“The planners know this, so it’s kind of a delicate balancing act to con people into thinking they’ve had a voice in the matter without letting ’em screw up the big dreams. That’s why the local leaders sit in the audience at these hearings and pretend they’re just regular citizens. They’re also watching for any real troublemakers so they can identify them and report to the main propeller heads, who are from out of town.
And I can tell you, Carlisle McMillan got their attention right away, because Carlisle, unlike most of the sheep, is not cowed by anybody, seems to me. More than that, he absolutely hates experts. And understand, experts are the key to the entire scam of the type we’re talking about here. At the hearings, ordinary people ask sort of simple questions, like ‘Couldn’t Denver find another source of water rather than damming up the Little Sal and pumping all the way from the high plains to the eastern slope? It’s a pretty good fishing river, and some of us would hate to see it spoiled.’
“At that point, the suits go into high gear. It’s all been intricately choreographed, ’cause there’s too much profit riding on this to leave anything to chance. The moderator of the hearing says something like ‘I’ll turn that question over to our expert, Larry Software, a PhD in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technocracy with two thousand years of experience in such matters, a staff of four hundred and sixty graduates of Ivy League schools, and a computer bigger’n this town.’
“Dr. Larry, who’s at the front of the room, has about twenty volumes bound with plastic spirals within arm’s reach. These are collectively called The Report. Expert Larry rises, puts his hand on the stack, and says, ‘I hope all of you have had time to read and consider The Report. On pages one sixteen through two ninety of volume twelve is the benefit-cost analysis for the project. Of course, in volumes fifteen and sixteen, along with some useful notes in the two-volume appendix to The Report, is our multiple-criteria decision model, in which we have included our set of alternatives, our prioritized criteria, and the utility weights we have assigned to these criteria, along with estimated outcomes of each alternative in light of the criteria. Oh yes, you may also have noticed our discount rate justification in volume eleven. Using all of this, we ran one hundred and eighty-two million simulations on our giant Crawdad 290FXZ computer, constantly adjusting and testing our probability estimates and examining the model’s sensitivity to parameter changes. Clearly, the only feasible alternative is to dam the bejesus out of the Little Sal so the people of Denver can have all the water they need for car washing and theme parks.’ ”
The old man shook his head. “I ask you now: Is the citizen who likes to fish the Little Sal smarter than Larry Software, his Crawdad 290FXZ, and his cast of hundreds? Hell, no. In the course of Larry’s mental enema, our fisherman is more than sorry he ever got to his feet. He hasn’t read The Report ’cause he didn’t know it existed, and anyway, he’d rather be bass fishing than plowing through that stuff, so he wouldn’t have read it even if he had known it existed. But he stands there, nodding from time to time so he won’t look too stupid, all the while being secretly aware that what Dr. Larry’s really saying is, ‘I’m sticking this project right up your sweet ass, you little toad, so sit down and shut up.’
“Besides that, the governor is all for it, which the moderator mentions about every three minutes, so whatever project we’re talking about must be all right. The governor wouldn’t be governor if he didn’t know what he was doing, right? Also, some folks feel generally uncomfortable in opposing things a smart man like the governor supports, as if it were sort of unpatriotic to behave that way, and they’ll buy the whole shitaree, regardless of what it is, on that basis alone.
“Trouble was, as I said before, Carlisle McMillan was not awed by experts. Quite the opposite. He’d seen these counterfeit proceedings before in California. So when the newspaper our state counts on lifted off in ecstasy about the new highway, Carlisle took one look at the maps on the second page and knew he had trouble. In addition to a general map showing the proposed route from New Orleans to Calgary, our reporter included a series of smaller maps that broke the state down into sections. And there it was: a nice, fat line right through Carlisle’s thirty acres northwest of Salamander and the grove across the road from him.
“Accompanying the maps was some of the most breathless prose you’d care to read, courtesy of the state’s Department of Economic Development, describing in some detail the almost overwhelming benefits the new road would bring us. One main idea underlying the project was to provide a highway link between the terminus of an oil pipeline that would be built from as yet unexplored Arctic oil fields all the way to Calgary. Then tanker trucks would haul the cheap crude from Calgary to refineries in Texas and New Orleans, the economies of which had fallen on hard times. Boy, that was brilliant. Use lots of oil to haul oil, creating your own demand in providing the supply.
“Of course, there were other much advertised benefits, such as getting farmers’ grain and livestock to markets and providing more incentives for giant Tokyo-based electronics corporations to locate plants out here, which, as we all know, they was just itching to do, except for the lack of a modern road system and rattlesnakes crawling around on the sunburnt greens of our nine-hole golf course. Tourism, it was suggested, would explode, as people desiring to visit Salamander and its many attractions, such as Leroy’s and the post office, could now get here more easily.
“Some even mentioned the possibility of putting a collection of boutiques in Lester’s TV and Appliance building, if the old codger—that being me—living on the second floor could be evicted. And these budding entrepreneurs were assured by lawyer Birney that, indeed, residents of Codgerdom have no rights of any kind regarding anything, and eviction was no problem.
“I had that part all figured out, however, and wasn’t worried in case it came to eviction by force. I had a plan. Among the souvenirs collected during my waltz across Europe in the winter of ’44 was a live hand grenade. Did it still work? I was guessing it did. Even if it didn’t, I figured the eyeball shock factor would be almost as good as an actual explosion.
“I could visualize it all, dwelt on it. The plan was as follows. I’d be sitting on the steps to my apartment, grenade concealed in my lap, pin pulled out. I’d be holding down the lever on the grenade, and I’d have a string leading from the grenade to a broomstick hidden behind me. I estimated Fearless Fred Mumblypeg, town cop and eviction master, would be in the lead, coming up the stairs with lawyer Birney right behind him, followed in turn by all the right-thinking commercial wizards about to lose their financial asses on a dumb idea.
“I imagined hearing Fred’s voice, ‘We have a warrant . . .’ Everybody would be packed in the stairwell behind him, looking up at me. Just as he’d get the words going, I’d swing out my little present on the broom handle so it was dangling right in front of them and yell ‘Shit on a stick!’ I also thought about following that with ‘Kill ’em all, let God sort it out!’ My old platoon sergeant used to say that second part, though I admitted to myself it was a little overused, and I was hoping I’d think of something better at the moment of truth when the storm troopers came up my stairs. I figured I would, since I’d be watching Fred go to his knees while lawyer Birney was trampling the fat red blazers behind him, and all of that would have been inspirational, I’ll tell you that.
“But there I go digressing again. The point is that the list of good things expected to flow from this great highway was virtually endless and was repeated almost every day by our state newspaper, supplemented on Wednesdays by a semiliterate piece in the weekly Salamander Sentinel, making even more extravagant promises, though it printed the maps upside down two weeks running.
“Now, the local excitement over what they named the Avenue of the High Plains was understandable, since Salamander was dying. I’d been conducting a death watch for fifteen years, though the decline had set in long before I began my observations. The real issue was whether anything could be
done to save the patient. My personal opinion, and understand I ain’t no expert at all on these matters, was that nothing could be done. We were too far gone for resuscitation, kind of like a cinder: not quite ashes, but incapable of further combustion.
“And I felt bad about that. Salamander was a pretty good place at one time. Still is, in some ways. But it’d become increasingly clear to me that we’d borrowed our days out here ever since Eble Olson drove a stake into the ground in 1896 and named the town after the Little Sal, which in turn had been named by the horse soldiers. Those latter fellas swept through here waving the flag of Manifest Destiny and pretty much decimating the original inhabitants, clearing things out for the white settlers.
“In terms of historical context, I should point out the Indians were gutsy, but they weren’t no match for the thirty-seven-millimeter revolving cannon invented by one Benjamin Berkeley Hotchkiss of Watertown, Connecticut, or the rapid-fire gun designed by Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling. On top of the firepower, there were broken treaties and land grabs that’d make Genghis Khan blush, not to mention the missionaries working to convince the heathen that Christianity was their true path to salvation, whatever that was.
“What really got the Indians, finally, was that we just took away their main resource by killing all the buffalo, completely wiping out the last herd of northern bison up on the Cannonball River in 1863 using the combined forces of the military, mercenaries, and the Sioux’s old enemies from the woodlands, the Cree. Heck, the government even gave medals to the buffalo hunters for their role in helping to put down the Indian threat.
“Still, I remember what things used to be like when I was a boy out here in what at one time was called the West River Country. ’Specially I remember Saturday nights. The farmers and ranchers would come to town, make a stop at the local produce house to sell eggs or a few chickens for pocket money, then proceed along the street for groceries and haircuts and hardware and what-have-you. We used to call it daughter-and-egg night, since that’s mostly what the farmers brought to Salamander.
“The town band would be playing in the little gazebo down at the park, and people would buy popcorn from the red, white, and blue wagon there, munching away while they listened to ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ and other favorites. Kids’d be running around, old folks’d be talking, and in between was the complicated dance eventually leading to new family formation.
“All the while, however, the clock was ticking and the interest on our note was piling up, though none of us was aware of that. We just took it for granted that things would go on forever in a more or less happy fashion, only getting a little better over time through the miracles of agricultural chemistry and improved farm implements.
“With the band playing its version of ‘Gary Owen,’ which was Custer’s old marching song, and the melodious hum of Main Street on Saturday nights, things seemed pretty good. We didn’t have any idea the tallyman was coming toward us. He was lean and tough and gaunt in the face, but he was a long ways off, and we couldn’t make him out yet.
“Understand, mister, this is triple-hard country. That’s for sure. Thin soil, short grass, and scarce water. The early mapmakers didn’t call this area the Great American Desert for no reason at all. Without the dreams of empire, it probably wouldn’t have ever been settled. But the federal government picked up the flag of Manifest Destiny where the horse soldiers dropped it and handed it off to various fast guys who flipped it around, showing everybody the Jolly Roger on its backside.
“The feds stayed in the game, however, giving us land under various congressional acts, along with subsidies for high-priced irrigation systems and for crops that already were in a condition of surplus. Naturally, being bribed to do something, people tend to do it. And being encouraged to drain aquifers that take maybe a hundred years or more to get filled up again has a tendency to leave the aquifers empty after a time. Similar thing happens with soil when you let it blow away in the wind or wash into the rivers through bad farming practices and overgrazing. Problem is, there’s some fundamental law at work when it comes to water and soil. It goes like this: When it’s gone, there ain’t no more, at least for a long while.
“A professor from an eastern college came out for a visit and said, ‘It’s all over, folks.’ Told us, given what had been done to the land and water, we had maybe thirty years left, no more.
“He proposed turning this part of the Union into something called a ‘buffalo commons,’ the idea being that the feds ought to resettle people out of here, let the towns other than those along main highways just go back to nature, and populate the place with buffalo and other critters that could do a better job of managing the place than humans.
“Personally, I thought it was a pretty good idea. Of course, not everyone felt that way, and some of the boys threatened to resettle the professor if he didn’t get his smart ass back to wherever his league of ivy was located. Bobby Eakins called the professor a head-egg and said all them thinkers were crazier’n shit. Bobby said he himself had been driving around the countryside in his Blazer and plenty of water was gushing from the irrigation systems.
“But the plain truth was that we’d used up the water, pretty well mangled the soil, and generally had caused a shower of destruction on the place. Still, the money from U.S. taxpayers kept on coming to us, for which we were sort of grateful and sort of embarrassed, all at the same time. Everybody knew these subsidies were nothing more than money doled out to people to keep ’em doing what they were doing when our beloved market system said they ought to stop doing what they’re doing. Naturally, we objected to that way of thinking about it, since it sort of smelled like welfare, and we got short fuses out here about welfare chiselers and government interference in general. So we kind of disguise all of this through the use of terms like agricultural programs and farm policy.”
I halted the old man’s historical lecture while I turned over the recording tape. He went to the bathroom and returned with two fresh cups of coffee.
“I always have myself a good chuckle,” he said, “at the debates in Congress over agricultural programs and the arguments involving what they like to call ‘saving the family farm.’ That creates kinda warm, fuzzy pictures in the minds of urbanites. You know, Gramps by the woodstove, chickens pecking around the barnyard, square dancing in the Town Hall on Friday nights, lemonade on the porch swing, the last refuge of old-time values, including something referred to as the real America.
“Actually, to my way of thinking, we’re in the manufacturing business out here and have been for a long time. Pittsburgh makes steel, Seattle builds airplanes, we manufacture grain and meat. No difference between what we do and, say, oil refining or Detroit’s assembly lines. Just visit any big cattle operation or the packing plant over in Falls City and watch ’em shred animals to pieces if you got any doubts about that. Axel Looker, for example, owned two thousand acres and rented another thousand. Axel didn’t have no chickens pecking around his barnyard. Matter of fact, Axel didn’t have no barnyard.
“What he did have was a new prefabbed ranch-style house, some prefabbed metal sheds for his big equipment, and a small forest of prefabbed silver MFS grain bins so he could store his grain and sell it at just the right time. And Axel wasn’t worried, because if grain prices didn’t get to where he wanted ‘em, he just backed down and let the government take it off his hands. If prices did go up, however, he wasn’t obliged to share any excess profits with other taxpayers.
“By the way, Axel’s wife bought their eggs and frying chickens over in Livermore at the Piggly Wiggly, instead of locally at Webster’s Jack and Jill. While she was shopping, Axel would be downtown, checking in at the brokerage office to see how the futures markets were doing. The Farm Bureau in particular doesn’t like to talk about those things, preferring the Hollywood version of the lonely struggling farmer against the greedy banker, all the while the bureau’s supporting programs driving the last few real family farmers and small towns to the wall.
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“Along with farming and ranching, we’re also in the resource extraction business in a funny kind of way. It seems to me that extraction is when you take something out and don’t put anything back. So we’ve been using both soil and water at a clip far exceeding their natural replacement rates. That is, we’re sort of in the mining business as a by-product of our main activities. In this case, we’re mining soil and water. Not too much worry about that, however, ’cause if the soil and water problems got too bad, we were all pretty certain the U.S. taxpayers would want to bail us out to save the family farm, even though we caused the problems in the first place.
“Fortunately, we’ve been pretty good at hiding all of that up until the last few years when some outsiders began asking rather pointed questions about our viability out here. Our congresspersons, however, have been real effective at selling the rest of America on the idea of preserving a bucolic life that don’t exist anymore, maybe never did. It’s a highly useful myth that’s turned into an outright lie.
“Along with that bad news are all the other things that’ve been working against the Salamanders of the world. With agriculture getting bigger and bigger, due partly to the generosity of Congress and their flows of money out here, there are less country folks to produce kids and buy things. People of childbearing age leave, except for a few, and if you ain’t got enough kids, you ain’t got schools. And if you lose your schools, you’ve ripped out the heart of the community. The few remaining kids ride yellow buses long distances to endure what passes for education in these United States. So contrary to popular belief, the money just oozing its way out here don’t help the small towns at all, just the big landowners and the big agribusiness firms. It just seems to go on and on, and it don’t ever get better, only worse.