The title of this recently completed memoir comes from the opening of a 1952 novel, THE WORKS OF LOVE, by Wright Morris. “Where rivers run sand,” he wrote, “something in man begins to flow.” Only a writer who grew up west of the Hundredth Meridian and was imprinted by a large, open, arid landscape could write such a sentence. “In the dry places,” Morris also wrote, “men begin to dream.” My book begins as I am following the sinuous curves of one of those dry, meandering streams. I had done this often in my explorations of wild western terrain. But this time, I was exploring the Little Beaver, the dry creek I grew up on. My plan was to begin here, at the old farm, and continue following the creek until I arrived at its outlet in the Republican River. I had never ventured that far in my childhood, but I’d recently read about the springs that used to dot the Little Beaver. These oases along otherwise dry creeks and the region's few spring-fed rivers had made plains travel possible not only for the early pioneers, but all the way back to Folsom Man and the end of the last ice age. I was eager to find one of those springs in order to reassure myself that my family and other farmers who irrigated out of the underlying Ogallala Aquifer had not drained the surface of every last drop. It was my responsibility to file the water reports for my family’s operation, and during the prior year, we’d pumped over 200 million gallons out of the aquifer. This was not an unusual amount for an irrigated farm in the area. But whatever I did or didn’t find would be commentary on my family, an indicator of the price the land was paying for our comfort. "Please let me find you," I prayed. "Let you still be there." I did find a spring that day. While I was sitting in the shade of a cottonwood tree beside it, a truck came into the pasture pulling a stock trailer. Talking with the driver, I discovered that he liked many of the same books I did and that he shared my passion for unfarmed grasslands. Soon, I would try to make him into the solution to a problem I had never allowed myself to consciously contemplate.  How was I going to follow my deceased father’s first commandment, Hang onto your land!, while also adhering to my environmental principles? At present, my agent, Emma Sweeney, is circulating WHERE RIVERS RUN SAND to publishers, and we hope to see it released in 2013.