The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (32 page)

“It’s going to be the next big environmental disaster,” Alice said. The resulting cancers and other health harms, she believed, were already catastrophic.

Like Stan, Alice and her husband grew organic wheat. The first year they harvested it and got eighteen dollars a bushel, three times the price of conventional wheat at the time, they paid off debts they’d been carrying for more than twenty years. But she’d been warned at a recent meeting of organic growers that China was beginning to export organic wheat and other cereal grains to the United States. Stan also warned that if everyone grew organic crops, the price would come down. But most important, he, Alice, and other farmers like them are proving that grain grown without chemicals can match yields in their neighbors’ conventional fields. Alice suggested that flour milled from U.S. grain should be labeled that way, so that consumers could make a choice. A lot, Alice pointed out, is up to consumers—make that people, us. The more we demand healthy food, the more of it farmers will grow.

I could see that Stan, Chris, Alice, and others like them were making inroads. The changes might not look like much yet, but this type of talking and thinking and doing had never happened before, not in my Kansas. All farming used to be organic, but that was before
farmers had any choice. When they chose to go with groundwater pumping and chemicals, they thought of the changes as progress. Now a few people were finally questioning that approach. If there were a few, there would be more.

That morning at breakfast, I’d overheard two older men talking in the restaurant. They sat alone at a table for ten. One of them, glancing at the door every so often, wondered out loud why the usual Sunday-morning crowd hadn’t shown up yet. They’d run out of things to talk about. The other one said, “It sure got awful boring yesterday. Inside all day and nothing to do. And nothing good on TV.” He followed this with an attempt at a laugh.

I’d seen plenty of people in Goodland who look bored with their lives. But Alice spoke about how, during her years as a school nurse in Atwood, she always loved her involvement with kids because she got to share her life philosophy with them and she didn’t have to give them grades. “I told them to look for something to do that inspires you. I told them what that word means. The root means breath or spirit. Choose something that fills your spirit.” She said she didn’t have time for TV, and I suspected that even when she got old, she would be too active to spare time for it. I hope to be like that too.

Alice pointed out some wild turkeys on the front lawn. I turned to look. Their feathers were copper, black, and tan, with white bars on the wings. “They are beautiful.”

“They are,” Alice said. “So many colors.”

They were also comical, she pointed out. Red wattles dangled from their long, naked necks, and they stopped after each step to gawk in all directions, open beaked. Looking at them, I noticed that the sky was getting grayer and the wind had picked up.

Quickly, Alice gave me a tour of her agroponics project, contained in a brand-new building with a cutting-edge heating system under the floor and special insulating wall panels and blue-plastic tanks for the tilapia and other bigger tanks for the lettuce that she would grow in water enriched by effluent from the fish. Dashing upwind, we entered a shed where she’d already started her broccoli and cauliflower plants
and where she grew microgreens in trays and oat grass so that her chickens always had fresh greens in their diet. Wow! I thought. She grows greens for her chickens. We raced past the Dutch Belted milk cow that she’d driven to Wisconsin to pick up and which delivered seven gallons of milk each summer day, and the two sweet and friendly hogs, also an obscure heritage breed. She pointed at the coops where her chickens were spending their day—too cold out for anything but hunkering down.

With the wind sweeping me toward my pickup, and Alice toward the shelter of her house, she shouted that it had been the Laura Ingalls Wilder books that had first inspired her, as a child. “They used
everything.
They relied on themselves. Nothing went to waste. I mean
nothing
.”

That had been Mom’s philosophy too. All of us plains kids were raised that way.

3

I
TURNED RIGHT INSTEAD OF LEFT OUT OF
A
LICE’S DRIVE, ALTHOUGH LEFT WOULD HAVE BEEN THE SANER CHOICE.
If I die out here today, I’ll deserve to, I thought. What plainsperson didn’t know the dangers presented by a blizzard on any road, let alone one that would be abandoned by everyone else on a day like this? I could end up in a ditch with engine damage and no way to run the heater and wouldn’t be discovered until morning, when some rancher came along to check on his cattle.

But I wanted to follow the water home. Chris had a mission. So did Darryl, his mentor. So did Alice. The Ogallala was mine. I wanted to, needed to, see it. It was the same thing I’d been doing in 2001, when I’d found my first spring on the Little Beaver and met Ward.

I thought the creek would be running low, if at all, but the ponds at Alice’s place had been full. I’d never seen them in late winter, I reflected, when the ground began to thaw. Perhaps they normally overflowed this time of year.

Because drought had returned, and it was bad, more than half the counties in the United States had been designated natural disaster areas in 2012. Among them, Sherman County had only 9.59 inches of precipitation, the third driest year since 1895, when records were first kept. Less than ten inches defines a place as desert. Sherman’s dryland wheat yields had been good despite the drought because wheat can survive on stored ground moisture. But all of that had been used up now. The winter wheat farmers had planted in September had failed to grow. They expected little if any crop this year.

Irrigation farmers make up for low rainfall by pumping more. In Texas, aquifer levels had dropped more last year than in the previous twenty-five. In southwest Kansas, levels had dropped more than four feet the year before last and three feet last year. In our district, 2012 declines had exceeded two feet. As if drought stressing the aquifer were not enough, the number of corn acres in the nation had expanded almost 20 percent since the ethanol boom had begun. Of the corn crop, 40 percent was now going into ethanol, spurred on by a government mandate requiring that fifteen billion gallons of it be mixed with the nation’s gasoline by 2015.

Ethanol is not an efficient replacement for gasoline. Cars don’t go as far on gas mixed with it as they do on gas alone; almost as much fossil fuel is required to make ethanol as it is supposed to replace; and at a time when drought is driving down yields on food crops, growing corn for fuel robs even more mouths of food than even growing corn for cows does. At least some lucky people get to eat the cows.

Hardly anyone thinks the ethanol policy is a good idea anymore—other than segments of the ag and ethanol industries, and all corn farmers supposedly. But I’d talked to many farmers who knew they had to stop using so much water.

Just that morning over breakfast a farmer told me that in some parts of the county, irrigation was already in trouble. “At the end of the season, they have to change the nozzles on their sprinklers just to get the water to go all the way out to the ends of ’em.” He knew people
who lived near Stan, the organic farmer I’d interviewed, whose house water pressure went down when the well engines were running.

Stan hadn’t mentioned this. But even though he does irrigate some of his crops, he said, “I know we need to do something about the water. We’re using too much of it, and it’s going to be gone.” The Smoky Hill River, which used to run through his place, once had ponds in it large enough for his father to swim in when he was a kid, but now it was completely dry on his farm. I told him I’d been appalled when Ward and I visited the Sherman State Fishing Lake and discovered it was empty. Stan said that as teenagers, he and his brother had waded into that lake as it was going down in order to rescue as many channel catfish as they could. They’d moved them into the ponds all the irrigation farmers had back then to catch the runoff from their irrigated fields—like the one I’d tried to swim in back in the eighties.

Meanwhile, nearby cities are also running out of water. Within fifty years, the Bureau of Reclamation predicts that demands on the Colorado River, which brings water not only to southwestern cities but also to Colorado’s Front Range, will exceed supply by 3.2 to 8.0 million acre feet.

“Don’t think Denver doesn’t have an eye on our water,” said my father’s old friend when I’d met with him and his wife years before, in my mother’s living room. “The legislators in the cities want water for their people. They ain’t gonna much worry about us out here gettin’ a little water or not. They’re gonna try to tie up all the water they can.”

The Ogallala Aquifer is a mastodon in the room, being driven to extinction on the plains east of Denver. It isn’t talked about much in public because farmers have senior rights to the water. But a question begs to be asked, and it will be very soon: Why are a few thousand plains farmers allowed to pump nineteen million acre feet out of the aquifer each year? That is more than half again as much as the annual flow of the Colorado River, which brings water to thirty million people.

When I told the farmer over breakfast what I’d discovered in my research, with special emphasis on that one statistic that never failed
to shock people—nineteen million acre feet out of the aquifer each year, more than half again as much water as flows down the Colorado River in that same amount of time—he said, “It’s not going to stop until ethanol stops.”

“And the Farm Program subsidies for irrigated crops,” I said.

“Those too,” he concurred.

But no large environmental organization is fighting this fight. Maybe because you can’t see the aquifer, and it’s in a low-density population area where to call someone an environmentalist is an insult. A Republican governor did recently get the law changed in Kansas. You don’t have to “use or lose” your water rights anymore, and Kansas now requires flow meters on all irrigation wells.

In Texas, the High Plains Water District passed a fifty-fifty rule mandating reductions meant to ensure that at least 50 percent of what the aquifer held in 2010 will still be available for irrigation in 2060. But as myopic as that rule is—what about enough water to
live on
in 2060 and beyond?—enforcement of it will be hampered by irrigators’ resistance. And large parts of that North Texas district, like many other pockets throughout the Plains, have already run out of water.

Water-quality issues are also beginning to proliferate. In a 2009 study, 14 percent of Ogallala wells tested by the U.S. Geological Survey contained one or more pesticide. Most common was atrazine. This weed killer has been used on cornfields everywhere over the years even though it is a known endocrine disrupter, suspected of interfering with the human reproductive system and of retarding fetal development. In 5 percent of the wells, nitrate levels either equaled or exceeded EPA safety standards. High concentrations of nitrates in infants’ drinking water deprive their blood of oxygen, causing a condition known as blue-baby syndrome, a serious threat to lifelong health and fatal if left untreated. During the coming decades, contaminant levels will continue creeping down into the Ogallala and up the charts as more wells exceed levels safe for human consumption.

Most of the focus, however, has been on declines. “The water-level decline of the Ogallala Aquifer is the largest single water-management
concern in the U.S.,” says Mario Sophocleous, a senior Kansas Geological Survey scientist and one of the leading experts on the aquifer. The nation depends on the aquifer for 30 percent of its irrigated crops. As that water vanishes, farmers will suffer, but so will everyone else. Food prices will escalate. The economy will be forced to absorb the inflationary costs at the same time that grain exports diminish.

But the economy will be the least of our problems if we continue to waste water at this rate. At current usage levels, and if efficiency gains are not made, world water demands are likely to exceed supplies by 40 percent within twenty years. This conclusion was reached not by an environmental organization, but in a study funded by the World Bank and by companies such as Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Syngenta AG. There is really no polite way to put it: Now is not the time to be pissing away the nation’s largest aquifer.

•   •   •

S
O
I
HAD PLENTY OF THINGS TO
be bummed about concerning the Ogallala, and I was duly bummed. But I had also been talking with people who were passionate about topics that I’d seldom heard discussed in Kansas. My relationships here were expanding just when I thought they were over forever. Those relationships weren’t only with people.

As I continued my drive through the Beaver Valley, my pickup kept veering toward the ditch, my wheels catching in the gravel just as Dad’s used to do when he got absorbed by neighbors’ crops. What I got absorbed by was the beauty in the rare places that remained like this, where there were no crops. To my eye, the buffalo grass on the hills was beautiful even in the winter, although it was more like a carpet than grass this year. There hadn’t been much growth due to the drought, but the subtle and surprising colors were as enchanting as ever.

During my lifetime, I’ve tried to duplicate the plains palette when painting the walls of houses I’ve lived in. But no sky-blue ever looked like real sky, and no pale green ever came close to evoking a buffalo grass pasture. Although predominantly grayish-brown with only a hint of green this late in the winter, the grass also had patches of salmon,
and even strips of neon yellow. No single or solid color anywhere—everything complex, everything variegated, like the human eye and human consciousness. That is why coming upon a patch of wild prairie affirms me so much. Wild life recognizes wild life. All life is wild at its center. We need the natural world to know ourselves.

The sky was low for a change, and droplets were beginning to splatter my windshield. I was in a race with the storm and knew I should turn south toward the interstate and the safety of Goodland, but there was a lot of water in the Beaver, way more than I expected. I had to keep stopping to roll my window down and breathe the cold, moist air and gaze at the marshes—large pools of water shimmering silver-black, surrounded by tall, russet valley grasses. In the middle of one large pond paddled a black and white duck. I vowed to look it up on the Internet when I got back to the little guesthouse where I was staying.

The Ogallala was all right today, there in that meadow. Seeing it that way, I felt as I had when Mom was in the nursing home and I would go in and find her bright and chipper and having a good day. The nearer she drew to the end, the more it meant to see her and be in her presence. Being in that relationship wasn’t a choice. We simply were in a relationship. It meant helping her fight for her life, advocating with the doctors, making sure she was getting the physical therapy and medicines she needed, and sleeping on the floor by her bed when the nurse began administering morphine.

Same with the aquifer. I’d been on this Ogallala road since birth, just as I’d been on the road with my mother since birth. I’d grown up slaking my thirst with Ogallala water and bathing in it. I’d gotten much of my financial support from Ogallala crops. And ever since I was a young woman and had knocked open the pipe gates myself, I’d been thinking Ogallala thoughts. Like my mother, the Ogallala had sacrificed a lot on my behalf. I wasn’t going to get off that road anytime soon, and I didn’t want to.

Even if it did mean abandoning it in the here and now so I could get back to Goodland alive. I didn’t even reach Sherman County before I had to give up. The sky was closing in, not only visually, but palpably.
The water in the corners of my windshield had turned to ice. I got to town just as the storm hit, and the blinding force and fury of it caused me to shake my head at my bottomless imprudence when in nature’s thrall and my infinite good luck.

I watched the storm from the window of a pleasant little cottage belonging to a new Goodland friend. I first stayed there when I gave a book talk at the Goodland library a couple of years before. In thanking the woman, I confided that I had feared what it would be like to stay in a motel in my own hometown. “You will never have to stay in a motel here,” she’d told me. “Our guesthouse will be your home away from home.”