescind them.
“Hubris?” Ward said. “Now there’s a writer’s word.”
“I mean arrogant disregard for things greater than us.”
Ward play-kicked me on the side of my leg. “I know what the word means. I agree the water shouldn’t be wasted. But the government can’t just tell property owners what to do either. That would be communism.”
“Oh right! That’s what I am. A communist.”
“I’m not calling you a communist, only pointing out that private property is the cornerstone of democracy. Don’t think I haven’t thought about this issue a lot.”
“And I haven’t? Who says you need capitalism to have democracy? They’re apples and oranges. One’s an economic system. The other is political.”
“So you are a communist.”
It was as if he’d struck an artesian well. I squirmed down in the bed, pulled the sheet over my head, and to distract him from the emotions I was really having, groaned and pounded my feet. Meanwhile I wiped my eyes with the sheet.
Ward laughed and squeezed my shoulder. “You know I was just joking, right?”
I didn’t respond, couldn’t yet. He tapped my head. “Hello?” Slowly, with one finger, he pulled the sheet off my face. He kissed my ear, my nose, my chin—a little striptease of conciliation, the bristles of his mustache tickling my neck now. “I want you.”
I was defenseless whenever he said that, his voice a low rumble, like thunder. I ran my finger along the inside of his bicep, silken from armpit to elbow.
• • •
AFTER MAKING LOVE, WE WERE CONJOINED IN spirit, the tension gone, we settled into our favorite sleeping posture, cupped together, my back to his front. We’d turned the blanket down to the foot of the bed. That’s how unseasonably warm it was.
Something skidded across the concrete stoop outside and banged into the fence. A horse whinnied in the corrals. I hoped the wind wouldn’t break the stalks of the orphan irises in the front yard. These vestiges of his aunt’s garden were almost due to bloom, a month early. Afterward, I planned to dig them up for him, then divide and replant them as my mother had done. I shouldn’t bother with his poor excuse of a yard, he’d said. It was all right, I told him. I wanted to. Although I knew such actions conveyed conflicting intentions. It was beginning to seem likely that he would, indeed, move to Laramie. He’d asked me to check into land prices near town. He would need
a place to pasture his horses.
“The wind blew and the shit flew and I couldn’t see for a day or two,” Ward recited.
I chuckled. “Uncle Wilbur used to say that!”
“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
THE 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.
