The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning Read online

  “This is the first time I ever saw a spring in the Little Beaver. Can you believe that?”

  He nodded. “There’re plenty of them, but when you’re a kid, you don’t know anything other than what’s out your back door.”

  “Used to be plenty of them,” I said. “I’ve read that more than seven hundred miles of Kansas creeks and rivers no longer flow.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “It’s a shame what we’re doing to the water.”

  He looked perplexed. Oh boy, I thought. Was I about to have a political argument with one of those fanatics who thinks that owning land gives him the right to abuse whatever was on or under it? Then I reminded myself that here in Kansas it was I who would be considered the fanatic. I probably sounded like one now.

  Ward said, “Hey, didn’t you write that book? I recognize you from the picture on the back of it.”

  This was surprising, to say the least. Besides my mother, the only locals I knew who’d read my essay collection had been one fourth-grade and one high school English teacher.

  “I liked that book so much,” Ward said, pausing to reminisce. “It had this melancholy quality about it that reminded me of The Last Picture Show. Larry McMurtry. I’m sure you know his work.”

  “Not as well as I should.” In fact, I hadn’t gotten around to McMurtry.

  “I even considered writing to you. I figured your publisher would forward the letter.”

  “You wanted to write to me?” I asked. “Why didn’t you?”

  “Oh sure, now. You would have thought I was some kind of nut case.”

  “No, I would have been flattered.” I looked up into the shadow his hat cast. For the first time, I noticed his eyes—an arresting Caribbean sea green.

  I lowered my gaze. Dark circles stained the underarms of his T-shirt, a light-gray color that a man would grab on a routine morning when he didn’t expect anything new to happen. And nothing new was going to happen. After all, this guy wore a silver belt buckle. Burnished by years of wear, it featured your standard calf roper. Jake’s dad had cured me of my cowboy fascination.

  I could imagine how I looked. After dousing my head at the windmill, I’d just jammed my cap back on. It had the word “Vedauwoo” embroidered on it below a silhouette of that granite mountain range—one of my favorite haunts near Laramie, Wyoming, the town where I lived.

  Ward’s cap also bore a Wyoming emblem. King Ropes, a famous saddler.

  “Do you read much?” I asked.

  “Winters get long when you live in the country, and I always liked a good book.” Taking a blue kerchief from his hip pocket, he removed his hat, revealing a high forehead. No ring, I couldn’t help but notice as he wiped his brow. But ranch and farm types didn’t always wear rings. Dad hadn’t.

  “Could use a little of that winter weather now,” Ward said. “My favorite author is Cormac McCarthy.”

  Were we really standing in a Kansas pasture? Louis L’Amour I might have expected, or Zane Gray. “I like the way he drops into Spanish,” I said. “‘Soy yo que traigo las yeguas de las montañas.’”

  “You memorized that,” Ward said. “What does it mean?”

  “’Tis I who brings the mares from the mountains,” I declaimed. “When I taught at the University of Wyoming several years ago, I always assigned All the Pretty Horses. Even though I think McCarthy was intentionally overromantic in that book. He was playing with the cowboy myth.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Ward said. His tone made me wonder if he’d ever heard the two words “myth” and “cowboy” together before. “I’ll admit McCarthy did get some of the details wrong,” he continued. “Did you notice that whenever those two boys went into a saloon, they would take their cigarettes out of their shirt pockets and put ’em on the bar top? Now a cowboy just wouldn’t do that.”

  “What would a cowboy do?”

  “He’d leave ’em in his pocket, take ’em out when he wanted one, then put ’em back.”

  This had to be the most ridiculous cowboy rule I’d ever heard, and I’d heard a lot of them. I glanced at Ward’s roughout leather boots and his jeans, bunched at the ankle. Jake’s dad used to stand before the mirror making sure his pant legs bunched exactly like that. He’d explained that a cowboy wore his pants long so they wouldn’t appear too short when he straddled a horse. He had a whole list. Cowboys didn’t wear sunglasses or feathers on their hats. They wouldn’t wear a buckle like Ward’s unless they’d won it. They wouldn’t be caught dead in shorts. They called women “ladies,” and to him, he said, that’s what I would always be. I’d learned the hard way how false such chivalry was.

  Ward was tall and formidable looking, but his belly bulged somewhat over his fancy buckle. I was eager to work my way farther down the Little Beaver to see what other water awaited my discovery. But standing opposite me beneath the cottonwood tree, he gave no more sign of leaving than did his dog, which lay curled at his feet, snapping at flies. Finally, he broke the silence, nodding toward the bays. “That mare’ll get here soon. She knows there’s oats in the deal.”

  “My dad said a horse’ll sell its soul for a bag of oats.”

  Ward laughed. “They will, too.”

  “Look at how the heat makes their legs waver,” I said, “like a mirage.”

  “Isn’t that somethin’? I can see how the Spaniards confused the buffalo with trees.”

  “Pedro de Castañeda!” I said.

  Ward nodded. “You a history buff too?”

  “I’ve been reading all I can get my hands on that might mention historical springs, for an essay I’m working on about the Ogallala Aquifer and irrigation on the Great Plains. I read Castañeda’s journals just last week. From a distance, they could see the sky through the legs of the buffalo and thought they were pine trees.” Admittedly, Ward had a nice smile. Slightly crooked, its startling whiteness was set off by a dark face.

  Castañeda had been one of Coronado’s men. They’d come north searching for the Seven Golden Cities of Cibola, which of course didn’t exist. They wound up in what, three hundred years later, would become Kansas. I said, “Can you imagine the Spaniards trying to figure this place out?”

  Ward shook his head and continued to smile appreciatively at me. Was he also remarking the coincidences in our meeting? A meadowlark sang from a fence post, its intricate notes running up and down the scale. “It amazed me to find this water,” I said.

  He drew a quick breath. “I know just what you mean. I’ve got two sections of grass on the Smoky Hill River. Water changes everything.”

  “You live on the Smoky?” The Smoky Valley was a paradise of unfarmed hills sloping down into cottonwood groves along the river. As a kid I’d dreamed of marrying Roy Rogers and owning a Smoky Valley ranch with him. I said, “One of my father’s old sheep buddies lives there. He told me that the ponds are mostly gone.”

  “The river still runs on my place,” Ward said, “but it’s no bigger than a crick now.”

  “If I’d come out here looking for springs twenty, even ten years ago, I probably would have found water closer to home.”

  “Prob-a-blee,” Ward said. “Water always runs downhill.” He was referring to the way the plains slanted downward from the Rockies. Irrigation pumping had naturally dried out the westernmost springs first. “And it is a shame,” he added. “I always considered myself lucky I didn’t have to farm anything, or dig one of those expensive wells.”

  The horses had nibbled their way to the pickup and were stretching their necks over the bed, trying to reach a bucket that sat there. “Let me give you a ride to your car. I can load these nags up in no time.”

  “No thanks. It’s not far.”

  “If I run across any news stories on the Ogallala, I could send them to you.”

  A flash must have passed from my eyes, because his eyes signaled back, one quic
k flash.

  He found a pen and piece of paper in his truck and wrote down my address. I extended my hand, and he held it for an extra beat. “Say hello to your son for me. Was it . . . Jake?”

  This took me aback. “Good memory.”

  “He must be a teenager now.”

  “Yes.” Did reading my book give him the right to ask about Jake? I wasn’t sure. “He’s sixteen.”

  He walked with me to the bank. “Let me give you a hand.”

  “It’s not steep here.” Unsteadily I slalomed down into the creek bed I’d climbed out of on my hands and knees. I could feel his eyes following me as I walked away. He had truly unusual eyes. Kaleidoscopic, as if filled with sunlit green stones.

  2

  IN LARAMIE, JAKE AND I LIVED IN A BIG OLD HOUSE THAT I’D BOUGHT THE WEEK OF MY JOB INTERVIEW IN THE EARLY NINETIES. With only a few days in town, I asked the hiring committee at the university to let me know their decision right away. There hadn’t been many houses on the market at the time, but driving around on the last day, I found an old two-story on the west side that I couldn’t believe the real estate agent hadn’t bothered to show me. It had everything I wanted—a wide front porch facing the Snowy Range Mountains, varnished woodwork, high ceilings.

  Back in Iowa that summer, I could barely wait to move. I’d just completed a graduate writing program, and through all the years I’d been studying, I dreamed of living in the West again. Having returned to school in my late thirties, I’d been what they called a nontraditional student. And now I was eager to settle down with my nontraditional family of two in a home that had at least the trappings of tradition. More important, there would be mountains nearby. Jake would learn to love the wilderness as much as I did. And instead of driving eight hundred miles from Iowa to Kansas to see my parents, we could now make the trip in a half day.

  When I pulled up to the curb in the Ryder truck two months later, I had to put on my best mommy face. Had I really poured the student loan money I’d managed to save into this brown-and-yellow fixer-upper? The exterior was so badly chapped I would have to sand every board before I could replace the ugly colors. Inside, now that no furniture or curtains hid damage, I saw that the varnished woodwork was scarred. Every room needed new carpeting and paint. But with its graceful turn-of-the-century detail, my house had incredible potential. I knew that I could make it beautiful again. “I’m going to live in this house for the rest of my life,” I told my parents when they drove up for a visit.

  “Oh, you’ll get out of here,” Dad said.

  I hadn’t really expected him to like my house. After all, here was the man who’d moved us out of the grand house that my grandfather Carlson had built on the farm—with high ceilings and varnished-pine woodwork and bay windows and beveled glass in French doors—and built instead a nondescript ranch style in town. I understood what had motivated him. After my grandmother Carlson passed away, my parents traded their share of her land for land closer to my father’s other holdings. Although there was an old house on the new land, Dad didn’t think that one suitable for Mom. He’d been raised in a sod house and hated remembering his mother bringing up seven children in that “rat hole.” Dirt falling off the ceiling, he often recalled. Christ! His father had been successful too and could have built Grandma Bair the big stucco house that I loved romping through on holiday visits much sooner than he had.

  Sometimes Mom regretted leaving the house she’d grown up in, but Dad didn’t seem to know what they’d sacrificed. In my Laramie house, I saw a classy, historic home that would give Jake some of the solidity I’d had in my childhood. Dad saw only peeled paint.

  “You wouldn’t recognize architectural integrity in the Taj Mahal,” I said.

  “Is that so?” The corners of his lips shot down into an inverted U and his brows shot up. It was his my-aren’t-we-snooty-today look.

  Then I saw, through the window behind my father, a man in a greasy parka peeing on my chain-link fence. The man was Doc, I soon learned, a local character who lived in a shack down the street and was fabled to have shrapnel lodged in his brain from Vietnam.

  • • •

  I DID MAKE THE HOUSE BEAUTIFUL, I thought, returning to Laramie after my three-day trip to Kansas that August. It might have taken me eight years, but I’d done it. I’d spent the first summers sanding the exterior, then slathered the clapboard in shiny ivory with coral and sagebrush trim. Jake and his friend Andrew helped me sand down the columns on the front porch, which I’d varnished at the same time I did the porch’s floorboards. With the honeysuckle vine I’d planted pouring over the front fence and my xeriscaped garden of wildflowers, the house now had an open-armed, welcoming look that surpassed even my memories of the farmhouse.

  I wished my father could see the house now, but he lay buried in Kansas, beneath a tombstone with a wheat stalk carved on it. Anyway, as much as I wanted to impress him, there wasn’t much I could do about the neighborhood. I really hadn’t chosen the best part of town. Before signing the offer, I’d consulted with a future colleague, who assured me there were no bad neighborhoods in Laramie. Little did he know. Even though Doc had since died and his shack had burned down, leaving a welcome gap on the street, Jake had witnessed many ugly things in the families of his friends here. Abuse, neglect, alcohol- and drug-addicted parents.

  To compensate, I’d enrolled him in a model elementary school on campus, staffed by master teachers. He made some good friends there. The summer before they started high school, they’d formed a punk-rock band together.

  When they practiced in my basement, the house shook. Some parents would have objected to the bedlam, but Jake drummed with thrilling enthusiasm. I loved how he poured himself into the music. And I looked to his friendships with professors’ kids for reassurance that he was fine despite my single parenting, his missing father, and all he’d seen in our lousy neighborhood.

  I dropped my bag in the entryway. He was lying on the couch watching TV. His velvet-eared, doe-eyed beagle, Regina, jumped off his chest onto the coffee table, then into my arms. I kissed the white splotch on her head, then leaned over and did the same to Jake’s forehead, an inch below his self-inflicted Mohawk. “Hi, Mom,” he said, as if he had no reason to feel guilty. It was only four o’clock, and he wasn’t supposed to get off work until five. Jake had probably the coolest job in town for a teenager, pretending to be a gunslinger from Laramie’s Old West days, and he just blew it off?

  He was wearing an old tank top of mine from twenty years ago. Cracking vinyl paint on the front of it showed a surfer riding a wave. On the side of his left calf, below the brown jeans he’d cut off—with pride, it seemed, in how jagged he could make them—I noticed a self-administered tattoo of a crooked star.

  “Oh Jake,” I said, reaching to touch what amounted, in my maternal opinion, to a stain on his innocence.

  He covered it with his palm. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”

  “How was I going to miss it?”

  He pretended to return his focus to the TV.

  I flicked it off.

  “Gee, Mom, don’t you think I’m a little old for you to take away TV?”

  “Why aren’t you at work?”

  “I overslept, I guess.”

  “You overslept. By how much?”

  “I don’t know. That alarm clock doesn’t go off. It’s happened two times now.”

  At times like these, I longed for a man to step in and set Jake straight. It went against all my feminist principles to want this, but I did anyway. Dad would never have put up with this kind of behavior in his sons. Not that I did. I let Jake know that he would lose his driving privileges if he skipped another day of work.

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING HE DIDN’T GET OUT of bed until after my fourth knock. Too late for the breakfast I’d cooked for him, he shoved his park-issued cowboy hat over his questionable hair an
d left for the tourist park.

  I sat down at my computer. If that water I’d seen four days ago in the Little Beaver could talk, what would it say? Above my desk hung a Charles Russell print—a caravan of Plains Indians crossing a creek. Russell had depicted the riders in the rear as transparent and ghostlike, as if fading into history. They might have been crossing the Little Beaver, the water that had supplied them now as diminished and ghostly as they.

  Farmers said they had no choice in how much water they pumped. Use it or lose it! my father used to say whenever I complained about how much he drew out. Kansas, like most dry western states, had a law requiring that those holding water rights take advantage of them to their fullest, or lose what they didn’t use so someone else could access the water before it flowed, or seeped, into the next state. It hadn’t occurred to early legislators that water could be lost through too much use. Now the law was codified by long practice and the rights holders were powerful vested interests with political clout. It would be nearly impossible to change how the Ogallala was managed. Still, I wanted to see new laws passed that aggressively protected the water.

  I emptied the pencil sharpener, played with paper clips, and searched for an argument that would penetrate the armor of the most dyed-in-the-wool pragmatist.

  My father died thinking that he and his farm neighbors were the same people they’d always been, descendants of pioneers adhering to frugal pioneer values. But since his childhood, he’d gone from horse-pulled plows to tractors that pulled forty-foot-wide chemical spray rigs. He’d gone from windmills that pumped ten gallons a minute to centrifugal pumps that could lift twelve hundred gallons in that brief amount of time. He’d gone from intense labor that broke men’s and women’s backs to intense pillage and poison that broke the earth’s.