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VICKIE STURGEON: The following edition of the Poet's Perspective is presented as it was broadcast over KRSW's regional magazine, Home for the Weekend. The Poet's Perspective was funded in part by the Minnesota Humanities commission.

JOE PADDOCK: For a few billion years, the rain and the snow and the hail fell over what was to become these prairies. Then the glaciers. Patient pendulum, 20,000 or 30,000 years to the swing. Came and went and left lumps of ice in moraine, which became sparkling lakes. And great inland seas of meltwater leaned against their melting southern faces. And deep underground, huge bodies of water began to float in porous rock.

Then, for a good many hundreds of millions of years, a thin rain of life, invisible to the naked human eye, had there been such, began to flow through these waters. And this rain of life in the joy and joke of time took a long, slow leap into lizards, which dwarfed strange trees. And then how many? Hundreds of millions of years of migrations winging north and again south. The ducks and geese and swans and cranes climbing the air, crying their love of the sky and of that water, which winked and flashed back to them, which teemed with fish and otters, beaver and make.

Then for just a bit of time, men and women. First, the Indians, then the whites, bellied down at the creeks and drank water sweet and clean as the prairie air. They drank and bathed in that water, listened to its chuckle and its waves slapping rich shores. Men and women saw their faces and their souls mirrored in still water. Then, a little less than one lifetime back, man began to rearrange the water. Water was too abundant. Man couldn't travel in a straight line. He couldn't grow crops everywhere.

SPEAKER: I wouldn't even walk through mud like this at home.

SPEAKER: You can manage that water properly.

SPEAKER: But this? This is terrible.

SPEAKER: Yeah, that's it. What are they going to do tomorrow? We don't have to use any more water than absolutely necessary to irrigate. And secondly, to increase its chances of getting down and recharging that aquifer. We're talking about six inches--

SPEAKER: We are gathered here this evening on a special occasion.

SPEAKER: --of precipitation.

SPEAKER: This is a special worship service.

SPEAKER: Before we start to get in--

SPEAKER: And usually when we have such a service--

SPEAKER: I wouldn't give [INAUDIBLE] for irrigation, because it's no good in this country.

SPEAKER: Why not?

SPEAKER: 'Cause there ain't enough water. They'll drain the country.

SPEAKER: So it is good, dear Christian friends. It is very good that you and I gathered together here in Fulda in this special prayer service. The Lord of all, open the windows of heaven and send forth thy showers of blessing. We have prepared the soil--

SPEAKER: Said that if the DNR goes ahead and approves the permit and that there may be some kind of reaction from the people in the area to the point where some of the irrigation equipment would be damaged or destroyed, what do you say to that?

SPEAKER: Well, this is something I have no control over--

SPEAKER: Inches of rainfall a year to grow a crop. The curve, the crest of it is in May and June when you need it for the growing season. So far this year, we've had two inches of rain.

SPEAKER: Everybody has this 100 bushel goal in sight. Maybe we better whittle back to 75. We better have rain next week.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

SPEAKER: --three inches of rain in the summer.

SPEAKER: I guess I would like to see snow right now, so to speak, insulate the ground.

SPEAKER: But I think if it shut off now--

SPEAKER: But also, the ground is dry enough that it's not-- the ground itself is not freezing. Hard and solid, like

SPEAKER: Thunder people--

SPEAKER: Would be like a cement block.

SPEAKER: Control the water. Here's old Fred Bleck talking about those first ditches.

FRED BLECK: I'd say they went in around 1912 or '14 around in there. I remember when I was a kid and that big county ditch went through. Those big dippers, they'd float them. You'd have to start out with a lot of water, see. And then you'd keep going. And they dropped the scoop on the ground and pulled themselves forward. It was only a half mile away from us. And we kids, we'd go down and ride on it.

Oh, I tell you, that was something when that big ditch came through there. Everything is tiled out now. My home place out there, what my dad bought, that was a big slew on the northwest corner of the quarter. And there was one on the southwest quarter. That was 160 acres. But they only farmed about 100 acres of it. Now you can go out there, and that's all drained out. They farm it from one end to the other.

The potholes are gone. The potholes are gone. All but one for every 1,000 that once laughed cattails in the wind. Whole lakes. Whole lakes are gone. Swan and butler, Berry and brant. No longer glitter and flash to the great migrations as they wane in the fall skies. Wet year and dry. The tile drinks the rain and runs it clean to the straightened creeks.

And woe to the man. Woe to the man who bellies down at the edge of that creek to drink deep of its water. If the poison doesn't get him, the fertilizer will. Oh, the corn grows tall and the corn fields roll in an endless flood. But the water ain't good. Old Fred says, how long did it take to get this area drained out? Well, as far as that goes, I couldn't tell you. They're still draining. By golly, even this last summer, there was just a lot of tile put in. Oh, I'll tell you, this country has changed. Well, sometimes I think things is going too fast. Something is going to break some of these days.

[DRAINAGE SOUNDS]

JOE PADDOCK: When the poet uses a poem or uses water in a poem, a pool or a stream or something like that, I think he's implying other things. Like he might be talking about birth. Again and again. I think a pool of water implies or symbolizes the unconscious mind out of which our conscious thoughts flow, out of which our deep energies flow. Or--

NANCY PADDOCK: The source of all life.

JOE PADDOCK: Right. There is this other thing that I think we all are aware of in poetry or in water symbolism in poetry, this is a sort of Daoist approach that water, in fact, is the strongest thing of all. It's passive and quiet, but in collaboration with time, it wears all things down.

I think I should say one more thing, too, is that water means these things in the individual poet's work, but it also means these things in our lives when we have it around us. That is, when we see a tranquil pool, a pothole, or a lake in the twilight, it opens up these areas in us in the same way it does when it's described in a poem.

And when these things are gone, these things are out of our life. And so this constant poetry that was existing in our environment that opened up certain things in us, in our daily lives before, now that it's gone, and we have this monoculture of corn. We aren't stimulated in those ways. We have to find it in another way, I guess. And so I think that's one of the major losses.

NANCY PADDOCK: I really think that the sound of waves. The sound of a river flowing over the rocks has a magic thing to us. Maybe we would like to be able to flow like water ourselves. Maybe we would like to be able to drift with our lives and not always be so goal-oriented, not always be trying so hard getting somewhere, succeeding or failing.

JOE PADDOCK: Well, I think all of this, as Nancy talked about, water is a quiet thing that continually finds its own level. And when we find our own personal quietness, it reflects back and forth between the water that we see in our environment, that which we imagine, and a sense of that sort of tranquil balance in ourselves.

And I think that when we live around water, to some extent, it influences us in that particular way. And when we eliminate it from our environment, if we don't find it in another way, then we have that much loss each time.

NANCY PADDOCK: I used to spend some time near the banks of a river. And lots of times, I'd go down and try to just float with the current. And this is about trying to just flow with my life. And the river, of course, is the symbol of time in my life and the energy that carries you along. It's called Losing Ground.

Willows shaking silver

Long grass tossing in the wind

The river, cold, pulled always downward and away

Past sandbars, logjams, trees undercut

And grasping with bare fingers

Their dark hair roots snarled in earth

Drawing out my breath

Stealing sand beneath my feet

The current, stronger than my body, is heavy

Letting go, I am carried in dark arms of the river

To drift and drown in sunlight

JOE PADDOCK: I mentioned the Daoist approach to water as being something that's quiet but endlessly powerful. And I have a quote from Lao Tzu, the Blakney translation, "Most perfect, yet it seems imperfect." And I call this Carried Along.

Not move then by anxiety to do something

How then does one proceed?

Organically, proceed organically

Move the way a plant grows

Never contriving, so much as a single second

Carried along, then, in and with the undercurrent

Consciousness, then, a tiny, unfettered boat of wonder

Again, a very similar short poem. It's called How Strange.

How strange to be stretched along a chain

The events of your life

When in truth, it has always been a quiet pool

With ripples spreading outward

[MICHAEL MARTIN MURPHEY, "SOUTH CANADIAN RIVER SONG"]

(SINGING) Drink life one drop at a time, time

Flow with the stream in your soul, soul

Pour your soul in the river of life, life

Rush to the ocean of God, God

SPEAKER: Next, Nancy Paddock reads Water, a poem by Wendell Berry.

NANCY PADDOCK: I was born in a drought year

That summer, my mother waited in the house

Enclosed in the sun and the dry, ceaseless wind

For the men to come back in the evenings

Bringing water from a distant spring

Veins of leaves ran dry, roots shrank

And all my life, I have dreaded the return of that year

Sure that it still is somewhere like a dead enemy soul

Fear of dust in my mouth is always with me

And I am the faithful husband of the rain

I love the water of wells and springs

And taste of roofs in the water of cisterns

I am a dry man whose thirst is praise of clouds

And whose mind is something of a cup

My sweetness is to wake in the night

After days of dry heat hearing the rain

["EARLY MORNING RAIN" PLAYING] In the early morning rain

With a dollar in my hand

With an achin' in my heart

And my pockets full of sand

Well, I'm a long way from home

And I miss my loved ones so

In the early morning rain

With no place to go

JOE PADDOCK: Nancy used to do rain dances. And she almost never failed. And in one case up in the cabin where I was living in Pine County, Nancy did a rain dance and brought down a 10-inch rain, which was the biggest in the history of Pine County.

And it washed out bridges on either side of us. And we had a very hard time getting out. And another time, there was a tornado was a small part of-- the follow-up of one of her rain dances, so--

NANCY PADDOCK: Well, I did a somersault. That was a big mistake.

JOE PADDOCK: That was the big mistake right there. Yeah, she went down to the river, as a matter of fact, and did a somersault in the water, which she thought maybe would bring rain. But she should have assumed, of course, that there was a tornado inherent in that act.

But I wrote a poem about one of her rain dances. I called it Rain Dance, A True Story.

We had the garden then

And I must have told her a half dozen times

Nano, get your tail off that couch and get out there and do a rain dance

Instead of sitting around with your nose in a book all day

Recognizing, of course, my own lack of power

So in the evening when I mentioned it again

She thinks on it a bit

Knowing there's some dark clouds off to the west

Then gets up and gathers a cup of wiener sticks from our fire pit

And goes over and beats on the bone dry eaves tub

Making a tinny thunder that hurt my ears

Then she drops the sticks and goes bounding

Hunched like a gut shot buck a couple times around the yard

Then drops to her knees and raises her fingers

Wriggling, like rain maybe?

And then she gets up nonchalant

And walks back to the lawn chairs where we were sitting

Well, an hour later, we watched the black clouds scooting and tumbling over the valley

High ones racing in from the Northwest and low ones from the Southeast

And having heard a tornado alert on the radio

I didn't like the look of it, this cross-cutting

And I says, jeez, Nano, all I wanted was a soaker for the garden

She smirks and curls her lip

And all of a sudden, every tree in sight tips

And the branches lift like a dance

Showing the white side of their leaves

And with that win, by god, she's on

As we're racing for the cabin

I'm thinking, it was that one outsized leap

She made over at the edge of the lawn

And I starred in giving her the devil

And for the first time, she's looking nervous herself

As the rain is lashing everything to ribbons

And the roof is starting to leak

But like that, the wind dies and the rain goes gentle

And Nano straightens her feathers

And looks more like the earth lady she is

I edge on over to her and lay her down on the bed

And in an hour, she's snoozing ever so easy

But I'm lying awake, listening to that soaker rain

As I drift back down through the clouds

[NEIL YOUNG, "SEE THE SKY ABOUT TO RAIN"] See the sky about to rain

Broken clouds and rain

Locomotive, pull the train

Whistle blowing through my brain

Signals curling on an open plain

Rolling down the track again

See the sky about to rain

JOE PADDOCK: Here's a poem about last year's drought. It's called It's So Dry.

It's so dry around here

That the soil sucks milk from cows

And kids with bare feet have to keep moving or lose blood

It's so dry around here

That the sky goes around with chapped lips and puckered cheeks

And the seed from last year's corn planting

Has taken to crossbreeding with the cactus down on blue mound

It's so dry around here

That when Billy Holmes sneezes west in Minnesota

A dust cloud lifts and covers half of South Dakota

Why it's so dry around here that the drainage ditches

Are all red-faced with embarrassment

Can't look you in the eye

And the water from that well

That hasn't gone dry

Comes out of the tap, gasping for a drink

Oh, it's terrible dry around here

I think when this land was first being settled out here, we've talked about water being super abundant, too abundant, as a matter of fact. And the oral history project, which we did around Olivia, found out that people thought that it was almost too wet there to live. And here's an example of a story like that.

A man by the name of Harold Dirks, who's in his 80s told me this. He says, when we first got out here, we inherited a bohemian named Steve Kartak. He must have been a man in his 50s at that time. And he was working in the store.

And he told about living on a farm with his folks down around Beacon. Evidently, before the railroad went through there, it went through here. They probably lived in a sod house out there, but he said that he went with his dad one time up to the old mill at Green Lake. They had some big rocks for grinding, you know, flour stuff.

And they came down through here. And they had to go around water and everything-- everywhere. He told us, my dad said to me, Steve, this country here will never be settled, too much water. And that's the approach at that particular time. And the draining from that perspective can be understood more, I think, than now, when a county might have 20 or 30 potholes left, and people are still draining them.

But I've got another couple of little pieces here about how people related to water, again, at the early part of our century. And this was right in the town of Olivia. A little creek went through the town, and everybody that we talked to talked about how lovely that was.

Well, the Methodist church had always stood there. Now, this is Ida Windhorst talked to me about this little creek. Of course, it's a different one. And then there was Beaver Creek runs through Olivia. Right through there, we had bridges we had to cross. It made it look quite different than it does now.

It was a place for kids to skate to in the wintertime. So we had to cross that creek quite a few times in a day. Sometimes it overflowed with the walks. We had to go out in the street to walk. Oh, it was pretty. I've always liked it here. Much nicer than many towns I've seen. I'm not too sure why they cover the creek.

I think it was on account of, they needed that space. You see, so many of these houses are built right on it. Yes, I guess we hated to see it covered. Although we had one boy was drowned at one of the crossings. There's usually a pragmatic response. I mean, maybe in fact, they were taming nature and getting control. Maybe what we're doing now is learning to loosen up on it, I don't know.

I mean, maybe that is a way of looking at it. Mary Cubasch, another woman in her 80s in Olivia, talked quite a lot about this creek. She says, well, there was wooden sidewalks with wild roses growing along the edges. And we had a lovely creek running through the town diagonally from the southeast through to the northwest.

There were many interesting bridges painted red. You remember the kind. And those were grand places for teenagers to stand and look on and talk over all their affairs. And then they put tile in that creek and covered it up. She was really kind of unhappy about the loss of the creek.

It was sort of the artery pulsing through her life of her childhood in a way. And it was tied up with so many good memories of having grown up in Olivia that by covering it up, it was almost like a covering of her childhood, I thought.

NANCY PADDOCK: Northwest winter wind grazes a desert of black fields

The horizon blurs gray with this land that has been taken up

And we are left with sterile clay and stones

This is the black highway to the dust bowl

And the dust years hover just beyond

The narrow memories of men whose farms are strip mines

Just beyond shelterbelts of cottonwoods, bulldozed and burned

Sloughs that held water in their hands plowed under now

Machines pump life from the Earth's heart into cash crops

Line clouds with silver to buy the rain

Lost to us, our birthright squandered in our lust for ease

We steal the future the Earth had put in trust for us

And for our children lost to us

["ROCK ME ON THE WATER" PLAYING]

(SINGING) Oh, people, look around you

The signs are everywhere

You've left it for somebody other than you

To be the one to care

You're lost inside your houses

There's no time to find you now

While your walls are burning

And your towers are turning

I've gotta leave you here

And try to get down to the sea somehow

Rock me on the water

Sister, won't you soothe my fevered brow?

Oh, rock me on the water

I'll get down to the sea somehow

SPEAKER: Nancy's poem, Lost To Us, uses poetic images to express concern over the effects of modern agricultural practices upon the region's watercourses and topsoil. A great many non-poets, of course, are concerned about the same sorts of things. And in the course of our regular public affairs coverage, we've had the opportunity to talk with several of them.

BOB RICKARD: This lake has probably 30 feet of silt in it. And going back to years back, it was a beautiful lake with a sand bottom and probably 35 feet deep. Now today, it's be well, if it's a foot and a half.

SPEAKER: The lake Bob Rickard is referring to is Heron Lake. But it could be any one of dozens of Southwest Minnesota lakes in similar condition. Rickard spoke with Dale Conley in Slayton last winter at a meeting of the Southwest Minnesota Lakes Improvement Association.

One of the organizers of the group is Joel Ramerth of Fulda, who feels we owe it to future generations to keep our lakes from filling in. Dale asked Ramerth how serious the problem is.

JOEL RAMERTH: There is areas where streams enter the lakes that on probing, you can actually determine that there is two-foot, four-foot, even more feet of actual silt, good farmland laying in acreage that would probably approximate 5 to 10 acres in a delta, so to speak. To me, that's bad.

And it's the tragic part of it is, it's somebody's greedy first-class topsoil that he wanted on his farm. And he's probably got to know someplace that's showing clay through it, whereas 30 years ago, it had two-foot of black topsoil there, and now it's down in someone's lake.

SPEAKER: According to Dennis Zabel of the Nobles County Soil Conservation Service, the lakes have been filling in for the last 10,000 years through the process of geologic erosion. According to Zabel, it was happening long before settlers arrived and would have continued if the settlers had never shown up.

But when people did settle in the plains, they plowed under the prairie grass and cut down trees, which had been serving as natural windbreaks. Because of these changes over the last 100 years, man has managed to speed up the erosion process so that the consequences must be faced today.

Joel Ramerth and his group are willing to confront the problems today, and Ramerth thinks one good solution would be better land management.

JOEL RAMERTH: As we have cropped our farmland more intensively, especially row cropped it, we should have educated individuals to realize that contour practices terracing, not only were beneficial to preserving our lakes and our natural resources, but they were also beneficial to the farmer himself.

In this respect, that it not only held his topsoil on his farm where it belongs, but it also held the moisture there when it fell and sparing amounts as it did these last two years.

SPEAKER: The benefits of caring for the soil are easy to understand. And you're not likely to hear an argument against preserving land for future generations. Even so, not everyone practices contour plowing, and not every farm that needs them has terraces to hold soil on the hills. I asked Dennis Zabel why.

DENNIS ZABEL: Probably the biggest reason for not doing some of these practices is the economics. It costs money to put terraces. Terraces have always been a pain in the neck, really, for farming. Back when we had two-row and four-row equipment, it wasn't too bad because we could turn in the middle of a field without much difficulty.

And four-row terraces, even if they weren't parallel, were farmable. Now with six, eight and 12-row equipment, point rows, uneven terraces, nonparallel terraces are almost impossible to farm. So we've attempted on any terrace job in the last few years to make them parallel and make them fit the equipment that the farmer has or plans to have so that he can farm these areas with the least amount of delay possible.

It costs money to apply conservation. We think that it eventually pays for itself. The federal government has supplied some very good incentives for applying conservation. The Soil Conservation Service will provide free engineering, technical assistance. This is all free of charge to the farmer.

We can determine the kind of practices that are needed, or we can determine whether or not a practice is needed on a certain field. The federal government also provides cost-sharing assistance. Up to 75% of the cost of construction work can be had from the federal government, from the ASCS office, for instance, on practices like terraces, waterways.

And there's usually some cost-share on establishing a new contour system. And like I say again, it's an expensive proposition. It can cost thousands and thousands of dollars to apply a complete conservation program on a farm.

SPEAKER: Dennis Zabel of the Nobles County Soil Conservation Service.

SPEAKER: Besides siltation, another major problem with the lakes in this region is that of the excessive growth of microscopic plant life. And most of us in this region have seen and smelled the thick green soup that many prairie lakes become by around mid-summer. Vickie Sturgeon recently visited the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory in Milford and spoke with its director, Richard V. Boberg, about this problem.

RICHARD BOBERG: In Northern Minnesota, the water that runs into a lake runs across gravel, rocks, and pine needles. And that's not very rich. In Northern Iowa and Southern Minnesota, the water runs across that black prairie soil, full of plant nutrients. Therefore, most of the lakes in Southern Minnesota and Iowa are fairly rich with algal life because they're shallow and because they receive this fertilizer from the soil.

Of course, modern agriculture adds more fertilizer, a great deal more. And most of the lakes that are very green now were not that green 100 years ago because modern agriculture and runoff has really added a lot of fertilizer to these lakes. And therefore, they grow like a crop grows and the respond to this fertilizer.

The other thing that's happened is that the land has become drained of wetlands, the marshes and sloughs. This area was once about half prairie and about half slough. And those slough waters held the water. And this margin of this lake here and most lakes around here were dotted with these sloughs.

And where there was water flowing downhill at the water's edge, there was a marsh of some kind. Now, those marshes held the water, used up the nutrients from the soil, and grew beautiful, gorgeous masses of cattails. But that enrichment didn't reach the water, which then percolated through the wetlands into the lake.

Now we have destroyed almost all of those. And this means that water flows directly off the surface of the land or down through the soil and into the lake without stopping to be cleared by the wetlands. So the clearing of marshes has been another big factor. Most of us believe in increasing the enrichment in terms of plant nutrient in these lakes.

JOE PADDOCK: Richard Boberg of the Iowa Lakeside Laboratory. Earl Rose is president of the Okoboji Protective Association, an organization formed several years ago to combat the degradation of the Iowa Great Lakes and surrounding countryside. Rose is disturbed that some farmers are apparently unwilling to incur the costs of adopting the conservation practices, which would curb topsoil runoff and the excessive siltation and fertilization of the area's lakes.

EARL ROSE: Many of the farm groups, and this is sad but true, the farm groups like the farm bureau, you would think they would be very strong for conservation, keeping the soil where it belongs rather than up in the air when a high wind or down in the lakes after a heavy rain because they're losing soil and it costs them. And it costs the whole world. Would we lose a ton of topsoil, that's gone forever.

And this is the lifeblood of our whole country, is the topsoil in this country. When it's gone, we're going to go with it. But it's just unfathomable how the farm bureau could oppose the conservation of the soil. And what, of course, they're opposing is some of the proposals that maybe this will have to be mandatory. At the present time, the federal government will finance 50% of any of the construction work, like terraces or farm ponds and things like this.

And the State Soil Conservation Department will put in another 25% of the cost. I mean, 75% that could be borne by somebody besides the farmer to protect his own land. But really, that isn't his land. He may have a deed entitled to it, but it isn't his because he isn't going to live forever. And he's going to pass it on to his children or to somebody else. And it should be passed on in as good a shape as he got it or better.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

NANCY PADDOCK: You were talking about images. You put your pain or your anger into images, words put together that make a picture. And I guess when I was seeing all of the drainage ditches out here, it seemed to me that-- especially the ones that aren't finished yet, they have the big mounds of earth all along.

It seemed like a battlefield to me with battle trenches. And that the battle, of course, was against nature. And then there were tile that were spread out along those ditches. The little-- they look like broken bones. And so the whole thing then became this terrible battlefield.

And then the end of that poem is, then the graves of all that died into the soil are robbed by the light, fingers of the wind. And I guess that's the way I feel about it.

JOE PADDOCK: I guess most of southwestern Minnesota is in the Missouri River drainage system-- or the Mississippi River drainage system, at least anything that goes into the Minnesota River. And this is called as Mississippi. And I wrote it while I was sitting on the banks of the Mississippi River about five years ago.

Heavy flow stinking, quiet through shrieks

Draining sores of the heartland, industrial pus

Sleek, quick things

Otters, fish have been filtered

Flock down a tube to the burning bed

This long wave shoulder shrug of the river flows past

A bad inch of sedimentary rock

What I did is draw off, I think, at the end from my criticism and suggest the largeness of time. And finally, I guess, maybe our presence here on the land in Southwest Minnesota might be equivalent to the movement of the glaciers over 20,000 or 30,000-year period, where they come down and scrape everything off and come back again.

Sadie Push, a woman in her 80s, told me a little bit about early Olivia water. And out in the prairies, good drinking water wasn't always available to everybody. And Olivia always had a problem with water, and she's talking about it. We had a water tower right on the premises, there where the day activity center is.

But it's been taken down just lately, right there on the corner. Then they built this new one out of ways. I was told, when they took the old one down here, of course, that hasn't been used in years that there were a lot of dead pigeons inside the tank. I don't know how they got there, but the water in this town has always been a problem.

At one time when you went to draw water in a glass, you would think you were drinking milk. It was the air in there, methane. Yes, you could set it afire. You put it in a bottle and put your finger over the top and shake it. Then you release your finger. You could strike a match to it and it would puff. I don't think it's too good yet.

Lambert Visser adds a little bit to that methane thing in the Olivia water. It goes this way-- Lambert has a Dutch accent.

I remember when my brother was here in this country

To that time, we put a 50-gallon barrel out there

And tied it to a cooler, pumped it just about full

Opened a faucet and lit a match

The old barrel went up to the ceiling

It's a good thing we got out of the way

That was the first and last time we tried that, too

Barrel bounced out at both ends

Used like an egg, then we got through

SPEAKER: Is that a true story or is that-- is that a bit of an exaggeration?

JOE PADDOCK: I've accepted it as a true story. Who knows?

This, again, is in the oral history of Olivia, the things we know best. And I was talking with two men about 50 years old, about things they did when they were growing up during the '30s. It was Jack Donnelly and Dick Hunsey. And Jack says here--

Another thing we did a lot of was swimming

I remember swimming out here in the gravel pit

Three miles south and a mile west

We used to go out there on our bicycles

I remember skinny dipping in there, Dick

They had a drag line in there

And they were taking gravel out of there, then

There were holes in there, 40, 50-feet feet deep in that day, Jack

I remember diving into that thing and going down and down and down

As far as you could go

You could never see nothing

And then it would be cold

There'd be places you know that just

Well, it was spring-fed, Dick

John Davey owned that

And he figured he could pump the water out of it

So they put a big pump in there, here some years back

And it got down to a point it dropped to 6, 8 feet

And the water was coming in there just as fast as they could pump it out

And the wells started going dry up three, four miles away

So they quit

It was a vein, a spring vein, Jack

We swam in there quite often until

Was it Ray Holliday that was working for a farmer drowned in there?

And that ended it for the rest of us

But I think it describes how the groundwater that we all use is interconnected and that you can't take a lot of it in one place without frequently damaging it for someone else. And when we get into things like irrigating the land, it might well be that someone's self-interest might really cut into someone else's just survival.

SPEAKER: Irrigation, that's another topic in this land of often marginal water supplies, which can bring people to intensities of emotion, which the poet might well envy. Recently, the Oahe irrigation project over in South Dakota has been in the news again, primarily as a result of President Carter's request that the Congress eliminate funding for the project and the persistent efforts of some South Dakotans to get it reinstated.

John Morel spent some time this past week looking into the way things stand now. And here is his report.

JOHN MOREL: The fight between pro and anti-Oahe project forces still continues because no one is willing to admit that the project is actually dead. Supporters of Oahe, like South Dakota State Senator Curt Jones, say that the issue is too important to give up.

CURT JONES: We really, if just in the last two or three years began to see the values of irrigation. And just within the last two or three years, partly because of drought, our cities have realized what drought can do to their water supplies and so forth. And I think we've been brought to realize how important water is to us.

But I think with everything that's happened now in regards to the Oahe project, anything that we do is going to be well-planned and probably pretty economically sound before we start on it.

JOHN MOREL: Jones is director of the Oahe task force. And recently, that task force met with Interior Department officials in Washington in an attempt to find some way to keep the project going. Interior officials said that support from farmers affected by the irrigation is critical. But the problem is that apparently most farmers don't want the project.

These anti-Oahe residents are represented by the Oahe Conservancy Subdistrict Board. And the board has objected to the Oahe project, saying that farmers would have to lose more than 100,000 acres of farmland to project facilities in order to irrigate 190,000 acres.

South Dakota Governor Richard Kneip has suggested convening a special legislative session to set up a statewide referendum designed to show Washington that South Dakotans, as a whole, do support the Oahe project. But not everyone favors the referendum. Oahe Conservancy board chairman John Sia explains.

JOHN SIA: Now, to tell the people in the 15.5 county area that you're going to have a statewide vote on something that they are going to be impacted for, is something they have to pay taxes for, is, in the words of Senator Curt Jones, who's chairman of our Hawaii task force that the legislature set up, he says it's just ramming, trying to ram a project down the necks of unwilling people.

And in that sense, I doubt very much whether the governor is going to give very much encouragement from state legislators over the county, or rather, over the state for calling a special session to deal with a referendum for the entire state.

JOHN MOREL: Sia also said that any referendum should be confined to the 15.5 county area affected by the Oahe project. So far, Governor Kneip hasn't made a decision about the legislative session. And it would still be months before any referendum could be held.

In the meantime, pro-Oahe people are gathering their forces. Recently, full-page ads appeared in South Dakota newspapers urging people to attend a rally in support of Oahe in Pierre on August 16. Supporters of Oahe admit that there's little chance of getting funds this year, but they're hopeful that they can gather enough congressional backing in the next session.

But Washington probably won't give Oahe any money at all unless some changes are made in the project. I asked task force director Jones what some of those changes were.

CURT JONES: I think one of the maybe most important things that should be looked at harder is the possibility for more canal-side irrigation. So from the original pumping plant, as we come out across the eastern part of the state-- at the present time, there are very few people who are losing property land, in some cases, their homes, farms states to the project, who will even be able to irrigate out of the canal as the water comes through.

And a number of us think that the possibility of more canal-side irrigation should be looked at. It's rather hard if we're-- if we're going to build that project,

JOHN MOREL: The anti-Oahe forces don't believe that any modifications in existing Oahe plans will do them much good. Instead, they have an idea of their own. Board chairman Sia explains.

JOHN SIA: These modifications that-- the major modifications cannot be done within the framework of the original authorization of the project. Only very plastic kinds could be done. Now, if we were talking about converting the system from open ditches to pipes, which is a very popular concept, one that we would find acceptable, the problem, of course, is cost when you're 231 miles away from the source of water.

Now, if you're 12 miles away from the source of water, as the projects that we envision would be very practical in South Dakota because we understand there's over 600,000 acres of irrigable land within 12 miles of the Missouri River from the pier to the North Dakota line. Well, this is three times the amount of land that be irrigated by the Oahe project. And it's within 12, 15 miles of the Missouri River.

So you see how this project, in the eyes of President Carter and the eyes of local people, has become a very absurd.

JOHN MOREL: Absurd or not, the pro-Oahe group vows to fight on. And as long as they do, the anti-Oahe forces will battle with them. I'm John Morel.

[LIGHT MUSIC]

JOE PADDOCK: The bottles are gone

All but one for every thousand that once laughed cattails in the wind

Whole lakes, whole lakes are gone

Swan and butler, Berry and Brant

No longer glitter in the flash to the great migrations as they wane in the fall skies

Wet year and dry, the tile drinks the rain and runs it clean

To the straightened creeks and woe to the man

Woe to the man who bellies down at the edge of that creek

To drink deep of its water

If the poison doesn't get him, the fertilizer will

Oh, the corn grows tall

And the corn fields roll in an endless flood

But the water ain't good

Old Fred says, how long did it take to get this area drained out? Well, as far as that goes, I couldn't tell you. They're still draining. By golly, even this last summer, there was just a lot of tile put in. I'll tell you, this country has changed. Well, sometimes I think things is going too fast. Something is going to break some of these days.

[LIGHT MUSIC]

VICKIE STURGEON: You've been listening to the poet's perspective, a series of nine programs funded in part by the Minnesota Humanities commission. The program featured Southwest Minnesota regional poets, Joe and Nancy Paddock. And the series was produced in the Worthington studios of Minnesota Public Radio station, KRSW. Staff members at KRSW responsible for the project were Kim and Judy Hodgson. And I'm Vickie Sturgeon.

[SOFT MUSIC]