The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

by Bair, Julene

  Most of the focus, however, has been on declines. “The water-level decline of the Ogallala Aquifer is the largest single water-management concern in the U.S.,” says Mario Sophocleous, a senior Kansas Geological Survey scientist and one of the leading experts on the aquifer. The nation depends on the aquifer for 30 percent of its irrigated crops. As that water vanishes, farmers will suffer, but so will everyone else. Food prices will escalate. The economy will be forced to absorb the inflationary costs at the same time that grain exports diminish.

  But the economy will be the least of our problems if we continue to waste water at this rate. At current usage levels, and if efficiency gains are not made, world water demands are likely to exceed supplies by 40 percent within twenty years. This conclusion was reached not by an environmental organization, but in a study funded by the World Bank and by companies such as Coca-Cola, Nestlé, and Syngenta AG. There is really no polite way to put it: Now is not the time to be pissing away the nation’s largest aquifer.

  • • •

  SO I HAD PLENTY OF THINGS TO be bummed about concerning the Ogallala, and I was duly bummed. But I had also been talking with people who were passionate about topics that I’d seldom heard discussed in Kansas. My relationships here were expanding just when I thought they were over forever. Those relationships weren’t only with people.

  As I continued my drive through the Beaver Valley, my pickup kept veering toward the ditch, my wheels catching in the gravel just as Dad’s used to do when he got absorbed by neighbors’ crops. What I got absorbed by was the beauty in the rare places that remained like this, where there were no crops. To my eye, the buffalo grass on the hills was beautiful even in the winter, although it was more like a carpet than grass this year. There hadn’t been much growth due to the drought, but the subtle and surprising colors were as enchanting as ever.

  During my lifetime, I’ve tried to duplicate the plains palette when painting the walls of houses I’ve lived in. But no sky-blue ever looked like real sky, and no pale green ever came close to evoking a buffalo grass pasture. Although predominantly grayish-brown with only a hint of green this late in the winter, the grass also had patches of salmon, and even strips of neon yellow. No single or solid color anywhere—everything complex, everything variegated, like the human eye and human consciousness. That is why coming upon a patch of wild prairie affirms me so much. Wild life recognizes wild life. All life is wild at its center. We need the natural world to know ourselves.

  The sky was low for a change, and droplets were beginning to splatter my windshield. I was in a race with the storm and knew I should turn south toward the interstate and the safety of Goodland, but there was a lot of water in the Beaver, way more than I expected. I had to keep stopping to roll my window down and breathe the cold, moist air and gaze at the marshes—large pools of water shimmering silver-black, surrounded by tall, russet valley grasses. In the middle of one large pond paddled a black and white duck. I vowed to look it up on the Internet when I got back to the little guesthouse where I was staying.

  The Ogallala was all right today, there in that meadow. Seeing it that way, I felt as I had when Mom was in the nursing home and I would go in and find her bright and chipper and having a good day. The nearer she drew to the end, the more it meant to see her and be in her presence. Being in that relationship wasn’t a choice. We simply were in a relationship. It meant helping her fight for her life, advocating with the doctors, making sure she was getting the physical therapy and medicines she needed, and sleeping on the floor by her bed when the nurse began administering morphine.

  Same with the aquifer. I’d been on this Ogallala road since birth, just as I’d been on the road with my mother since birth. I’d grown up slaking my thirst with Ogallala water and bathing in it. I’d gotten much of my financial support from Ogallala crops. And ever since I was a young woman and had knocked open the pipe gates myself, I’d been thinking Ogallala thoughts. Like my mother, the Ogallala had sacrificed a lot on my behalf. I wasn’t going to get off that road anytime soon, and I didn’t want to.

  Even if it did mean abandoning it in the here and now so I could get back to Goodland alive. I didn’t even reach Sherman County before I had to give up. The sky was closing in, not only visually, but palpably. The water in the corners of my windshield had turned to ice. I got to town just as the storm hit, and the blinding force and fury of it caused me to shake my head at my bottomless imprudence when in nature’s thrall and my infinite good luck.

  I watched the storm from the window of a pleasant little cottage belonging to a new Goodland friend. I first stayed there when I gave a book talk at the Goodland library a couple of years before. In thanking the woman, I confided that I had feared what it would be like to stay in a motel in my own hometown. “You will never have to stay in a motel here,” she’d told me. “Our guesthouse will be your home away from home.”

  It had been a long drought, and then a long winter, but new life was setting in. Nestled securely as the snow flew, I logged onto my hostess’s Web server and discovered that my duck had likely been a male common goldeneye.

  4

  AND NOW I AM SITTING IN THE GRAVEYARD, STARING AT TWO HEADSTONES, AND FEELING GOOD AND BAD AT THE SAME TIME. The way we do when our own lives continue to unfold, but the lives that gave us life and others that gave our lives meaning have ended. Finished, fini, supposedly. Except Mom and I are still talking, and I complained most of my adult life that we couldn’t talk at all.

  You have a new great-grandson, Mom. His name is Indy.

  Indy? What kind of name is that?

  I know. It’s not traditional, but it’s what they chose. I didn’t like it either at first, but I’m getting used to it. Not just used to it. I like it. He’s the greatest little boy, Mom. So smart and cute, and his heart is full of love.

  It is? Mom says. I can hear the joy in her voice, although the only empirical evidence of my mother’s existence in this place is a block of very cold, almost-black granite.

  Yes, and Jake is doing fine, Mom. He’s a certified nursing assistant, and Kate wants to be a hairdresser. They’re getting a late start because they were busy trying to reinvent society more to their liking.

  Kind of like someone else I know.

  There’s one thing I need to tell you, Mom. I should be telling this to Dad, but I mainly want to talk to Mom now because it’s her voice I hear. I need to tell you about the farm.

  Everywhere I drove in Sherman County, I found that any land that had less than a thirty-degree incline had now been farmed. Lots and lots of corn. More than ever. Lots of thick wheat stubble too, “sprayed clean” as my father’s old friend had said, leaving nothing alive. But when I came to our farm, I discovered only corn stubble from one end to the other. Both dryland and irrigated. All corn right up through what had been the last of our pasture.

  Before going to Goodland, I’d braced myself for this by visiting the Kansas Geological Survey Web site. The blue line representing our observation well confirmed my fears. The line’s angle of decline had indeed steepened. I studied the related numbers for an inordinate hour or more. The annual drops in water levels weren’t really that much worse than when we owned the place, I rationalized. And at least part of the decline would have been due to returning and intensifying drought. But seeing all of this corn now, I knew that the linebackers had to be placing much greater demands on the wells than we had even during those drought years that had helped persuade me to sell.

  The farmstead was still there, although they’d torn down the house Mom and Dad lived in when they were first married and that Jake and I had once lived in. The sheep barn had burned down a year after we sold. Someone had been welding and a spark had lodged in the old timber unnoticed. Or so we’d been told. Maybe they’d just wanted to get rid of the barn so there could be more corn. They’d even taken out three rows of the windbreak we’d planted. Only the cedars were left, with corn
right up to them. It couldn’t be good for the ground to have corn on it year after year. Corn is a big plant and must have space to grow. So its stubble leaves lots of bare ground to erode in wind or heavy rains, whereas wheat stubble is thick and protects the ground much better. We had always rotated corn with soybeans, a legume that fixed nitrogen in the soil. But forget natural systems. As Alice Hill had said, it was all petrochemical inputs now.

  “You don’t know what you let in here,” one neighbor, who was a pallbearer at Mom’s funeral, told me afterward. “They’re already buying other quarters.”

  And Stan had said, “My place won’t ever go to somethin’ like that. They’re like a vacuum cleaner. They’ve been buying land up in Rawlins County, where Becky is from too.”

  It doesn’t help much knowing that ours is a common story or that what happened to us is happening everywhere on the Great Plains and in the Midwest. I know that we also brought it on ourselves. I sit in my truck, an ant steamrolled by my own confused and confusing interests as much as by history, and try to imagine what it will be like if there really is an afterlife, as Mom thought, and I have to explain this to Dad. In ag school he learned all about soil conservation and protecting his land from erosion using contours, and rotating crops, and browsing livestock in his stubble fields. He was gradually abandoning all that too and moving in this direction, but he never would have gone this far.

  What would Dad say if he knew, Mom?

  It’s all right. We talked about it. He said it would be all right.

  Of course she isn’t going to tell me anything new. Just the same old things are replaying in my head. But that’s okay. They are the things I need to hear. And maybe I hear them in a new way.

  Bruce and I didn’t heed Mom much whenever he and I were in the same room together. Even when she wasn’t repeating herself, her voice got lost in our eagerness to impress each other. At least that’s what it always felt like to me. It took me a long time as an adult to understand that he’d seen me as a rival in childhood. There was always that competitive charge between us. Then after Clark died, we were the only ones left, the only contemporaries. We needed to understand each other, were perhaps more capable of understanding each other than anyone because we shared a family and a past, but we never took it far enough into actual understanding. Meanwhile, the treasure that gave us content to talk about as we discussed its disposition to grain bins or banks was Mom’s, earned through a lifetime of garden growing, chicken tending, cow milking, bum lamb feeding, meal making, housecleaning, husband tending, and kid rearing. And she just kept repeating herself, being ignored. I am so grateful she repeated herself now.

  Forgive yourself, Terry also said. Her words had forgiveness in them. That’s why I cried on hearing them. Taking a more tender view of my own fallibility really helps.

  The one other forgiving thing is the land itself. The high point of this trip was seeing the half section of Conservation Reserve Program land we’d withheld from the sale. Bruce had bid it into the government program because it had been too hilly to farm in the first place, but Dad had gotten greedy at some point and broken it out. That type of greediness is rampant now, and many farmers have abandoned their contracts, plowed their CRP land and planted it back to corn or wheat. More than nine and a half million acres have been returned to cropland since the ethanol boom began. That would have happened to our CRP land too if we’d sold it, but we kept it in reserve partly as a retirement plan for Ron. We signed over the remaining proceeds of the contract to him.

  After driving through our corn-blighted farm, I turned onto the track along the fence line, hoping for respite, and that’s what I found. Respite in beauty. A hill rose in the center of the field, so when I switched off the engine and got out, it blocked my view of the road. As was customary with CRP contracts, Ron had planted the field with a mixture of grasses that were more native to places east of us. They were bunch grasses, meaning they didn’t form a turf and grew in clumps. The tallest was little bluestem. I never understood why it was called that, because its most distinctive trait seemed to be how red it turned in the fall and winter. It liked the low, moist spots best. On the hill, blond clumps of another type of grass—some kind of fescue?—formed a bumpy silhouette against the sky. The pasture that Bruce had traded off years ago adjoined this land, so I could stand as I had in the old Carlson farm’s canyon pasture and imagine grass going on forever in every direction.

  I was once a purist and didn’t like the way CRP grasses looked compared with the locally indigenous buffalo grass, but the plow’s incursion over the last few years made me grateful for what I could get. Most people would think the bunch grasses were more beautiful, and they were definitely more dramatic. Besides, if it was buffalo grass I wanted, I could find it there too, in small patches that would most likely spread and replace the others eventually because it was the true native.

  An awareness of the land’s health coursed through me, whereas on the flat part of the farm, I had been painfully aware that the land was being enslaved and abused. Standing there proved to me that it could all be put back someday. That would be the one advantage to running out of well water or of drought. If grain crops couldn’t be grown here anymore, there would be horrible consequences for the world’s people, especially the poor, but the land would return to grass and it would heal. Ever since I was a child, I’d been thrilled to imagine the world “pre-us.” I wasn’t exactly thrilled to imagine it “post-us,” but I did take some comfort knowing that it might recover from our brief and injurious tenure.

  I noticed a large object in the distance. Rectangular and gray, it lay in the crook of the valley. I wended my way through waist-high bluestem and the brittle branches of large wildflowers. I would have to wait for summer to see them in bloom and find out what they were. As I drew nearer the object, I began to notice animal trails. I stopped to photograph one particularly clear paw print, which might have been that of a kit fox, or possibly a bobcat because I didn’t see any claw marks. I’d always heard that was how you could tell between canine and feline prints, because cats can retract their claws. What a joy it was to imagine either of those animals alive and well here!

  Arrival at the object confirmed my suspicion that it was a wildlife waterer, installed by Ron as part of the CRP contract. It had a corrogated tin roof built low to the ground and at a slant to collect rainwater, which flowed into gutters and down into a plastic holding tank. The tank had a hole cut in the top large enough for animals to reach in and get a drink. That afternoon, the tank was a quarter full and had ice floating on top. I scooped out the mud that had collected in the rain gutter, wiped my hands on my jeans, stood up, and gloried in the survival of the animals that had made those trails.

  Looking around the budding grassland, I understood what I love most about this place. It is the sun. The plains are high and bright, wide and exhilarating. To be outside here is to be on top of the world, lifted up and exposed to sun from all directions. Yes, the sun more than anything. Knowing it the way I do, it knowing me, so intimately and in every aging crease, many of which it caused to form, and being comfortable with so much light and openness tells me I am native here.

  • • •

  I AM ESPECIALLY AWARE OF THE SUN now as I follow my shadow across the snow in the cemetery, carrying flowers and a newspaper I bought from the machine at the diner. And always this shadow traveling with you everywhere. It brings a certain level of self-awareness. You know you exist and that you exist in relation to the sun and to the world. It makes you aware of the imprint you are making on the land.

  I don’t have to worry about walking on their graves, because beside them are a couple of empty plots Mom and Dad purchased for Bruce and me. But my remaining brother and I won’t be buried anywhere, not if our wishes are obeyed. He wants to have his ashes scattered on a certain bend of a river he loves, and Jake is to divide my ashes between the canyon pasture on the old Carlson farm and
the rock-house hill, in the Mojave. It troubles me imagining how difficult it will be for him to arrange a ceremony, because neither of us lives where he grew up anymore. Even if we’d stayed in Laramie, he would have had to think it through. Nothing ever has to be thought through in Goodland. You just make arrangements with the church your relative belonged to, and the pastor and the funeral-home director walk you through it, the way they walked Bruce and me through it with Mom.

  To have deep roots in a place means having dead buried there. It is almost that literal, the dead forming your bond to the earth and to the others whose dead lie buried there. I always had that bond whether I knew it or not. Whether I bemoaned the loss of it or failed to have the meaningful conversations I wanted to have or couldn’t get back in by way of a man. After this trip, I am more sure of that than ever.

  Daffodils for each of you. See, Mom?

  In this weather and with a newspaper you had to pay good money for? It’s a bunch of damned foolishness if you ask me.

  The stones look beautiful with the flowers beside them. I always used to think that decorating graves was pointless, but I don’t think that anymore. I have two sets of grandparents, several aunts and uncles, and one cousin buried in this cemetery, but it would take me all day to find them. I’m sorry, Mom. I don’t have time.

  That’s okay. You should be getting home to Jim.

  Mom, Dad, Clark. How is it possible that they live so fully in my mind yet they aren’t here anymore? That no matter how much I imagine conversing with them, the responses are only memories? I turn to leave but change my mind. I need to say a fitting good-bye, so I kneel, knees in the snow. I put my hands together. I say “Dear God,” because the word, however inadequate, acknowledges agency in the universe and I want there to be agency. “Help me accept the loss of these people who gave me everything and asked for so little. Thank you, Mom. Thank you, Dad. Thank you, Clark. I love you. Amen.”