The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

by Bair, Julene

  With one finger on his pickup’s steering wheel and one arm on the sill of his open window, Ward drove us into the valley on a winding road, a welcome diversion from the straight section-line roads on the flat divide we’d crossed after leaving his place. He was wearing his King Ropes cap and his chocolate-brown Carhartt jacket, which set off his blond mustache and hair. On the tape deck, Lucinda Williams was singing about her own knee-buckling addiction to a man. We were both enjoying the liberating breezes of spring after a winter of long drives on snowy highways, then excruciating weeks between our visits, when the season’s cold exacerbated our longing.

  I inhaled the sweet smells as we passed groves of budding cottonwoods and sprinkler-irrigated hay meadows. That’s one thing that would make living here nicer than living in Laramie, I thought. I wanted to wake up each spring morning to the promise in the soil. Laramie winters were too friggin’ long.

  As we rounded the turns, white-tail deer sprang across the meadows and disappeared into stands of mature cottonwoods. Wild turkeys trotted through tall grass. Pheasants scurried into ditches. In Collier’s time, the valley must have been even richer in animal life, although there would have been one notable absence.

  Collier had started coming into the area as a bone picker, one of the men who roved the prairies collecting buffalo bones. In the 1870s, the plains had been littered with those bones because the hide men, or hunters, who’d wiped out the buffalo herds had a ready market only for the hides. Vultures, wolves, coyotes, cougars, and in some cases, even grizzly bears had cleaned the bones of flesh, leaving them easy pickings for the final scavengers.

  Collier alone claimed to have gathered a thousand tons of bones. I envisioned him crisscrossing the unfenced prairie from pile to pile on still mornings, his horses’ harnesses creaking, the bones in his wagon clacking. Using the same trail that had served as the Indians’ Ladder of Rivers, he hauled the bones to a railhead near Fort Wallace, on the Smoky. From there they were shipped east and made into all sorts of things—knife handles and combs but mainly bone black, a form of charcoal used in refining sugar. Some bones were ground up, shipped back west, and dusted onto the monarchs’ own Elysian fields, as fertilizer.

  My map led us onto the headquarters of a showy ranch with a big barn and several Quonsets. I didn’t recognize the locally famous ranch until Ward stopped in front of a two-story limestone house with a red tile roof. I’d heard about the beautiful house from my mother, who had once attended a ladies’ club meeting there.

  We found the owner in the side yard, spray-painting an iron bed frame gold. “You got a little on your boot,” said Ward.

  The man looked up. “Well, look what the cat drug in.” Ward knew all the ranchers, the dwindling number who had not succumbed to farming. This one was compensating for low beef prices by stocking his pastures with game and selling hunting rights. He’d turned the house into a bed and breakfast for the hunters. The bed frame, he explained, was destined for one of the guest rooms.

  Ward stood with his arms folded and his mustachioed lip curling in a wry smile.

  “Sometimes hunters bring their wives,” the man explained. He wasn’t sure, but he thought that his great-grandfather, who’d bought the place from Collier in the early 1900s, had torn down the homesteader’s soddie when he built the barn.

  When I asked, he recalled that the ponds along his family’s stretch of the Beaver had been large enough to swim and fish in when he was a kid. They used to irrigate alfalfa out of the creek too but hadn’t been able to do that for a long time.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Groundwater pumping and what all. The big spring under the bridge still runs.” He pointed down the road.

  As we approached the body of dark water, a pair of mallards churned over the surface and waddled into the shoreline brush, where hundreds of red-winged blackbirds trilled from their perches on the powdery heads of last year’s cattails. I leaned on the bridge’s railing and stared down at the shiny water, stained dark by cottonwood and hackberry leaves. I’d read a beautiful definition of a spring: “a place where, without the agency of man, water flows from a rock or soil.” Such appearances were a kind of grace, like the buffalo that the Indians once believed flowed perpetually from a cave hidden on the prairie. It was only human, I supposed, to think that these fonts could never dry up.

  Funny, though, how all could seem right with the world as long as I stood in a beautiful place. It helped to be under love’s spell. “Hello, Homaiyohe,” I said.

  “The Mighty Beaver,” Ward said.

  It had thrilled me to run across Cheyenne words for the creeks and rivers. The Smoky Hill River that still trickled in the valley below Ward’s house was Manoiyohe, Bunch of Trees River. My childhood creek was Homaiyohekis, Cheyenne for Little Beaver. The beavers would have dammed the water that trickled from the springs, creating marshes for wildlife and allowing the water enough time to trickle down through the sands, recharging the aquifer. But the animals had disappeared long ago, trapped by fur traders in the first half of the 1800s.

  Many beavers had returned, Ward now explained, but ranchers used to dynamite the dens, freeing the water for their hay meadows.

  “Did you ever do that?” I asked, hoping the answer was no.

  “Never did on my place. But I helped my uncle do it when I was a kid.”

  “Did that bother you?”

  “I tried not to let it. If you want to make a living, you have to pull in your feelers sometimes, sweetheart.” He squeezed my hand.

  I squeezed back. I was in no position to criticize.

  Blue dragonflies flitted about, their wings blurring the air. One of them landed on my forearm.

  “A good omen,” I said.

  “Do you think?” Ward smiled indulgently, letting show his western condescension toward anything that smacked of the New Age.

  But this was Old Age stuff. The Cheyenne believed that dragonflies were messengers from deep water. They called them little whirlwinds because their swarms took that shape, warning Indians of enemies and indicating which direction to travel. This insect was a lustrous mechanism, with bulbous aquamarine eyes and what looked like precious blue-green stones on its back where the wings attached. The wings were delicately veined and so clear I could see the hairs on my arm through them. One wing had a notch torn from the lower edge.

  Ward raised his camera and shot the picture that he would later hang on the wall over his kitchen phone—my hair white fluff in the sunlight, and the dragonfly a strike of blueness on my glare-whitened arm.

  In 1857, a military expedition had discovered the remains of a recent sun dance on the Middle Beaver, probably at this very spot. Historians believed that almost every member of the tribe had been present. “More than four thousand people,” I said now. “Can you imagine?”

  “There must have been a lot more water than this,” Ward said. “Must have run all the way up and down the valley. Hold that pose.” Grasping his camera, he left the bridge and threaded his way into the cattails.

  I waited, transfixed by the warmth of the day and the clarity of the dark water in Collier’s spring.

  Not long after Joseph Collier built his house, wrote his granddaughter in a Sherman County family history volume, another man and his family settled in the valley. One day soldiers appeared on the road, escorting some Indians. When the Indians turned their ponies out in Collier’s hayfield, the two neighbor men rode out and told them to graze their horses elsewhere. This so angered the band’s chief that he grabbed the reins of Joseph’s horse and jerked them. Joseph was almost thrown. The two made a hasty retreat to the Collier home, wrote the granddaughter. They decided the ponies would not damage the hay land so much as they had first decided.

  The anecdote had struck me as a remarkable admission of less-than-heroic behavior in a pioneer ancestor. I sensed that the granddaug
hter was on the chief’s side. Was there some awareness seeping out between the lines that the meadow belonged more rightfully to him?

  That chief might have been one of the many who’d defended the land from invaders, returned to it now as a prisoner. He might have been among those who’d sun danced here in 1857. If so, he’d won his rights to this rich valley with his own suffering. Braves doing the sun dance bled into the dirt, went thirsty for days, ate nothing. The medicine man would have pierced the chief’s chest, strung a rawhide rope through the wounds, and tied it to a cottonwood tree that the tribe had chopped down and erected at the center of the circle with exacting ceremony. The custom was to pull back on the rope until it tore through the flesh.

  Although the Cheyenne had come onto the plains from the forests around the Great Lakes, they had known what to worship here. As the writer N. Scott Momaday put it, on the plains “the sun has the certain character of a god.” His Kiowa people had also adapted quickly. “After untold centuries bent and blind in the wilderness of the northern Rockies, they soon reckoned their stature by the distance they could see.” We had no idea what it was like to meld with indwelling spirits, I thought. Because we were unwilling to bleed for the land, as it did for us, we were still foreigners here.

  “Don’t look at the camera,” Ward called from his stand in the rushes.

  “It doesn’t help, telling me not to,” I called back.

  I’d wanted to visit this place to see what had made life possible here for my own people. Were it not for this and other rare surface water, there would have been no homesteaders. Settlers who didn’t live near water were said to have filled barrels at places like this one and rolled them home. But as usual, it was the Indian history that excited my imagination. When I’d read that the sacred sun dance had been performed on the Middle Beaver, I’d looked up from the book and stared. Triangles in my office’s southwestern-print wallpaper had floated in my vision as the marvel set in. The knowledge that the plain old dry creek my family crossed every time we went to town had hosted such a spectacle no more than twenty miles east of that crossing gave me a glimpse of the land as once wild. I would never attain the Indians’ ferocious connection to the place. You did have to bleed for that, but thanks to the image the words conjured, when I thought of the past on our land, I now saw colors. Instead of gray images of windblown homesteaders, I saw dancing, heard drums and songs that praised and gave thanks for the grass and sky. I saw wild animals. I saw live water.

  • • •

  THROUGHOUT THE SPRING, WHENEVER I WAS ABLE to visit, Ward and I continued making rounds to all the old watering places. On an unseasonably hot Saturday in early April, we went searching for the headwaters of the Smoky Hill River and the campground of the Dog Soldiers. We stopped at Sherman State Fishing Lake, where my brother Bruce used to play hooky from farm work. I remembered his triumphant returns home, the silver tabs on his stringer flashing as he pulled sun perch, catfish, and blue gill from his bucket. Now only heat waves swam in the dry lake bed.

  As we continued south through the Smoky Valley, a glimpse of blue in the distance led us to traipse across a pasture in the record heat, visions of a cool swim egging me on and giving Ward a window on my fanaticism. As we arrived at the pond, which turned out to be unappealingly muddy, the banks erupted in dark, bubblelike objects. These scuttled, like a battalion of remote-controlled robots, into the water. Turtles! We perched on a chunk of limestone and watched for them to reappear. Only once did we spot what looked like a wood chip floating on the water—the knot of a turtle’s snout, taking in air.

  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?

  • • •

  WHENEVER I PULLED INTO WARD’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

  PLANNED 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 inform
ed 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.”