I left Kansas when I was eighteen, but returned in my early thirties and lived for a while 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 pesticides. He shouldn’t eat the fish he caught in his tailwater pond, which collected the chemical-laden runoff from his irrigated fields. Most importantly, he shouldn’t irrigate, since the water for this purpose came from the Ogallala, the huge groundwater system underlying the Great Plains. The aquifer was already seriously depleted by then, the middle eighties. My father enjoyed getting a rise out of me. “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 industrial farming. I found within a short time that no easy solutions existed. My family didn’t share my guilt. Even if they did, our choices would have been 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 was possible that we could go back to growing dryland wheat, which provided adequately for us up until the late 1960’s, when Dad started irrigating, but we worried that the severe drought of the last few years signaled permanent climate change. Even if rain started falling again, converting from irrigated back to dryland farming would cut our income potential by two-thirds.

The book narrates my attempts to either reconcile myself with or cast off my new role as an environmental marauder. These included a love affair with another native and my conflicts and conversations with my father, whose dying didn’t seem to impair his ability to get under my skin. My attempts also led to conversations with neighbors and water bureaucrats, treks along the dry streambeds in search of the few springs that still bubbled to the surface, and searches through written histories for knowledge of the Cheyenne Indians who had camped beside those springs. Their eviction had enabled our possession. Little did I know that my family’s tenure on the land would also end by the time I typed the book’s final words.