No one does as good a job as reporter Brett Walton and Circle of Blue putting world water issues on the map. The latest contribution is an actual map depicting the intensifying crisis facing the Ogallala Aquifer.Continue Reading »
A Familiar Clanging Noise
From The Ogallala Road, Part I, “A Rare Find”
“I heard a familiar clanging noise. I looked up to see a white pickup coming down the hill pulling an empty metal stock trailer behind it. Great! I thought. Now I’ve got to deal with some yokel out here in the middle of nowhere.
“I tried to warn you,” my mother said in my head, where she’d resided for as long as I could remember.
The Women Who Saw Me Through to the End
Almost every Thursday night for five years, these women and I shared our work and the truth–no matter how hard it was to say it or hear it. The result: Gail Storey’s I Promise Not to Suffer, Lisa Jones’ Broken: A Love Story, Elisabeth Hyde’s In the Heart of the Canyon, Marilyn Krysl’s Dinner with Osama,
Ogallala Aquifer Spring on Little Beaver
“I found the pond lying still and innocent, a receptive, vulnerable reflection of the sky. This wasn’t rainwater. It hadn’t rained in weeks. My brother Bruce had … told me he was worried that the ground would be too parched to plant dry-land winter wheat this September. No. This pond was what the pioneers and early settlers had called ‘live water.’ It had found the surface by itself without the aid of rain,
The Sound of Water in My Childhood
“The windmill’s fan whirred and the well rods creaked up and down, making a tinny, lonely sound. Water spurted from the pipe into a tank. These, not the growl of irrigation engines, were the sounds I equated with water while growing up. The rhythm was systolic, soothing.”