by Bair, Julene
When the snow melts, Mom, it will be spring and yours will be the first ones. Bright yellow when no one else has even a bud showing.
I insert the first of the four bouquets into the vase on her side of the stone but see from the way the wind catches it that it won’t stay long. I forgot to bring newspaper. I always stuff some down in the bottom, to hold the flowers in place—the way she used to do when we visited family graves together.
I’ll come again tomorrow, Mom. Right now I’m going to go sit in the truck. I’ll talk to you from there.
Okay. But you really don’t have to go to all that trouble with the flowers.
• • •
THE DAY AFTER MEETING WITH STAN, I went to Atwood, in the county northeast of Sherman. Much of the land around that small town is rugged and hilly, dotted in soap weed, the local word for yucca. To me, the hills are beautiful, and I suspect that beauty has a lot to do with why I’ve never met anyone from that little town who didn’t love it. If they no longer live there, they want to move back. Chris Sramek, the guy I went there to see, had made it his life’s work to help people do exactly that. He graduated from high school in the mideighties, a very difficult time for farmers and farm communities, and was told that he would have to leave home to find a good job. But he stayed in touch with his classmates, many of whom felt the same way he did about Atwood. Over the years, a dozen or so, like him, had managed to return.
I wanted to talk to him because he directed the High Plains Food Co-op, a group of farm families who raised everything from free-range chickens to yaks and sold their food products in cities along the Front Range. The co-op seemed to be only one of about a thousand ways that Chris and his friends were revitalizing their community. But for me it was the most interesting because here were people who had grown up on farms like ours and who’d left, as I had, but unlike me, they hadn’t dismissed or rejected the place when they were young.
Chris told me stories of returning farmers’ children who were starting over from the ground up, with egg farms and roving chicken-processing businesses and free-range turkeys. I learned from him and others I spoke to that this type of thing was happening all over the area. One of Sherman County’s own county commissioners raised grass-fed bison and cattle and sold the meat both locally and nationally.
I asked Chris what motivated his involvement in organic and natural foods. He said, “Health, health, health.” He said it three times because he wasn’t talking only about human physical health but the health of the community and the land. He thought of the High Plains, all the way from western North Dakota to the Texas Panhandle, as a single bioregion, the Ogallala Commons. He’d been influenced in this thinking by a nonprofit group of that name, led by a friend of his, Darryl Birkenfeld, also a friend of mine. That’s how I’d found out about Chris.
Darryl was a former Catholic priest, educator, and sustainable ag apostle who devoted himself to helping High Plains communities survive. He and his board of directors—Darryl’s “five foot soldiers,” as Chris called them—advocated taking common responsibility for the “commonwealths,” including water. The group’s literature featured a map of the Ogallala Aquifer. During the opening ceremony at one conference, which took place, fittingly, in Ogallala, Nebraska, two performing artists held up jars of Ogallala water and called it sacred. The leaders of that organization knew the names of the plants and animals that thrived on the High Plains, whether in the past or present. They knew which tribes had been evicted for their great-grandparents’ settlement and the names of those tribes’ leaders. They had a sense of history and a conscience. If I were a young person and had encountered thinking like that when I still lived at home, I might never have left.
“Darryl and his five foot soldiers came through here scattering their seeds,” said Chris, “and they’ve been growing ever since.” With their help, Chris had organized an entrepreneurs’ fair in Atwood ten years ago, and still staged it annually.
A winter storm had been forecast, but after leaving Atwood, I entered the Beaver Valley on the east end and began angling toward Sherman County. It would be perhaps forty miles of back roads in advancing inclement weather, but I wanted to see the Collier spring once again. It was instinct, a form of touching home or paying my respects, not unlike stopping at the cemetery to see Mom, Dad, and Clark, although the spring, I hoped, would still be alive.
On the way I had a stop to make, at the Beaver Creek Lodge, a pheasant-hunting lodge owned by a woman named Alice Hill and her husband, Jeff. Alice was one of these powerhouse foodie entrepreneurs I would expect to meet at a national forum on Slow Food, but never in my own home territory on the Kansas plains. She and Jeff had turned their old stone house, which sat on a grassy ledge beside the creek, into a gorgeous showplace. Like the farmers in the High Plains Food Co-op, they drew on clientele from the Front Range.
Alice, who had always been an avid reader, had learned much about organic gardening and animal husbandry from magazines and books. She grew almost all of the ingredients in the home-cooked meals she served her lodgers. And she had recently gotten a grant to build an agroponics demonstration project, which would add fish and lettuce to her menus year round.
Like Chris, she proved to be openly environmentally minded. “Look at what we’ve gone to,” she said. “Almost all of the land around here is on chemical fallow now and one hundred percent petrochemical inputs.” Chemical fallow is one of the forms of no-till agriculture that is getting all the hype. It means fallowing ground to conserve moisture, as we always did, but spraying it instead of tilling it after harvest to kill weeds. The inputs Alice referred to are petroleum-based fertilizer and pesticides plus all of the diesel fuel it takes to run the equipment. As to outputs, those are the crops themselves. Food. “Inputs and outputs.” Everyone uses the lingo in farm country, even if, like Alice, they don’t buy into the mentality of industrial farming. The same type of thinking views those who purchase the outputs as consumers instead of simply people.
“You see the airplanes spraying crops or you see the spray rigs going back and forth across all of the fields, and you know those chemicals permeate everything,” Alice said.
I’d observed one of the giant rigs spraying a field the day before. It had a cab on big wheels and two long wings sticking out, like a giant robotic dragonfly, except it had no tail and there had been nothing beautiful about it. It crossed the field at a faster clip than I’d ever seen a farm implement travel. On the plains you are constantly aware that you are on a planet, but in witnessing an operation like that, with endless miles of farmed land as a backdrop, I felt as if I were on a planet in a science-fiction movie, one that had been completely colonized by aliens.
“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 c
hoice. 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 ALICE’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 eac
h 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.