Author
“Our Turn at this Earth” airs every Thursday at 6:44 pm CT on KANZ (High Plains Public Radio).
They Came to Stay—that is the title of three big history volumes recording the stories of the first settlers of Sherman County, Kansas. I grew up basking in the pride of that phrase. Proof of my own family’s long past in Sherman County could be seen in the crumbled remains of the sod house where my mother’s older siblings had been born.
“Our Turn at this Earth” airs every Thursday at 6:44 pm CT on KANZ (High Plains Public Radio).
Every few years, I obey the compulsion, as instinctive as a migratory bird’s, to return to the home nest. Last time I visited the northwest Kansas farm I grew up on, I parked my car by the pole that used to bring electricity to our house. The electricity it brought now kept a pivot sprinkler clocking through the ghost of the farmstead my mother’s family had settled in 1906.
“Our Turn at this Earth” airs every Thursday evening
at 6:44 pm CT on KANZ (High Plains Public Radio).
“I grew up on the mild-green, short-tufted buffalo grass prairies of northwestern Kansas.” That is the first sentence in my first book, One Degree West. Not all people define themselves by their childhood past, but still today, if asked to explain who I am,
I’m indebted to Ivy Anderson for this fine interview she did with me. Ivy not only asked the perfect questions, but edited the long interview down to a succinct expression of my core insights about the water that made it possible for my family to settle and thrive on the High Plains.This is just an excerpt from a longer piece she wrote, beautifully incorporating her own experiences living on a Sicilian farm, where there was no tap water or well.
When insanity is driven by greed it suddenly turns to “reason.” That’s what’s been happening as Kansas corn farmers’ latest brainstorm, to build an aqueduct transporting Missouri River water 360 miles across Kansas, has been gaining momentum. According to a just-released U.S. Army Corps of Engineers draft report, the aqueduct would take 20 years to build and cost $18 billion. And then there would be “significantly higher” habitat restoration costs, according to John Grothause,
