Dead Dry

by Sarah Andrews

  I noticed that Ray had turned very pale.

  I said, “This isn’t really about me, is it?”

  Ray could not find his voice.

  “Your wife’s been dead how long?”

  He stared now at the ground. “Five years.”

  “That’s rough,” I said.

  He raised his indigo blue eyes to the mountains, where the last glow of daylight played along the peaks.

  I poked him in the ribs. “Some days I think I liked you better before you learned to talk.”

  He lifted his head. “And other days?”

  “I like the new, more communicative Ray.”

  He nodded, then put a hand on my shoulder in a tender sort of way and walked with me back to his car.

  FIFTEEN

  NEWS OF AFTON McWAIN’S DEATH WAS NOT ONLY IN the newspapers Sunday morning, it was out on the grapevine.

  As the outside temperatures in Salt Lake City again rose to the wilting point, a couple of old friends from the oil patch started phoning to reminisce about our departed colleague and to fish for grisly details. We talked about his former life as a hard-driven petroleum geologist who made buckets of money with big strikes in the D-J Basin and mused over his sudden departure into parts unknown. The caller who barely knew Afton eventually sidled up to the matter of the setting in which his corpse had been found, wondering askance if I could offer any juicy tidbits. The one who knew him well asked more directly, trying to deal with a sense of shock.

  I told them that I couldn’t say much about the circumstances of Afton’s death—apart from truly not knowing much about its causation, it was incumbent on me, I explained, to keep what we could of the mechanics of his demise out of the pool of general knowledge, so that anyone who did have such knowledge would be easily identified as his killer. I indulged in a little dramatic flair in delivering that last, suitably horrifying word.

  “That’s how it’s done on the cop shows,” the first caller said. “So hey, are those things accurate or what?”

  I said, “In my experience cops aren’t usually as glamorous as you see on TV, and they don’t go waving their pistols in bad guys’ faces if they can possibly help it. That’s a good way to get your gun turned on yourself. And cops are trained to aim a gun only on the way to using it.”

  “Cool.”

  “I suppose so. But just like us geologists, police detectives deal with incomplete data. So just like us, they often have no idea who did what and why. But on TV, every crime is solved within sixty minutes or less with three breaks for commercials.”

  “Emmy …”

  Michele phoned at ten. “Have you had any additional thoughts about any of the evidence?” she inquired.

  I told her what I had learned in Snowbird, then asked, “How badly does it hurt the case that everybody now knows that the body was found mashed flat by a gravel slide in a quarry?”

  “That doesn’t help the process.” She didn’t sound happy about it. Not at all.

  Carlos phoned at eleven with the forensic geology referral he had promised. The contact’s name was Tim Osner.

  I remembered Tim vaguely from my Denver days. He had worked for one of the mid-sized oil companies for a while, and now was teaching part-time at a couple of different schools, eking out a living as geologists so often find themselves doing. It’s always the same story. People want oil? We’ll find oil until it gluts the market and people think they don’t need us anymore. Folks got ground-water contamination to clean up or landfills to be built to ensure that additional ground water isn’t fouled? We’ll all jump on that until that’s done, and folks think they’re done spilling things, and again we’re out of a job. Humankind wants to be safe from earthquakes? We’ll map the fault lines and advise legislatures until public policy is enough improved that everyone forgets what we did for them lately and … yeah, same story, we fall prey to the next budget cut. Folks don’t comprehend how long it takes to build such knowledge, and how quickly it can be lost.

  I wrote down Tim’s number so I could phone him from my office.

  By noon, it was almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit out. I was dripping with sweat again and more than ready to escape up the canyon to cooler elevations and the ground-water conference. I arrived at one, put on my complimentary name badge, and slithered into the gathering of ground-water geologists, hoping to look and smell like a sheep rather than a wolf.

  I immediately ran into someone I knew. It’s a small world for geologists, a prime example of my first theorem, which is that regardless of how many billions of people there are in the world, only one hundred thousand of them get around, and ten thousand of those are geologists. The person I bumped into was George Hadley, another old Denver oil patch survivor who, like Julia, had retrofitted his knowledge to serve the issues of ground water.

  “Hey, Emmy,” he said, as he sidled over with his free cup of coffee and mashed a hug on me. “What’s the haps?”

  “Oh, not much, Georgie boy. Just slummin’. Seein’ what you H2O freaks are up to.”

  “It’s all just getting juice out of the rocks, Emmy.” He showed me a little smile and took a swig of his coffee. “My God, this stuff’s foul. So you getting rich, or what?”

  “Not me, boss. Just keeping out of trouble as best I can. So I hear where Afton McWain’s one of the keynote speakers at the plenary session. Wow.” I phrased it such that if he had heard that Afton was dead, it would sound like I was speaking about him in the past tense, and if not he could say whatever occurred to him. It was just possible that the Coloradoans attending the conference had been in transit when the news broke, and would not yet know. News of the corpse in the quarry had already washed through the Salt Lake newspapers, and the Denver papers would be waiting on their doorsteps back home. And certainly neither Gilda nor Julia would have informed the conference of his death.

  “McWain. Oh yeah, McWain. Folks are asking where the fuck he was, like they expected to see him here last night or something.” George’s face creased with a pompous display of mock concern. “I even heard a rumor that someone bumped him off. I wouldn’t be surprised. He’s been such a flake lately.”

  “Why, what’s up?”

  “Afton’s gone and got hisself in a bit of a bramble down in Douglas County.”

  “How so?”

  “Stay tuned. I mean, do stay tuned. He’s gonna deliver one corker of a talk here today, even by his standards. Or that’s the scuttlebutt.”

  “Really.”

  “Yeah. He’s been working on that Denver Basin stuff. Hell, we’ve all been working the Denver Basin. It’s the hot topic, but he’s gonna blow it all out in the open.”

  “Wow. What Denver Basin stuff?”

  “Man, Emmy, you really have been out of touch. It’s like war out there. Oh, hi there, Hugh …” He turned to someone who was just sidling up to him hollering something about the increased girth of George’s stomach. When George was done defending his paunch, another pal of his had wandered up, and another, and there was no getting back on the topic. As the crowd started to funnel into the ballroom for the plenary session, I buttonholed him, but he’d forgotten what he was talking about. “Shit,” he said. “I’ve got such a hangover. Bunch of us partied hard when we got in yesterday. I barely woke up in time for this session.”

  “You were telling me about Afton.”

  “Old Afton?” he said. “Don’t mind me. You know I was always jealous he got in before they quit handing out the overrides.” He spotted someone else he wanted to talk to. “Hey Freddie!”

  I found my way into the ballroom where the talks were being presented and chose a seat near the back, where I could observe as many people as possible and also leave early, if the talks began to put me to sleep.

  Two moderators took their seats at the raised dais and shuffled their notes. The program indicated that one was from California and the other was from Nevada, so they might not have known the dead man personally. Presently, one of them stood up and made a general sta
tement about the purpose of the session, showing a few PowerPoint slides that listed the talks about to be given—Afton McWain’s was scheduled third—and then introduced the first speaker. So it was official: they didn’t know that Afton would not be speaking that day, unless it was from the far side of the morgue.

  I settled in to learn a little hydrogeology.

  The first talk was given by Jim Connor, a consultant from Arizona. He discussed the way water was valued—or undervalued—in our society. As an example, he described the Central Arizona Project, an immense system of aqueducts, tunnels, and pumping stations that had been built in order to mitigate the over-pumping of ground water by delivering surface water from Lake Meade.

  He described the political maneuvering that had beleaguered the project. “Farmers, who are the main consumers of ground water outside of our rapidly growing municipalities, think they should get a break on the cost, because why should they pay more for water than the price of running the pumps on their wells? And the municipalities wonder why they should pay more than farmers. Meanwhile, they’ve pumped so much water out of the ground that the ground has cracked and subsided as much as twelve feet.

  “Now, you all know from your freshman geology classes that once an aquifer has collapsed, it’s a dead aquifer, but the average citizen does not understand that water is part of what holds the ground up. As the grains of sediment are deposited, water fills the tiny spaces between the grains. The water can flow through the rock, but, being a non-compressible liquid, it actually helps support the sediments, even when, over time, they become deeply buried. But if water is pumped out faster than it is replaced, there is nothing to support the weight of overlying sediments. The pore spaces compress and collapse. They no longer exist. Water can never fill them again.”

  Connor intoned, “We are, in effect, mining the water, and the resource is going away and cannot be regenerated. Water must now be piped in from elsewhere, and now we all pay the cost, an increasingly higher cost. Okay, so today I’m preaching to the choir. So how do we educate the public and our servants, the lawmakers?”

  As Connor was speaking, one moderator peered repeatedly at the entrance door. Was he watching for Afton McWain? A woman appeared at the door and raised her shoulders and turned up her palms in the universal “Who knows?” signal. The moderator drummed his fingers nervously on the desk.

  The second speaker, Janet Terry, presented a summary of the ages of ground water in aquifers around the West. “Why is the age of the water we are drinking important? Simple. If we’re drinking ground water that filtered into the ground during the last ice age—or earlier—we know that this aquifer is not recharging. We are instead mining it, as Jim explained, whether we’re collapsing soft sediments or just draining rock.”

  Terry was a specialist in finding the age of water by isotopes dating. When she talked about the Denver Basin aquifers, I sat up and took notice. The water in the Arapahoe aquifer—which I had seen delineated on Afton McWain’s office wall, and whose depiction had now mysteriously vanished—was 30,000 years old. Older than the last ice age. Mammoths that are now extinct had watched it fall from the sky as snow.

  “This is vintage water,” she told us. “The water Douglas County residents are drinking found its way into the ground 30,000 years ago. That means that rain that falls today on the aquifer’s recharge area along the foothills of the Rampart Range is not migrating into the ground fast enough to replace the water residents are pumping out.”

  The Rampart Range. She was talking about the foothills at the edge of Afton McWain’s ranch, which, even as she spoke, lay searing in the prairie heat in the worst drought on record. I was beginning to see why Afton had developed an interest in the rocks that lay beneath his feet.

  As the isotope specialist showed us one alarming slide after another, the woman who had shrugged her shoulders in the doorway reappeared, briskly approached the dais, and handed a note up to the moderators. As they read it, their eyebrows shot up. Anxiety played across their faces. They looked back and forth at each other and around the room. They put their heads together and whispered urgently, then looked down at a woman who was sitting in the front row. One of the moderators got out of his seat and hastened down to talk to her, keeping his head low so he didn’t form a silhouette on the projection screen.

  Terry finished her talk and left the lectern. The time for Afton McWain’s presentation had arrived.

  One of the moderators stood up. He adjusted his glasses, cleared his throat, ducked his face awkwardly toward the microphone, and said, “Uh, we’re going to, ah … change the order of, ah … the talks here a bit. We’ll move next to, uh, Karen Brown, who will present the economic model for ground-water development. Uh, thank you for being flexible, Karen.” Having introduced her, he left the hall and did not return until the end of her talk.

  Karen Brown was a minerals economist from New Mexico who strode to the podium on athletic legs and delivered a high-speed summary of water economics as it is practiced in the American West. She pointed out that American consumers treat water as a free commodity because it falls out of the sky but that few have any comprehension of the nature of ground water—how it gets into the ground, what happens when we begin to take it out, and most importantly, the fact that, if it is pumped out faster than it percolates in, it is a finite resource.

  She said, “What is the price of ground water? Typically, we pay the cost to lift it out of the ground or have it piped to us but give it no per-volume value unless we put it into bottles and sell it in grocery stores. Water drawn from rivers or reservoirs, by contrast, has a volume value because it is reckoned by the acre-foot if you are a farmer or by the gallon if you are a homeowner in places where it is metered or rationed, but even then it is usually based on the cost to deliver, and the valuation is a matter of apportionment. We talk of water rights but rarely do we discuss a per-unit cost of water. We know the price of a gallon of gas to the penny, but what is the price of a gallon of water?”

  Brown pumped the remote, firing rapidly through her PowerPoint presentation. “Trying to say who owns the water in the ground is unclear in most states,” she explained. “Surface water is typically governed by a system of prior claim. First in line, first in priority. The oldest claim is satisfied first, and if the stream is sucked dry before the newest claim is satisfied, that’s that person’s tough luck. Again, this is not regulation, this is apportionment. In some places we have meters on water wells, but this is not to regulate consumption but instead to create a tax revenue stream. It’s the tragedy of the commons. We degrade that which we own in common, each taking what we can before it can be taken by someone else.”

  Brown went on to present some graphs that showed what happens when a community on private wells runs out of water and needs to start importing it from other areas. “We typically turn to a government agency and expect them to ‘fix’ our problem. The government agency puts in a community-wide system that delivers water from another source—sometimes hundreds of miles distant. The agency must charge to provide O and M—operations and maintenance—and that puts them in a subtle conflict of interest. If they stop delivering water, they’re out of a job, and anything a government provides has to be paid for. It is therefore in the government’s interest that the citizens consume water. They tend not to regulate consumption even if that were the purpose of the agency. Ration, maybe; regulate, rarely.”

  The question-and-answer period after Dr. Brown’s talk was lively because, it seemed, there were a few journalists present. One asked, “What do you think of the statistics published by Senator White of the Colorado state senate subcommittee on water supplies stating that there is plenty of water to be had to support development in the south Denver metro area?” he inquired. “I refer to Arapahoe and Douglas counties, which are expected to gain 400,000 citizens by the year 2050.”

  Brown replied, “Well, as you know, there are several kinds of lies. There are lies, damned lies, and then there are statisti
cs. I’d have to ask Senator White if these additional citizens are going to learn some extreme measures of conservation.”

  Someone asked her why Senator White and the rest of the subcommittee might have conjured these numbers.

  Brown replied, “Any elected official in any western state is well aware that to mention the reduction of water resources in a public forum is a sure way to avoid reelection, so having the temerity to actually do anything about it is tantamount to political hara-kiri.”

  Laughter ensued. As the child of a ranching family, I rolled my eyes in agreement. In Wyoming, ranchers have been known to invite any official that foolish to a barbecue, and they wouldn’t be serving beef. In the semi-arid West, a ranch needed a certain number of irrigated acres to grow enough alfalfa to get the herd through the winter or they’d have to cut the herd. Having to purchase feed could tip the economic scale from profit to loss.

  I raised my hand and asked, “This may be off the point, but while I’ve worked in a commodities-based industry—oil and gas—I’ve never taken economics, and I’m wondering, how do you tell when an economy is in a state of decline? What are the symptoms?” I was asking for two reasons: first, to better understand what had happened to my heritage, and second, to find out whether it was happening, in perhaps a different way, to the community around Castle Rock, Colorado.

  “It becomes stagnant,” Brown replied.

  “You mean it quits growing?”

  “Yes. Most economies are based on growth.”

  “Then how can an economy stay healthy, if it’s eventually going to run up against the exhaustion of its finite resources, such as ground water?”

  Brown said, “Then, as I said, they have to import the resource, and the governing limit becomes cost or the balance of trade.”

  A journalist asked, “Then you’re saying that an economy is only healthy if it’s growing.”

  “That is usually the case,” she replied, “at least, from a Western capitalistic viewpoint. The new thing is to try to figure out how to make economies and the resources that they rely on sustainable, but the way most economies work is that populations either grow, level off, or decline, and with them goes demand. Most often, populations grow.”