Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [278]
One Weldon Valley resident remembers how she found out about Sandy. “My husband walked in the house one day,” she says. “I think it was late in the afternoon. I was sitting right here at the kitchen table. I could tell from the look on my husband’s face that something was really wrong. All the things that it could be flashed through my mind in a second and I just lighted on Sandy. I said, ‘Sandy went over.’ And he said, ‘Yup. Sandy went over. They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.’
“They poisoned the atmosphere in this community something dreadful,” said the woman. “They went after the people they thought were more likely to sell, but they also spread lies about the leaders of the Regional Landowners organization. We just heard the rumors. We didn’t know who was spreading them, we didn’t know if they were true. When I heard that rumor about Don Christenson selling out, I thought, ‘Well, that’s the end,’ They created such an atmosphere of distrust it took years before we got over it. I’m not sure we have completely yet.”
Another weapon in the Narrows lobby’s repertoire was the old strategy of feint and dodge. “Every time we read one of their new reports the figures were different,” says Don Christenson. “In one document they said they were going to have 100,000 acre-feet available from the reservoir each year. They said 120,000 acre-feet. At one point they were up to 150,000. They never gave an explanation. They just changed the numbers on us all the time, so we had to get out the old calculator and prove them wrong again. All the while I’m trying to raise a thousand acres of corn and worry about a few hundred head of cattle. It was no picnic, I’ll tell you. One thing about the Bureau, though,” Christenson added grimly: “They sure know how to make a person mad.”
Meanwhile, as the Bureau was doing battle with the Weldon Valley (or “poverty valley,” as Gary Friehauff of the Lower South Platte organization described it to me) on the one hand and with the newly elected Carter administration on the other—one of Carter’s first actions was to put Narrows on his initial water-projects hit list—the state engineer, C. J. Kuiper, thought he had discovered yet another fatal flaw in the scheme. It was one of those details that dwell in a special kind of obscurity reserved for the perfectly obvious. What if the water couldn’t possibly get to where it was intended to go?
“At first I never thought much about the channel losses,” the state engineer would remember later on. “But one of the biggest headaches of my job had always been getting water down to the senior irrigators along the South Platte. All the groundwater pumpers who came along during the fifties and sixties and seventies had been depauperizing the aquifer on both sides of the river. Some guy would call on fifty second-feet that were his rights and my river master would cut off the junior diverters and the pumpers upstream so he could get it. Nothing would arrive. He’d call on another fifty cfs and we’d send it to him and it still wouldn’t arrive. I said to myself, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ Then we figured out that it was all being captured by the aquifers. The pumpers had emptied those aquifers so bad that they were acting like pumps. The water we sent down went right through the bottom of the Platte and migrated laterally and went into the aquifer. It was like it had a great big hole in it.
“So I went to the Bureau and told them their water was going to disappear on the way down from Narrows to the South Platte Conservancy District, and they said, ‘Hogwash!’ I said, ‘Hogwash? We’re cutting junior diverters up and down the river by four hundred cfs so the seniors