The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (22 page)

We began hearing tiny splashing sounds.
Plip. Plip-plip.
Out of the corner of one eye, I noticed something streak through the air. Tiny frogs were leaping into the pond. The frogs stampeded like grasshoppers in dry weeds as we walked the shoreline. Finally, we spotted
a shell protruding from one of the deep hoof prints cows had made in the mud.

The turtle was doing his best to be invisible, but I lifted him out and peered at his retracted beak. He kept his eyes closed in what must have been abject terror and held every protuberance in as tightly as he could, but his withdrawal had limits. I tested the claws on his yellow-speckled toes, and Ward lifted and let spring back the little pointed tail he kept curled against himself. His shell, which was darkest river green, camouflaged him. I turned him over. The smooth shields over his stomach were outlined in fire orange, dramatically brilliant in his habitat of mud and dark water. Within the outlines, brown, odd-shaped splotches evoked a series of symmetrically positioned lakes, no two shaped alike. I fancied they constituted a prehistoric map of the region when it had been wetter.

Back in the car we consulted my map and discovered that one of the Smoky’s tributaries was actually called Turtle. The possibility that this was the same creek enchanted me. But we decided the pond was on Lake Creek. On one of my forays in the Goodland library, I’d run across an old newspaper story about a cowhand who’d drowned in Lake Creek in 1905. It was hard to imagine the pond ever being large enough or enticing enough to swim in. Then had come, as the owner of the ranch we’d visited on the Middle Beaver had put it, “groundwater pumping and what all.” In a few more years the pond might be gone entirely. Where would the turtles go then?

•   •   •

W
HENEVER
I
PULLED INTO
W
ARD’S YARD AT
night, after driving those three hundred miles from Laramie, I would glance up at his curtainless kitchen window. There waited my love, freshly shaved and showered, his arms crossed as he leaned against the counter, smiling. That he could exist so independently, that his life went on when I was away, fascinated and tantalized me. I was seeing a male version of myself in a happy context of yellow incandescence and the knowledge that family and friends populated the darkness beyond. He claimed that he needed
a change, that he wanted to get off his duff, that moving to Laramie would allow him to make more of himself, but I doubted he really believed that. For him, the pond wasn’t shrinking. It had stayed the same.

4

P
LANNED DEPLETION.”
That’s what the state’s Ogallala Aquifer policy amounted to. I’d heard water bureaucrats cite the concept in talks, with no apparent shame. As if there were a plan, all very orderly and nothing to be concerned about. As if using up the life-giving waters of an aquifer underlying parts of eight large states could be considered sane. On the Internet, I discovered a list of observation wells, a sampling from irrigated farms that hydrologists measured annually. I plugged the township and range number of our farm into the search box and felt both excited and apprehensive when I got dozens of hits. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see, in black and white, the damage that was being done to the aquifer so near to us. Going down the list, I happened onto a legal description, 07S-41W-07, that looked uncomfortably familiar.

I’d recorded those numbers and letters many times when I’d been a zealous future farmer, on maps I’d made of our farm in order to keep records of crop rotations, field operations, and chemical applications. These legals also appeared each year on the water reports I filed. Our best irrigation well was located on Section 7, Range 41 West, Township 7. We pumped it at one thousand gallons per minute, twenty-four hours per day every July and August, to water our corn and soybeans.

The damage was not conveyed so much in black print as in a solid blue line that lurched downward across a graph. The depth to water had been 180 feet when the well was dug, in 1949, the year I was born. This made it seem as if my life and that particular water were directly linked, although the place had belonged to my uncle Wilbur and aunt
Vernita then. It was their farm my parents had traded the Carlson place for in the sixties. Then Dad had the well rebored for irrigation. The depth to water was now 210 feet. Bedrock, or the bottom of the well, lay at 300 feet. In less than four decades, we’d pumped a quarter of the water from beneath that ground.

I knew I would never single-handedly put an end to irrigation, as Bruce liked to joke, but I could at least try to do my part. To write more informed articles, I would need to interview the director of our water district. He was nationally known for his zero depletion plan, the most ambitious effort ever proposed to conserve the Ogallala. I’d first read about the plan in the early nineties, in
National Geographic
,
but could
find no references to it in current policy news. I wanted to know what had happened to zero depletion and what, if anything, had taken its place.

Despite my experiences elsewhere, I still had a rural Kansan’s unease when it came to confronting power. My father never “stuck his nose in where it didn’t belong” or acted “like a big shot.” He let men like our water district director run things while he kept his head down and his nose clean. But after seeing our well on the Web, I couldn’t put off calling the director any longer. Because Big Daddy hadn’t stepped in and stopped irrigation as my father had thought he would. And this man represented Big Daddy.

And now I didn’t have my daddy to blame anymore. He’d died, leaving Bruce, Mom, and me holding the deeds and owning the invasive practices that made the land pay.

•   •   •

I
SPENT THE NIGHT BEFORE THE INTERVIEW
at Ward’s house. Whenever my eyes closed for one of his deep kisses, the graph etched itself onto the darkness above the bed.

“You thinking about Jake?” Ward asked.

“No. For once.” Although many memories of that well did include Jake. During the summers I worked for my father, I would stop to check the oil in the engine on my way to change the sets. Hearing its roar,
Jake would writhe and kick in his car seat and his face would redden with fear. When I reached into the heat and noise and pressed the chrome button turning the engine off, relief would settle over us both. In the renewed quiet, we would hear birds singing in the old farmstead’s trees.

The candle that Ward’s sister-in-law had given me for Christmas flickered as, outside, a dry spring wind churned in the budding cottonwoods, causing them to scrape the shingles. I told Ward about the graph. “It looked like a stock-market chart from 1929.”

“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.

•   •   •

A
FTER 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!”