Centennial (153 page)

I had had no experience with western juries and offered no opinion, so Garrett continued: “Operating a zoo without a license. He’d held his bears in cages for periods of more than thirty days.” He uttered a string of profanities, then added, “Now guess what his fine was. For killing four hundred and thirteen bald eagles, two hundred bears wired for sound and eighty-one of my turkeys ... a fine of fifty dollars.”

“Go back to your honeymoon,” I told him. Laughing, he hung up.

Late that afternoon he must have turned on his television, for when he returned to town he handed me a tape which he especially wanted me to hear:

When President Nixon started to speak to the newspaper editors I was much encouraged, and told Flor,
“
Great! Just what he ought to be doing. If he
’d
explained all this six months ago, we
’d
have had no Watergate.
”
But then I heard him say to the American public,
“
The people have to know whether their President is a crook. Well, I
’m
not a crook. I
’ve
earned everything I have got.
”
I felt sick. How undignified. How damned awful. I snapped off the television and sat with my head in my hands. My world seemed to be coming apart. Shortage of gasoline. Rampant inflation. Plants in Denver closing down for lack of raw materials. Spiro Agnew, a man I had trusted, kicked out because of his own misbehavior. And now my President proclaiming that he was not a crook.

I told Flor,
“
No man should ever find it necessary to make such a statement in public. It
’s
like a doctor assuring everyone in Centennial that he doesn
’t
give his patients strychnine. Who in hell said he did? A President of the United States buttonholing a bunch of editors and telling them,
‘
I
’m
not a crook.
’
Who said he was?
”
And Flor said,
“
You must admit he started the rumor.
”

Early Monday morning Paul and Flor drove back to Venneford, where Bradley Finch, one of America’s leading experts on water supply, waited to take Garrett to a meeting of the Water Board. It was to be held at a research station near the headwaters of the Cache la Poudre, and Garrett said, “I think Professor Vernor would be interested in seeing what we’re doing,” and Finch said, “Come along. Might as well start to worry now as later.”

When I asked him what this meant, he said, “Our citizens seem to be rather worried about gasoline rationing. That’ll be child’s play compared to what’s going to happen when we start rationing water.”

“Will it come to that?” I asked.

“It already has. When you see our analog model, you’ll understand.”

“What’s an analog model?” I asked.

“It’s easier to demonstrate than to explain.”

As we drove up the beautiful canyon of the Poudre, Finch told Garrett, “This is your first appearance as a member of the board, Paul, and it’s crucial. We’re looking to you for leadership. You’ve got to make some very tough decisions, and you mustn’t show yourself as wishy-washy.”

“You make it sound ominous,” Garrett said.

“It is.” As we parked the car before a low building hidden beneath tall evergreens, Finch concluded, “You and I will have to decide who shall live and who shall not live. It’s as serious as that.” Before he could say more, other members of the Water Board spied the new deputy and gathered to congratulate him.

“I don’t even understand the questions, let alone the answers,” Garrett protested.

“You will, by lunchtime,” Welch assured him.

We assembled in an austere room, one wall of which was painted white. Bradley Finch, as chairman of the board, said briefly, “Our technicians worked all last week to get a slide show ready for you, Garrett, and I think we’d better plunge right in.”

He darkened the room, and a young woman, who was introduced as Dr. Mary White from Cal Tech, said, “I’m to give the presentation, Mr. Garrett, and if you have any questions, press that buzzer at your desk.” Forthwith she unfolded the dramatic story of water, as it affected all the western states. Slide after slide developed the inevitable theme: population, agriculture and industry were all growing so fast that available supplies of water simply could not keep pace. States like Colorado, Arizona and Utah faced permanent drought conditions.

Garrett pushed his buzzer and the slides halted. “You keep mentioning the word
aquifer
. Define it for me.”

The lights went on, and Finch said, “Dr. Welch, I’ve heard you handle that question rather well. Care to take a crack?”

Dr. Welch went to a blackboard and drew a heavy, solid line from left to right. At one end he wrote “Rocky Mountains,” and at the other “Nebraska.” Beneath the line he wrote in bold letters “Platte River.” “This is us,” he said.

With red chalk he drew three dramatic lines leading away from the Platte. The first he labeled “Towns and Other Social Use.” The second he labeled “Agriculture.” The third was “Industry.” “These are the agencies which want our water, and right now they’re prepared, among them, to take away far more than we can provide.”

Finch, himself an engineer from M.I.T., interrupted. “That shows you rather well the basic problem, Garrett. The three outgoes already exceed the various inflows. Your job ... that is, the job of our committees ... well, we have to apportion our available water.”

“What’s the aquifer?” Garrett repeated.

Dr. Welch resumed. “The only inflow we have, really, is fourteen inches of precipitation on the plains out here. Pitifully small. Just barely enough to keep life going. And lots of snow up here in the mountains. It all winds up in the Platte ... or the Arkansas ... or one of our other rivers.

“Now, as the water comes down the river system, several things happen. Some of it we can see—like the Cache la Poudre outside this building. And some of that is diverted into dams and irrigation ditches. And some of the diversion seeps into the ground and creeps back into the Platte.”

“That sounds like one of Potato Brumbaugh’s theories,” Garrett said.

“But what even he failed to take into account,” Welch said, “was the water we can’t see. And having missed that, he missed exactly half the equation.”

Deftly he sketched in the various inflows into the great system: the snowfall, the rainfall, the dams, the ditches. Then, with a broad stroke of his chalk, he laid down two boundary lines about five miles north and south of the river, and with hasty, sweeping movements filled in the space between so that the river and its intricate relationships could no longer be seen.

“That’s your aquifer,” he said. “Underground and invisible. Four million years ago, when the Platte was being carved into the silt thrown down from the Rockies, there was this impermeable basement of shale and limestone. On it rested deposits of highly permeable gravel and sand, in some places two hundred feet thick, and as you can see, up to ten miles wide. For millions of years this catchment lay hidden, covered over by whatever topsoil came along. It now forms a lens whose interstices can be filled with water. It’s really a massive subterranean reservoir, and it acts as the balance for our entire Platte system.”

The lights were turned off, and various slides were flashed on the wall to indicate the operation of this mysterious phenomenon. As Garrett traced the intricate manner in which water seeped down into the aquifer and then escaped upward through springs and artesian wells and filtration—this constant coming and going of the water that sustained all life—he could not help thinking of old Potato Brumbaugh, who had lived his life sitting on top of the great reservoir without comprehending either its existence or its operation. He had plumbed all the secrets except the biggest.

“We must think of the aquifer as the permanent invisible counterpart of the visible river. Had we left it alone, it would have served us forever, but unfortunately, some years ago we began to sink wells into it, and now it’s in grave danger.”

Dr. White resumed her slides, showing how ranchers, like Paul Garrett, had sunk artesian wells into the aquifer and were drawing off millions of gallons of water that should have been left in the subterranean system.

“This invention,” she said, flashing onto the screen a photograph of an ingenious watering device, “has done more harm to the Platte River than anything else in history, for it has almost destroyed the aquifer.”

On the wall appeared the photograph of a flat, treeless, open range. In the middle stood a steel tower resting on self-propelled wheels. To it came electricity and water, and it moved ceaselessly in a circle, throwing a fine spray of moisture from a set of nozzles on top. Twenty-four hours a day this tower could revolve, watering an immense area.

That was not all. Eight to thirteen such towers could be linked together, side by side, each with its own motor, each moving around the circle at the appropriate speed. The combined towers thus formed a vast arm reaching out a quarter of a mile and irrigating an area containing one hundred and twenty-five acres. These were the fairy circles that I had seen on my first tour in Garrett’s plane.

The lights went on, and Finch said, “So that’s our aquifer. And it’s in peril. Not only are present demands on it depleting, future demands threaten to exhaust it. Detlev Schneider has some news on that front.”

Schneider, trained in demography at Oxford, was a robust man with an effusive sense of humor, and as he spoke, Garrett reflected on one of the most reassuring aspects of Colorado; it enlisted help from the best sources in the world: Oxford, Cal Tech, M.I.T, Harvard, Stanford.

“We face a real dilly,” Schneider was saying. “Because Colorado is such a popular state, fifty thousand newcomers want to move in each year. We’d like to welcome them, but we haven’t enough water. And within the state itself, twenty thousand of our rural people a year want to move into Denver. Love to have them, but no water. We also have scores of industries that want to establish their headquarters here. Executives want instant skiing, and we need their tax dollars. But we simply don’t have the water.”

Harry Welch interrupted to say that the Colorado legislature had been handed a bill denying permission to anyone from outside the state to move into Colorado. “We’ll set up checkpoints at the borders and turn them back,” he said.

“Completely unconstitutional,” Schneider retorted. “Any American citizen can move anywhere he likes.”

“But not into Colorado,” Finch said. “The analog model takes care of that.”

In a small room at the rear of the building stood a pegboard forty feet long by five feet high, simulating in minute detail all aspects of the Platte system. The river was represented by a heavy copper wire, to which came smaller wires for the contributory streams. Soldered to these were thousands of electrical resistors of varying strength, duplicating the water-bearing properties of the region. Just as rocks impeded the flow of water through the aquifer, resistors impeded the flow of electricity through the model.

At each junction of four resistors a capacitor was attached, storing electricity the way porous rocks and dams stored water. With everything operating, this complex electrical system reproduced every attribute of the river and the aquifer, and any flow of water that came into the real system was reflected in the model.

“But what about the outflow?” Garrett asked, and Schneider explained, “You see these small light bulbs scattered about the plan? And these little resistors? They draw off electricity in the same way that irrigation ditches and wells withdraw water.”

As Garrett inspected the model, Finch said, “It shows you the Platte as it is today. But it can also show you what will happen five years from now if we continue to increase the demand for water. Let’s see what Harry Welch was warning us about with his red outgoes.”

The electrical input, representing precipitation, was kept constant, but a large light bulb representing increased demand by communities of new people was turned on. “Watch the oscilloscope,” Finch said.

There, on a screen placed to one side of the model, were graphically shown the effects of the new demand: a shadow-line which had been depicting the even flow of the river dropped dramatically toward the bottom of the screen, forming a deep cone of depression. “It proves what we predicted,” Finch said. “Look downstream. Real shortages down there, but we still have a river.”

Schneider said, “But now let’s increase the demand for industry too,” and he turned on various bulbs. The line on the oscilloscope dropped ominously toward the bottom of the screen.

“At this point agriculture is hurting like hell,” Finch said.

“Now let’s crank in five years of drought,” Schneider said, “such as we’ve often had.”

Instead of adding new bulbs to simulate increased demand, current was diminished in the mountains, indicating low snowfall, and other current was stopped to show decline in rainfall. The oscilloscope line vanished; the Platte no longer flowed.

The model was turned off. “There you have it,” Finch said. “If we encourage the population of Colorado to increase, and invite more industry, and continue to deplete the aquifer with agricultural pumps, we shall destroy the state. Your job, Garrett, is to see that this doesn’t happen.”

“Do we still have options?” Garrett asked.