Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
The Ogallala Aquifer sits deep below eight states spanning from South Dakota all the way to the Texas South Plains. An underground lake bedded down in sheets of sand, silt, clay, and gravel, it is ancient, and like all ancient things, it will disappear sooner than we would like. We use its water faster than the rain can replenish it.
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When I was a kid, my favorite song was the Sons of the Pioneers’ “Cool Water,” but I preferred Marty Robbins’s version.
Keep a movin’ Dan.
Don’t you listen to him Dan.
He’s a devil not a man.
And he spreads the burning sand
with water.
Cool. Clear. Water.
It is a lonely desperate song about a mirage, about the deadly illusion of water. You can keep traveling with your old mule Dan, but the water will always be out of your reach. There’s a tree in the distance; there has to be water just over the horizon. Your journey will kill you.
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Playas are small migratory ponds, flighty ecosystems in miniature. They are sneaky. They have their own agenda. One day full of water, the next covered in grass. Within a week a lush, marshy patch of cattails turns to a dry dent of cracked dirt and salamander bones. In the sixteenth century, the Spanish traversed the Texas Llano Estacado in search of gold. On that flat swath of Texas from Amarillo going down south to just north of Abilene, playas were a real pain in the ass. As landmarks, they could not be trusted. I grew up in Floyd County, between Lubbock and Amarillo. Floyd County once boasted over seventeen hundred playa lakes. Playas get in the way of the plow, too, and some playas have been silted over with top soil to make way for cotton and corn, silage and soybean. But, when they are left well enough alone, playas can fill with water that seeps slowly down to the Ogallala Aquifer through layers of caliche, making its way through all that sand and silt, gravel and clay.
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Founding member of the Sons of the Pioneers, Bob Nelson, wrote “Cool Water” as well as “Tumbling Tumbleweeds.” Tumbleweeds wander until they are stopped by fencing or they find water, but in order to travel they must be mostly dead, just falling apart as the wind carries them, broadcasting seeds along the way. Because the entire plant acts as its own seeder, the tumbleweed is known as a diaspore. The seeds can hitch rides in clothing. Birds grant them winged conveyance. My dad called them “careless weeds.”
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Before I was born, my mother had two miscarriages. She wasn’t the only one. Many women trying to get pregnant in the county could not carry to term. The doctor told her to drink bottled water, a strange request of someone in rural West Texas in the late 1970s. My parents lived in a small town with one stoplight at the corner of Main and Locust Streets, and one paltry grocery store, Pay&Save. The store carried bottled water, and my grandparents had bottled waters shipped to their ailing home and auto store. They had a water cooler. It brought in people but not much business. My parents, though poor, were lucky. They didn’t have to travel far to find water. Nevertheless, my father would have traveled hundreds of miles in search of the water my mother needed.
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In her own version of “Cool Water,” Joni Mitchell sings, Some devil’s had a plan, while Willie Nelson, in a duet, adds buried poison in the sand. Mitchell sings a warning, We’re still in no man’s land, which Nelson supports in the vision of Dry bones and sand, sung in his trademark grit-born, behind-a-beat delivery.
Joni Mitchell’s lyrical revision is clear: People never planned for water here.
The song becomes less about a man wandering the desert with his mule and more about people living in an unforgivable landscape, people asking the earth to give more than it can and poisoning it in the process. As a song, it is disappointing, its rewrite not aging as well as its original thanks to the gaudy percussive ornamentation typical of 1980s pop music.
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The Ogallala Aquifer sits thirty feet lower than normal under the counties surrounding Lubbock. Some predict that it will dry out in about fifty years, but this part of Texas will see this emptying out much sooner. Yet, many farmers continue to reach down deep and grab that water from an underworld of buried rivers. This is a region where people readily believe in the things that they cannot see. The Lord will provide, I guess. And what is a mirage but a confusion of earth and sky when water is scarce?
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Lee Anne Gallaway-Mitchell grew up working on a family farm in Lockney, Texas. Her essays and poems can be found in Bat City Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, 0-Dark-Thirty, and terrain.org, among others. She is an MFA candidate in creative writing at the University of Arizona.