The tablet said 171.3 when I checked it at five-thirty. Depth to water, feet below ground surface. I set it on the counter next to the coffee maker and let it update while the pot filled.
Denise was still asleep in the back bedroom. She'd driven out from Wichita Friday afternoon for the long weekend, and Monday morning we'd gone to the cemetery with a flat of petunias and a trowel. Mom and Dad. Grandma and Grandpa Vogt. Uncle Harlan. The plots take up more of the south fence line than the living households take up on the county road. Neither of us said that.
She was supposed to leave Tuesday afternoon. She didn't. I figured she was working up to something, and I figured I knew what.
By six I was on the porch. Both pivots visible from there, the quarter-section units Dad put in during the eighties. I keep the gearboxes greased and the tires inflated. Check the nozzles every spring. They haven't run water since I signed the contract, but I maintain them like they might start tomorrow. Denise would say that's the whole problem.
South wind. Already warm. The wheat stubble on the Meier place across the road was short and pale. Troy switched to dryland sorghum four years ago when his north well dropped below 600 gallons a minute. His center pivot sits where it stopped, and the grass has grown up around the tires on the east side. From the porch it looks like the land is slowly eating it.
I heard her in the kitchen around seven. Cabinet doors, the microwave. She came out with her coffee and sat in the other chair. We watched a red-tail work the fencerow for a while.
"What's the number this morning," she said.
"171.3."
She nodded. Last January the KGS crew came through with their steel tape and got 169.8. Two years before that, 167.4. A foot and a half a year, give or take, even with me not pumping. Everyone else still is.
"Garden City called again," she said.
I drank my coffee.
"Their water resources guy. Leland. Said the offer's good through September."
"I know when it's good through."
"Okay."
The red-tail dropped into the stubble and came up empty.
What I have is 1,200 acres of dryland wheat and sorghum on land that used to grow irrigated corn. Four water rights retired permanently. Two remaining. Annual CREP payment that covers most of the difference between what the land produces and what it used to. The contract runs fifteen years. I'm in year seven.
The two remaining rights are what Denise wants to sell. Dad drilled those wells in '87 and '89. The authorized quantity is 310 acre-feet combined, but the wells would rattle if I opened them up. I haven't tested them in two seasons, but I know.
Garden City's water authority has been buying farm rights across the district for municipal supply. Denise had the number ready when she brought it up Saturday night. $2,800 an acre-foot of historic consumptive use. She'd already done the math on a napkin she left on the kitchen table. More than the land would bring without the water.
She's right about the arithmetic. The rights are worth less every year the aquifer drops, and the aquifer drops every year.
After breakfast I drove out to check the east pivot. The tires were fine. The gearboxes were fine. A meadowlark was sitting on the first tower, and it flew when I got close. The pivot's shadow stretched west across bare ground that used to be corn rows. CRP grass now, native mix, bluestem and switchgrass the contract requires. Looks like what the land probably looked like before Grandpa Vogt broke it in 1952.
I don't know if that's supposed to feel like progress.
Denise had followed me out in the Subaru. She parked on the turn row and got out, and we stood there looking at the pivot. She had her phone in her hand. She always has her phone in her hand now. She manages accounts for a medical supply company in Wichita, and I've watched her work the numbers on a screen the way Dad used to work the gearboxes, quick and sure, everything in its column. She's good at it. She built something out there. But she was standing on the turn row in shoes that weren't right for it, and I could see her looking at the grass the way you look at a room in a house you've already decided to sell.
"Contract's up next year," she said.
"I know."
"Are you going to re-enroll?"
"Haven't decided."
"Carl."
"I said I haven't decided."
She looked at the grass, the pivot, the sky. "What are you maintaining this for?"
I didn't answer.
"The co-op doesn't even stock irrigated seed anymore," she said. "You know that. The whole west wall is dryland varieties. Sorghum, sunflowers. Randy told me they haven't ordered a pallet of DeKalb since '37."
"I know what the co-op stocks."
"So what's the pivot for?"
The meadowlark came back and landed on the second tower. We watched it.
"I'm going to go pack up," she said.
I checked the tablet at noon. 171.4. A tenth of a foot up from morning, which means nothing. Barometric pressure, daily fluctuation, noise in the sensor. The number moves around a foot or two across a week. But the trend line only goes one direction. I've watched it long enough that I don't need to pull up the graph anymore. I can see the slope in my head. Down and to the right, year after year, the seasonal pumping dips getting deeper each summer even though I'm not the one pumping.
I sat at the kitchen table and ate a sandwich with the tablet propped against the salt shaker. Denise was in the back bedroom with the door closed. I could hear her on the phone but not what she was saying.
The thing about the number is that nothing on the screen tells you when it's too late. The slope just gets steeper until one day the well rattles and you're done, and you can't point to the moment it became inevitable because it was always becoming inevitable. It was becoming inevitable when Grandpa drilled the first well in 1954. When Dad put in the pivots. Every good year was also the year the number went down.
I washed my plate and put the tablet back on the counter.
Denise came out with her bag around two. She set it by the door and stood in the kitchen looking at me. Her napkin was still on the table. She'd written the number clean and neat, the way she writes everything, no scratch-outs, and circled it once.
"I'm not trying to take anything from you," she said.
"I know."
"I just think if we wait, there's nothing left to decide about."
"Maybe."
"It's not maybe, Carl. You watch the number every morning. You know what it says."
I did know. Seven years of not pumping. Seven years of watching the number drop anyway, maintaining equipment I'd agreed not to use, farming dryland on irrigated ground, collecting a payment for the absence of something. Selling the last two rights would finish it. The water would belong to Garden City. The wells would be capped. The pivots would be scrap. The land would be what it was before anyone drilled into it.
Which is maybe what it should be.
"The contract's up in March," I said. "Let me get through the summer."
"And then what?"
"I'll figure it out."
She looked at me the way she'd looked at me at the cemetery Monday, when I was tamping the petunias into the dry soil around Mom's stone and she was standing back with her arms crossed. Watching me do something careful and slow in the heat. Her eyes had been wet then, and I'd pretended not to notice, and she'd pretended she was squinting at the sun.
"Okay," she said.
I carried her bag to the car. She hugged me in the driveway, and I could feel how thin she'd gotten, or maybe I'd just forgotten. She said she'd call when she got home.
I watched the Subaru raise dust down the section road until it turned east on 156 and disappeared. Then I went inside and checked the tablet.
171.4. Same as noon. The number sat there, plain and small, not crossing anything, not telling me what to do. South wind pushed through the screen door. Somewhere out in the grass the meadowlark was going again.
I set the tablet down and went out to the shed to check the gearbox oil on the west pivot. It didn't need checking. I checked it anyway.
Something would come due. Not today.
- The first LEMA's results: Kansas farmers in the Sheridan County management area cut irrigation by 31% and found that energy savings were four times greater than lost production, shifting the metric from bushels per acre to bushels per inch of water.
- Southwest Kansas proposes major cuts: Groundwater Management District 3, the largest in Kansas, is proposing 5% annual reductions in pumping over twenty years to stabilize the Ogallala, the first time the district has considered cuts of this scale.
- Crop-switching hits an infrastructure wall: Farmers exploring alternatives like canola and black-eyed peas face a problem beyond agronomy, since grain elevators, feedlots, and ethanol plants across the High Plains were built for corn and have no market infrastructure for replacement crops.
- Towns competing for farm water: Municipalities like Hays and Garden City are purchasing agricultural water rights and building pipelines as the aquifer forces a direct contest between irrigation and drinking water.