This is Linda Allen in Amarillo, Tx reading and writing about Lucas Bessire’s 2021 book “Running Out – In Search of Water on the High Plains”. Bessire’s treatise on the depletion of the Ogallala aquifer was a finalist for the National Book Award and named Book of the Year in 2022 by the Center for the Study of the American West at West Texas A & M University.
Bessire is a 5th generation Kansan whose roots infiltrate the depleted soil of southwestern Kansas. He begins by returning to those rural outposts of his early years and memories of times, places and people he left behind for the much wider world beyond.
Staying in his father’s bunkhouse and meeting up with relatives, neighbors and board members came across to me as the humbling experience of returning to a place after many years where he is known only as “RW and Fern’s grandson” or one of the local kids who went off to college and never came back. The home folks couldn’t care less that Dr. Bessire is a professor of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and has written award winning books.
The author’s low profile and essentially tagging along for his father’s visits to his uncle and neighboring landowners helps open the doors to them sharing what the land and life were like before and since intense irrigation began.
He unearths a treasure trove of archived clippings, stories and personal writings his grandmother Fern collected over her years as a farm wife. Family history, hardships and personalities are revisited alongside the realization that the true picture of the aquifer is one of ongoing decline, waste and corporate greed.
Attending meetings of conservation district boards reveals the irony of such groups which consist of wealthy local farmers whose livelihood depends on keeping their sprinklers and wells flowing – it’s apparent that conserving and wise usage of the limited resource is not top of mind.
The philosophy continues to be “pump until the water’s gone.”
As Lucas visits his father’s and grandparents’ original home places his own sense of rootedness and ancestry brings forth dreams and long forgotten flashes of memory. The little rock house his father has chosen to live near contains remnants of family history and untold dynamics. Lucas learns from his father and uncles reminiscing that their mother Fern was a volatile, unpredictable force who had what was then known as a nervous breakdown and was
institutionalized for depression. Women on the plains in the dirty 30s were tested to their limits and such occurrences happened in many families.
The ongoing drawdown is finally gaining attention and publicity as organizations seek solutions
and remediation. In a timely article from the Amarillo Globe-News dated January 28th, I learned about Ogallala Life. Like Ogallala Commons, this group is raising awareness and seeking volunteers to restore water flow and replenishment of stream beds and habitat. In 2023 Ogallala Life focused on the Canadian River and in 2024 will be working to build leaky weirs on Palo Duro Creek in the Wildcat Bluff natural area NW of Amarillo.
I’ll describe “Running Out” as a soul-searching research project that points to the future and
explores the authors roots and his family’s complicity in the draining of the aquifer until his
father’s generation becomes concerned. In researching Dr. Bessire I learned that he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and has another book in the works called “The Plains Interior”. I’ll look
forward to his next book.
This is Linda Allen for the HPPR Radio Readers Spring Read.