The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

by Bair, Julene

  “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.

  • • •

  AFTER IDLING DOWN MAIN 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.

  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

  HAVING 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 st
ars 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?