Two years ago, in what now looks to be a great feat of prescience, my wife recommended I read a new book that was abuzz in the Social Sciences, Lucas Bessire’s Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains. At the time, I think I met the recommendation with a fair amount of skepticism. What could an anthropologist, publishing with Princeton University Press tell me about the aquifer and its deleterious effects on southwest Kansas that I didn’t already know, that I hadn’t already lived?
The aquifer's steady depletion is an ever-present reality that we’ve all lived. Those childhood "Water Conservation Days," the high school science teacher's hushed warnings, the rivers turned to dusty nostalgia - we've felt the wells run dry. As Bessire observes, when vital resources drain, "depletive industry flourishes along these fault lines that turn us against the future, against each other, and against ourselves." (145). Through personal reflections and family histories, Bessire shows us many fault lines in our lands, with our neighbors, and in ourselves. He reminds us of the millennia of stewardship of these lands by the Indigenous peoples who inhabited them and were violently and systemically removed from them, he reflects on his family’s impacts on water depletion in Grant County, he takes to task the double speak and the cold and illogical economics that justify draining resources with little regard for the relatively few who find make their home in the tumble weeded country. And, he does all of this while wielding a spare and searing prose reminiscent of late era Cormac McCarthy.
For many years, my emotional resonances with SW KS revolved around the ecologically apocalyptic. The aquifer, and even more specifically the Arkansas River, had become a cherished metaphor for all of my own complicated feelings of home. In this, Bessire’s book hit me, and it hit me hard. The sedimenting of his personal and familial narratives with those of the lands which made him were so beautifully conceived and spoke truth to elements of my own identity I’d long let run dry. In describing the conception of his journey, Bessire writes, "To say I was making a journey to rediscover my home seemed sappy and abstract, even though in some ways it was true. How could I have articulated that I wished to come closer to the mystery of the aquifer in search of some unknown kinship that might be running out with it?" (12). To answer his question, I’m not sure exactly how this came to be articulated, but I found many unknown kinships, and many (admittedly sappy and abstract) rediscoveries within the pages.
Ultimately, I just hope that writing this book was as healing for Bessire as it was for me in reading it. To translate the complexities of human behaviors and corporate institutions at odds with sustainable life in the area is the work of an incredibly skilled scholar and anthropologist. But as seems must have been the case in many of his interviews, after some time, Bessire’s academic orientation faded to the background for me, and he became another person that the Plains had both birthed and broken in all those familiar ways. Perhaps unlike any other book I’ve encountered in my adult life, this book dropped my guard, it made me vulnerable, and it made me something I didn’t even know was possible–it made me homesick.
