The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

by Bair, Julene

  As I knocked the floodgates open, the water would gush out in beautiful arcs and with such force that if I tried to slice my hand through it, my arm would be thrown back, almost dislocating my shoulder. To direct the water into the furrows, I placed “socks”—tubes of woven plastic mounted on wire hoops—over gates in the pipe.

  Having lived in the Mojave, I quickly adjusted to working in hot sun, and the work led to sensuous exhaustion at each day’s end. In Main Street, I wrote in my journal, Sinclair Lewis calls the look of the land at sunset ‘fulfilled.’ True of the land’s creatures too. Work and my past here make me one of these.

  But life in the desert had also sensitized me to the value of water. Because the rock house had no well, I had borrowed a tank from my neighbor. Whenever the tank ran out, I would hook the Cruiser up to the flatbed trailer it rested on, drive the two miles to his house, and refill from his carefully conserved windmill supply. I have since learned that Americans, on average, use between eighty and one hundred gallons of water each day. I made that five hundred-gallon tank last for more than a month.

  Imbued with the respect water demands where it is not readily accessible, I greeted the appearance of so much of it coming out of the ground in our desertlike heat as surreal. Why didn’t all High Plains farmers—who had surely grown up conserving water just as my mother had, her father making her drink all she poured into the tin cup that hung on their windmill—not mistrust such bounty?

  I had not yet seen any of the maps that would later trouble me. No brown blots where the aquifer had been exhausted. All I had to go on was a gut feeling. I knew we couldn’t draw that much water from the ground and expect it to keep flowing forever. What would we do when we ran out? What would the next several thousand years of High Plains inhabitants do for water?

  As I lay in my bed at night, the backs of my lids strobing with images of all the rows of corn I’d driven past that day and of silver water snaking down each furrow, the incessant growl of the pumps plagued my conscience. The big truck engines, converted to run on natural gas and mounted on concrete pads at the edges of the fields, seldom stopped, even at night.

  The water didn’t belong to the farmers, although most of them seemed to think it did. The state allowed us to use it, but only up to the limits of the rights granted to us. Many farmers, however, didn’t even bother to fill out forms reporting how much water they used. Dad was apparently among them. One day over dinner he fished a letter out of his lunchbox and handed it to me. It was from the Kansas Water Office, informing him that from now on, farmers would be fined for not reporting.

  We didn’t know how much water we’d pumped that year. The Water Office hadn’t made us install meters yet, so the only way to figure it out was by using the bills that the utility company sent for each engine. Dividing the total gas usage by an estimate of how much the engines used in one hour, we could estimate the number of hours we’d pumped, then multiply by the engines’ pumping rates. Dad said he’d tried to do all this himself, but he couldn’t get his “ol’ noggin to do the numbers.”

  I can still see the utility bills scattered over my kitchen table. I remember how confusing it was to discover that two of the wells shared a gas meter. But mostly I remember my shock when I totaled the numbers. We’d pumped 139 million gallons that season. Even though we irrigated more than seven hundred acres at the time, half of that amount went onto our eighty-acre cornfield. That was more than four thousand gallons of water for every bushel of corn we’d harvested.

  Hoping to prove that irrigated corn wasn’t really profitable, I suggested I do a spreadsheet computing the cost of labor, fuel, depreciation, chemicals, seed, property taxes, everything. “Go ahead,” Dad said. “Compute your heart out.”

  The conclusion I reached: We barely broke even on corn—until I factored in the subsidy checks, which put us ten thousand dollars in the black.

  “Are you satisfied?” Dad asked.

  “No. They’re paying us to throw away water. And it’s so irrational. The only reason people out here grow corn is because of the subsidies. But there’s a corn surplus. The more we grow, the lower the price, so the more subsidies they have to give us. It’s a vicious circle.”

  That might be true, he allowed. But if the government paid midwestern corn farmers to the east of us to grow corn, it wouldn’t be fair to draw a line down the middle of the country and “separate our poor, dry old plains asses from those lucky so and so’s who get rain.”

  I sighed.

  “Don’t despair,” Dad said. “Big Daddy will put the plug in before it’s too late.”

  By Big Daddy, he meant the government. He had faith in this. It was the government’s job to look out for the general good, preventing any serious harm individuals might cause in the pursuit of private gain. In his lifetime he’d seen the feds bust trusts, protect unions, and protect the environment with clean air and water laws. The Farm Program dictated many of his practices. In return for his subsidy checks, he had to leave a certain amount of organic matter on the surface. He’d been required to terrace his hillier land. The Soil Conservation Service, set up in FDR’s presidency, enforced these measures to prevent our topsoil from abandoning itself to water erosion, or the wind from picking it up and dropping it on Oklahoma, as it had done during the Dust Bowl. Big Daddy always had his hand in, and he would certainly reach in and do something before the water was all gone.

  In the meantime, my daddy would raise his brows, cock his head at me, and smile with overstated cheer. “Until then, I got mine!”

  How had we managed to farm before we had access to all that water? The same way we still farmed on our dry land. We employed the art my grandfathers and other plains farmers had developed by hit and miss. The first hits had been the wet years during the early half of the 1880s, when settlement boosters claimed that the rain had indeed followed the plows westward as they’d predicted it would. Farmers heartily embraced the rhetoric even if many agronomists warned that the science was extremely dubious.

  The misses had been the dry years, culminating in the worst drought ever, in the Dirty Thirties. The thirties were called that because when the wind blew, which was practically all the time, the air filled with topsoil that had been tilled to a powder. My mother told stories of dirt blizzards so thick that they couldn’t see the barn from the house. After those storms, they resorted to using scoop shovels for dustpans. Through those tremendous trials and errors, farmers figured out that to grow wheat on the plains, they would have to let half their fields lie dormant each year, leaving stubble on the surface to prevent erosion and to allow enough moisture to accumulate to support the next crop. To keep weeds from taking over the field, they undercut the stubble with sweeps, the implement we now used in combination with ammonia fertilizer. When, after a year of dormancy, the stubble had to be removed to make way for a new crop, the two-way disk came into play. It piled dirt up in opposing directions, thwarting the wind.

  My father still farmed more than a thousand acres of dryland winter wheat. After making as clean and well packed a seedbed as Farm Program conservation rules allowed, he planted in September, placing the seeds deep enough to rest in damp soil but shallow enough so the sprouts could reach the surface. If he was lucky, snow would come and keep the crop moist. “Drip, drip, drip!” he would say, playing the air like a piano with his thick fingers, his eyes shining with delight over nature’s built-in irrigation system. If there was no snow on the ground when January winds began to rage, he was quick on the draw with an implement called a chisel, which tore gashes in the ground perpendicular to the wind. The ridges this left prevented the fields from blowing.

  When Dad had done all he could to ensure success, he prayed. No matter how irreligious he claimed to be, that’s what he’d been doing in my childhood when he stood on the balcony of our old farmhouse summer nights, scrutinizing the sky. Seeing a thunderhead approach over the western windbreak, his face wo
uld swell with hope the way the ground seemed to swell in advance of a rain. To me, he had looked kinglike, standing on the ramparts of the house my grandfather had built. But like every farmer who invested his family’s future in the interplay of soil, seed, and weather, he was no king. He was merely a supplicant, completely subject to the sky’s whims.

  Now that I was back, I couldn’t get enough of watching my burly, arthritic father kneeling behind his wheat drill, flicking dirt out of a furrow with his pliers handle to make sure he was planting at the right depth. He had this uncanny knack for uncovering the kernels. “Ooh, ooh, there she is,” he would say. “Now you try.”

  For the life of me, I couldn’t find a single one. But I liked crouching beside him and being given the chance to learn. Even with our big equipment, everything came down to kneeling in the dirt. The action went back ten thousand years to when wheat was first domesticated in the deserts of Mesopotamia. At least in this particular instance, nature’s and my father’s dictates were one. You must plant in moist soil. You confirm your success by uncovering the seed and checking.

  • • •

  “LOOK AT THAT, JULIE,” DAD SAID IN August, proud of the corn I’d planted in April. Fully tasseled, it stood six feet tall, a solid green wall, every plant a uniform height and color. But to me, the corn seemed hypergreen. It looked unnatural. What corn and sorghum we’d raised when I was a kid had survived on our scant rainfall. Without irrigation, seeds had to be planted farther apart so that they could compete for moisture. Looking at a cornfield then, I’d seen as much gray dirt between the stalks as I had emerald green.

  Our old, dryland, prechemical approach had more in common with the way I’d seen Hopi Indians farm than it did with our present methods. Although the Hopi generally distrusted outsiders, I had a San Francisco friend who assisted the elders of Hotevilla, the most traditional village on the reservation, with their causes. This was in my desert exploration period. My friend didn’t own a car, and when he told me he’d received an urgent call from James, the village spokesperson, I had offered to drive him to Arizona in my Cruiser.

  The Hopi, who traced their lineage in the desert southwest to AD 600, were still farming the way they always had. James took us to his field, where I watched him drop to his knees, that universal posture of farmers. He pressed holes into the mounded earth with his planting stick, then dropped corn kernels into them one by one.

  He and his family stored their harvested corn inside their house. At night, stacks of the burgundy and indigo ears gleamed in the lantern light as we crowded around the family’s small, painted wooden table. We ate posole, piki bread, and pinto beans. After supper, James and my friend worked together composing a newsletter. James hoped the newsletter would garner support from Bahana, or white people, to stop a town well that the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted to dig and a tower it wanted to erect to store the water. The Hotevilla elders were willing to lay down their lives in this battle. They’d done it before, preventing the BIA from bringing electricity to the village by lying down in front of bulldozers. If that well went in, James explained, people would waste water. Their spring would dry out—an unthinkable tragedy, as it would make it impossible for them to live there any longer.

  Could two cultures be any different? I now wondered. We were taking federal money to mine water and would do so until the unlikely day that same government made us stop. The Hopi had been trying to prevent the government from giving them a well in the first place.

  “It’s an attack on the values that have been teached to us by the elders for thousands of years,” said James, who spoke English with a gentle accent. Hearing him speak Hopi with his wife and children, I realized for the first, mind-bending time in my life that I was a foreigner on this continent. In their low-lying, flat-roofed house made of adobe and rock fragments, James and his family lived seamlessly with the wild desert around them. According to Hopi legend, humanity failed to appreciate and therefore destroyed three previous worlds. The Hopi had been given the desert this fourth time around and were grateful for the privations of the arid climate. It reminded them to stay within their limits and avoid making the same fatal mistakes.

  Not to say that the Hopi were less provincial than any other tribe, including ours. When my friend introduced me to a group of the village elders, I was as naively reverent of them as any white, twenty-eight-year-old Carlos Castañeda aficionado would have been. A man in his nineties who was revered by everyone motioned me to his side. Had the old man seen something in me that promised I would be especially receptive to his wisdom? No. Apparently he’d misinterpreted my interest in him as flirtation. He grabbed my hand and pulled it toward him with surprising force, like an old crab creakily dragging carrion toward its mouth, except his destination turned out to be the fly of his khaki pants. So much for my dream of becoming the first woman ever allowed into a kiva. As he pressed my palm into his crotch, I jerked free. The old guy must have thought he “could have had” me right there.

  Some things, I guessed, were the same everywhere. But other things were so different it was hard to believe that the Hopi and we were members of the same species. James’s village was formed in 1906, the same year that my Carlson grandparents traded the Texas land they’d homesteaded for Kansas land—as my mother liked to say, “sight unseen.” A chart graphing Hotevilla’s and our progress would have diverged rapidly from that year forward regardless of what you measured. Standard of living, as defined by our culture, up, up, up for us. Horizontal for them. Crop yields up, up, up for us. Horizontal for them. Groundwater reserves down, down, down for us. Horizontal for them. Biological diversity of the plants and animals we shared our land with down, down, down for us. Horizontal for them.

  That was the main difference between the Hopi and us. They were okay with horizontal. We were not.

  7

  IT TOOK ME A YEAR AND A HALF, BUT I FINALLY GOT MY OPPORTUNITY TO RESTORE NIGHT TO OUR FARM. An electrician came out to raise the wire between the shop and old sheep barn so that Dad’s new seed drill could pass beneath it when folded up for transport. Surreptitiously, I had him install a switch on the light pole. He said no one had ever asked him to do that before.

  Because it had rained recently, the pump engines weren’t running the night I turned off the mercury-vapor light. The darkness, therefore, was doubly sweet. Starlight glazed the road somewhat, but I couldn’t gauge the distance between my eyes and the ground. Each step I took felt like an act of faith. Remembering how juniper, yucca, and cactus had billowed out at me like ghosts during my nighttime walks in the Mojave, I tried on my wilderness mind-set. Imagining the blackness around me as unfarmed prairie filled me with a sense of limitless possibility.

  “The strangest thing,” said the new hired man’s wife the following morning. They lived across the drive in a new double-wide that Dad had entrusted me to order for them. “Did you notice that the yard light went out last night?”

  I told her that I’d turned it off and that I hoped to keep it off from now on. “Won’t it be nice to step outside at night whenever you want to and look at the stars?”

  She stared at me as if I’d lapsed into a foreign language. “I wish you wouldn’t turn it off,” she finally said. “That light’s for see-cure-i-ty.” She drew the word out in the explanatory way you might use with a small child.

  This was the same hired man’s wife who had invited me to a Tupperware party. I’d sat with my legs folded demurely in the circle of women who were as careful not to say anything they couldn’t live down as the women in my mother’s ladies’ club had always been. In most rural communities, you keep your private business private and you don’t express any views that might upset or alienate your neighbors. It hadn’t been like that in the Mojave. Once I’d gotten together with Stefan and began circulating more, I discovered that people there argued about politics and gossiped openly. You had to be pretty free-spirited, I guessed, to live in the Mojave.
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  But in Kansas, women carefully tiptoed around one another. All we talked about at that party were our gardens, the weather, and our parents’ health. I took a slip of paper from the bowl handed around, to see if it had my birthday month written on it, in which case I would get to take home a free lemon-squeezing contraption. I competed to see how many words I could make from “Tupperware.”

  “Weep” came first to mind. Probably a reason for that. Did the other women bluff their way through those gatherings, pretending to be entertained by the small talk, while boiling inside with ideas and unspoken needs for true connection roiled within them? How did they keep from exploding?

  For the double-wide, I’d ordered a fireplace, a pretty built-in hutch, and oak trim—niceties that Dad had balked at. “Because you’re cheap,” I’d said. “Jesus, Dad, give them something to make it homey.” He forked over the cash because this new man was young and smart and experienced—promising management material. Dad’s heart was not getting any stronger. He would not be able to run the farm forever. So I left the yard light on after the hired man’s wife asked me to. Dad needed a manager more than I needed darkness, especially now that I had been having traitorous thoughts again.

  • • •

  “AH-AH-AH.” EACH SUMMER NIGHT, THE BABY SOUNDS Jake made as he lay in his crib playing with his toes kept rhythm with the “grr-rr-rr” of the pulsating pump engines. I would sing the lullaby I’d written for him.

  Jake’s a little cowboy, yes he is.