I left Kansas when I was eighteen, but returned in my early thirties and lived for awhile back on my family’s farm. During that period, I voiced many critical opinions about my father’s environmental practices. He should be more sparing in his use of herbicides and pesticides. He shouldn’t eat the fish he caught in his tailwater pond, which collected the chemical laden run-off from his irrigated fields. Most importantly, he shouldn’t irrigate, since the water for this purpose came from the Ogallala, a huge aquifer underlying much of the Great Plains. The aquifer was already seriously depleted by then, the middle eighties. My father – ol' Harold, as I called him – enjoyed getting a rise out of me almost as much as I enjoyed telling him what he should do. “That’ll be your problem,” he used to say whenever I complained that the water would one day run out. “I got mine!”

Life has a funny way of casting back on us, through the mirror, all that we disapprove of in others. My father died in 1997, leaving my mother, brother and me not only the farming enterprise he’d built over the course of his lifetime, but responsibility for the environmental travesties that are the natural by-product of modern Great Plains farming. I found within a short time that no easy solutions exist. Even if the other family members shared my sense of guilt, which they don’t, our choices would be limited. If we divested, we would pass the deed to our irrigated, chemically saturated soil onto others who would continue to pump and spray. It is possible that we could go back to growing dryland wheat, which provided adequately for us up until the late 1960’s when ol’ Harold started irrigating, but we worry that the severe drought of the last few years signals permanent climate change. Even if rain started falling again, converting from irrigated back to dryland farming would cut our income potential by two-thirds.

I’m calling this book The Whole Song because the romance my family and most western Kansans have with groundwater goes like a country and western song. We fell in love with irrigation when it was first promoted as a way to farm successfully in our semi-arid region, but we’re going to wind up crying in the end. The book narrates my attempts to either reconcile myself with or cast off my new role as an environmental marauder . These include a love affair with another native and my conflicts and conversations with a returning character from One Degree West – ol’ Harold, whose dying didn’t seem to impair his ability to get under my skin. My attempts also lead to conversations with neighbors and water bureaucrats, treks along the dry streambeds in search of the few springs that still bubble to the surface, and searches through written histories for insight into the land’s previous owners, the Cheyenne Indians, whose eviction enabled our possession. They had, in their turn, dispossessed the Comanches. As I explain in “They Came to Stay,” a chapter that draws its title from the name of our county’s family history volumes, “Everyone comes to stay, but no one gets to.”