They ask me how's Lubbock so far; I've been here only what, four months maybe, so I don't really know. People are nice. It's easy to get around, and has a small-town feel, everyone knows everyone more or less. It's got an economy, which is more than you can say for anything northeast of about St. Louis.

It's odd, though, that the town has developed so far out south and west, and more or less left the downtown empty. I went downtown to the library on Saturday, and once more, the streets were virtually empty. I saw an entire block, empty. No shops to speak of, no Christmas shopping going on, that I could tell. At the library, there was a policeman; the library, at least, had a lot of people. It was maybe the only place that had a lot of people. Ah, but then, it's worm in there, and it's cold out, and it's always open, I think that explains the policeman.

Then tonight I went out to a friends' house way out south, on the edge of development and cotton fields, a good nine miles from our house in town. Out there, he said, there's plenty of traffic, plenty of business, plenty going on all the time. There's water, he said, at the corner of Indiana and ninety-eighth, this water comes from local businesses that water their lawns all the time, but the lawns are red clay and the water doesn't seep back into it. It ends up on the street where people splash it around but it has nowhere to go until it evaporates. So I said, it's nice here, I'd like to invite my kids and my relatives to settle around here, but it seems, if the ogallala aquifer is on its way down, and everyone is just spraying water on red clay left and right until it's gone, then the place doesn't have that much of a future. OK so they're bringing in water from the nearby lake. Maybe that will help for what, a few years? But that water is from the Brazox. There's no infinite supply of natural water anywhere. Ten, twenty years from now people will start fighting over what's left. We'll blame the people with those green lawns and point fingers for wasting all that water for so many years, letting it run into the streets like that and evaporate away because it has nowhere to go.

Ah but in the meantime, people have these nice new cars; gas is below three; the sun shines and they keep building out into the cotton fields. The guy sells off his cotton field little by little to the developer and doesn't care how much cotton he gets off of it; some of it drops from the plants near the road and lines the fence along with paper and garbage strewn out in the country there, blown by the wind. I feel like getting out of the car and grabbing some of it if only because it has to be part of an era. Who can justify pulling up so much aquifer water for that cotton, so that the cotton can just blow around the plains getting in tumbleweeds? Cotton is prosperity and it keeps the banks and the new cars coming, but, does it take our future in the form of the water we'd need to stay here permanently? And those people who are serious about the cotton, growing it in huge bales, irrigating like crazy, what else do they have to do to the red clay to make it come forth with all this cotton? I'm not clear on how this works.

And another thing, the people just outside of town, have their own wells, no water restriction at all, they can draw up whatever they want. Is that because they have another source besides the ogallala? Or because it's just assumed they're using it only for themselves and not for bales of cotton? Not, for example, just leaving a hose running by a tree until the water shoots out and fills up the streetcorner?

A playa is a plains lake, just sits there until it evaporates; maybe in the old days the water had ways of getting down through the soil, back to from whence it came, the ogallala reservoir. These days, places like ninety-eighth and Indiana are playas, because they collect the water too, and everyone knows that, and takes University when it rains. If somebody can explain this to me, please do; one issue is that the city as we know it is so new, nobody has applied themselves to figuring out how to make it survive over time. Another issue is, there are really two cities. One, the old one, has been here a while, but is fading back into the plain. The other, new, aggressive, drill baby drill, get it while you still can, and then maybe if you have some money in a Swiss bank, when the water runs out, maybe you can head out to the south of France or some such place, because you'll be used to the warm dry sun, and you'll have a taste for the monied lifestyle. I feel like one of those old cowboys, squatting in the shadow of the saloon, weighing it back and forth, by the time he's made up his mind, the wagon's up and left town for better parts, the history it leaves behind, merely the suggestion that things could have been better.

ogallala! ogallala! ogallala!

I have noticed, having lived here almost three months, that mention of the ogallala aquifer makes people very nervous. It is generally known that 1) the ogallala aquifer is what we rely on in times of drought and in other times, 2) it is running out so quickly that it may be totally gone in 25 years, and 3) in some places Texas landowners are digging wells and then having to redig them in a few years because the aquifer has gone down so fast. The result of this is that ordinary, sentient Texans are very nervous about the long-range chances for our children to live here. It cannot be replenished very easily, apparently. This is due to the nature of the soil and the nature of the various layers below it (the caliche) that prevent the water from getting back down there.

I learn this from reading about it. It's actually very scary.

To me there is a rather obvious solution that I'm confident would be politically difficult if not impossible. That is, make people pay for their use of water from the aquifer, and use that money to ensure that the water gets replenished. How do you ensure it? Well, if water from playas replenishes it, make more playas. If it requires research to figure out which water replenishes it the best, do the research. This would be paid for by people who need that groundwater so badly that they're willing to pay extra for it.

Texas is a huge consumer or depleter of this groundwater; specifically Texas cotton-growers and other ag folks who have apparently been considering our public heritage, our future, as their personal water tank to use and deplete. That may sound a little crude, but in fact, you can't expect them to just be prudent or careful about it, when there are no laws to prevent them from drawing what they can out of it. Public resource? So is the air, the roads, the government grasslands, etc. They are somewhat in the habit of taking things for granted. Farming requires taking what you can, what you have, what you can use, and making stuff you can sell. It doesn't require asking questions, or begging to pay more for a resource that you sorely need.

On the other hand, I'm sure farmers would understand if you said: this belongs to all of us. We can't deplete it at this rate. If you can raise, say, sunflowers, and conserve it, and still make money, you should do that, because we're going to charge you for taking away our future rights to live here. Etc.

In the process of raising children, and encouraging grown children to live here, I am coming to realize that nothing is more important than ensuring some kind of sustainability for them and future generations. Now I just got here, and folks were nice to us; they didn't tell us, though, that we could move in here but we might not have water in 25 years. Actually I suspect nobody really knows how long it will be before "the well dries up." And, as I've noticed, they've at least started doing something about it...In fact this article mentions how hard it is to get people to work together on an issue like this, and how hard it is to accept any limits at all. Government in particular is hostile to limits from above, and actually, in my mind, I'd already blamed those ferrocarrile guys, who I'd suspected had already let their friends start fracking, etc., and who probably were the first to open the door and let anyone have at any public resource. But the fact is, I don't know from anything. I've at least read a couple of articles, and I'm beginning to realize: people have noticed. Water is scarce. It's a place to start.

water rights

I realize that I'm stepping square into a giant puddle here, but there is apparently a lot to say about water rights in general and developments in the Lubbock area.

First, I was wrong when I said, upon moving here, that I'd heard people referring to giant puddles at street corners as "playas." I had in fact thought I'd heard someone say that (the big puddle in my life is at Flint and 19th; however, I understood there to be one, also, at Quaker and 50th); but, as it turns out, they were probably not referring to the puddles in the streets per se, but rather, the dips that the city put in in places in order to catch and hold that water, and get it out of the way so that traffic could still function. Thus, you have low spots along 19th street out by the park, low spots in parks here and there throughout the city, and, if all goes well, water drains off into there, and stays there, until it either evaporates or seeps down into the ground.

The latter, however, apparently doesn't happen. It's red clay country, and the water table way below, the so-called Ogalalla reservoir, is what my friend called "not replenishable". Now I have a question about that: would replenishing it be impossible? Unlikely? or just Difficult? I don't know. But apparently all water on the plains, in these so-called "playas," is more likely to evaporate. And there are no grounds for the rumor that "estacado" was actually misheard and was really "estancado" or stagnant as in what happens to this water after it has stuck around for a while.

But I have questions about water use in general. Yes, I hear people discussing it in various places as a politically hot topic around the city. The essence of these discussions is that we city people actually have water use regulations; we can only irrigate on one day of the week (somebody said: as long as you hold the hose yourself, you can stand there all day, but if you turn on a system, you're supposed to check the city website and do it only on the day you are allowed). However if you buy a ranch or farm out in the country you can dig your own well and have no restrictions. So all new houses out there in the hinterlands are coming with their own wells. Yet the wealthy out there are complaining that after a few years, they actually have to dig another one, or dig deeper, because the water table is going down so fast.

What's up with that? It sounds like an alarming development, that wells that were good not five or ten years ago, have now run dry, and that there's a thriving industry just in redrilling for rich people who simply want a steady supply for permanent, ongoing lawn-watering.

It reminds me of a story about Las Vegas that I heard, and which, like the above, I have no way of substantiating anyway (I may be totally wrong about all of this, but have no way of knowing). The story goes like this. Las Vegas hotels were luxuriously indulgent in every way, and one way was to build these huge fountains right outside their front door that attracted tourists. At times of drought and water shortage you couldn't get much worse than southern Nevada, desert of deserts, but the casinos and hotels argued successfully that there was water in the water table, they had it covered, they lost a little bit to evaporation but by and large they contained most of the water so it was less wasteful than, say, a homeowner who constantly watered his lawn, such as you'd see in suburban Vegas or Lubbock for that matter. They went back and forth on the issue, with some people objecting most to the symbolism of it. So, they said, you use up the water table, you make this big splay in your front door, what is most irritating is the implication that there's water to waste, when in fact, there isn't. Finally the casinos got the message: it was bad PR. In times of shortage, it's like driving a Cadillac through the poor neighborhood. You should have some sense, some decency, recognize the appearance of it.

There is also, of course, the social justice angle. The water is almost gone? And people are still watering their lawns?

playas

I was bemoaning the fact that whole streets get badly flooded here whenever it rains even a few inches, and a friend pointed out that these were called 'playas' and that, along with 19th and Flint, another bad one was at 50th and Quaker. I had already known that for all intents and purposes I had to avoid 19th and Flint at all costs for at least a few hours when it rained. Police cars come from different directions just to warn people away, perhaps because those people see no other choice besides driving through the intersection, and invariably lose their car or soak it badly. The water appears to be bad enough to swallow whole cars; I'm reminded of friends in Japan who hear about impending typhoon and just hunker down and stay home for days on end. That option is not open to me, but I'm on a bicycle, so I've begun to plan alternate routes, and there aren't many; there are actually playas wherever one turns.

Now I don't want to slam the city's sewer system, because tearing up whole roads for months or years at a time isn't necessarily even possible. Part of the reasoning is that it rains so rarely that comprehensive million-dollar plans for managing these rains is not really cost-effective. In many other ways the city seems to be well-planned; it's easy and safe to get across town, and they always take out the garbage. I've also noticed that they basically leveled a whole area north of Broadway; much of it is now fields but there is a lot of fairly new housing up there and a kind of boulevard that, like Broadway, doesn't seem to be getting a whole lot of action. Their rebuilding of the city ("revitalizing") was not entirely successful, I can see, but I can also see that a lot of love and care has gone into trying to make this a more habitable, pleasant place to live.

What makes a playa into a playa is that the water has nowhere to go, so it becomes a lake on the plains that just sits there, becomes stagnant, and eventually evaporates. There is one theory that "estacado", the so-called "stacked" or "escarpmented" plain of llano estacado, was actually estancado or "stagnant", which would lend a touch of irony to our idea of the plains as a nice place to live.

But I've been thinking a lot about one naturalists' assessment of why we no longer have water in the aquifer. He said that our downfall was getting rid of the buffalo, who wallowed in the lowlands, thus making mud wallow areas where rain water would work its way naturally down into the water table. My question is this: is he right? Do we actually lose a lot of water to evaporation, that we need down there? This of course is a question for the entire plains area to answer, and do something about, but we, Lubbock, as the biggest city on the plains, could lead in figuring out creative solutions to making sure rain water, what little we get, goes back where it belongs.

So, you ask, am I suggesting mud wallows, with buffalo, in the middle of the city, at corners like 19th and Flint? Well, that would be a little extreme, but, remember, there are lots of medium paths. Any run-off system would be better than what we have now, and there are systems like French drains that do essentially the same thing without making people actually live next to buffalo. People seem to like these raised roadways like the exit ramps of the Marsha Sharp, one of which took me way up over Lubbock the other day, a fine view, but with no place to pull over; you might protest that these are lousy places for cars to break down. Yes, but four-foot floods are lousy places to have to go through, when you need to get somewhere. I say, if you have a crucial intersection that everyone needs, that plays an integral role in traffic flow through the city, consider raising the road, and making wallow-type arrangements that naturally take in some of this water, and get it out of our hair. We water our grass enough, so that we aren't really falling short in the evaporation department. But our water table needs a hand. One long-term way of ensuring our survival out on this windy arid plain, is to hang onto what little water we get, and not set it to the winds.