Michener, James A. (189 page)

So there it was, Texas Tech University, with a curriculum of agricultural, mechanical and modest liberal arts programs. Its students were sought after in the oil fields and in Silicon Valley, but what residents like the Cobbs especially appreciated were the cultural programs it sponsored, a string quartet now and then, a choral presentation of an opera—no sets, no C06tumes—or a series of three Shakespearean plays. Challenging lectures were available, with notable conservatives like William Buckley applauded, and farmers like the Cobbs could easily arrange casual meetings with the professors.

But what gratified Nancy Cobb, and attracted her most often to the university, was the unequaled ranch museum it had put together: a collection of houses and buildings assembled from all over the state, showing how ranchers had lived in the various periods. Thirty minutes among these simple structures, with their rifle ports for holding off the Comanche, taught more of Texas history than a dozen books.

One hot afternoon in 1981 when Nancy had taken a group of

visitors from the North to see the open-air museum—it covered many acres—she was standing before one of the box-and-strip houses built by the 1910 pioneers and explaining how the settlers, deprived of any local timber, had imported it precariously from hundreds of miles to the east, and had then used it like strips of gold to shore up their mud-walled huts, and as she talked she began to choke: it must have been so hellish for the women.'

One symposium series gave the Cobbs a lot of trouble, for a lecturer predicted that the day would come, and possibly within this century, when the rising cost of electricity and the constant lowering of the water table would make agriculture on the Western plains uneconomic:

'And 1 do not mean marginally uneconomic. I mean that you will have to close down your wells, abandon your cotton fields, and sell off your gins to California, where their farmers, because of sensible planning, will have water. We would then see towns like Levelland and Shallowater revert to the way they were when the Indians roamed, except that here and there the traveler would find the roots of houses which had once existed and the remnants of towns and villages.

'We could avoid this catastrophe if all the states dependent upon the Ogallala Aquifer united in some vast plan to protect that resource, but all would have to obey the decisions, because any one state, following its own selfish rules and depleting the aquifer, could defeat the strategy-'

Cobb, extremely sensitive to the problem of which he was a vital part, and interested in possible solutions, raised enough donations from local farmers and ranchers to offer Texas Tech funds for conducting a symposium on 'Ogallala and the West,' which attracted serious students from across Texas and representatives of the governments of all the Ogallala states.

It was a gala affair, with Governor Clements giving the keynote address and with two lectures each morning and afternoon on the crises confronting the Western states. As the talks progressed, especially those informal ones late at night, several harsh and inescapable conclusions began to emerge:

. . . The Ogallala was not inexhaustible, and at its present rate of depletion, might cease to function effectively sometime after the year 2010.

. . . Diversion of rivers and especially the snow-melt from the eastern face of the Rockies could be let into it to revitalize it, but such water was already spoken for.

. . . Strict apportionment at levels far below today's usage would prolong its life.

. . . State departments of agriculture were prepared to recommend more than a dozen ways in which farmers and ranchers could use less water.

. . . Texas would soon see the day when it would be profitable to purchase from surrounding states like Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, and perhaps from those as far away as Colorado, entire rivers and streams whose water would be piped onto its thirsty fields. (Delegates from the named states hooted this proposal.)

. . . Commercial desalinization of Gulf waters plus great pipelines west might well be the answer, if nuclear energy were to become available at low rates.

. . . Every state, right now, must organize itself on a statewide basis to ensure the most prudent use of every drop of water that fell thereon.

It was in the working out of this last recommendation, which the conference adopted unanimously, that Cobb learned how divisive a subject this was insofar as Texas water users were concerned, because when the Texas delegation met, these points were stressed by the more active participants:

Ransom Rusk, Longhorn breeder: 'Every word said makes sense. But what we must take steps to ensure is that cattle raisers be allowed to retain the water rights on which they've built their herds, often at great expense.'

Lorenzo Quimper, operator of nine large ranches, some with serious water deficiencies: 'Regulation and apportionment are inescapable, but we must protect the backbone industries of the state, and in them I include ranchin'. Cattle cannot live without water, and from time immemorial their rights have been predominant and must remain so, if Texas is to continue the traditions which made it great, and I must say, unique.'

Charles Rampart, cotton grower, north of Lubbock: 'You need only look at the level of the aquifer year by year to know that something must be done, but the prior rights of our wells in this agricultural area, and I drilled mine in the 1950s, they've got to be respected. All the wells in this region will have to be grandfathered. If they're in, they stay in.'

Sam Quiller, farmer, Xavier County: 'The irrigation ditches that lead off the Brazos River to water my fields date back to 1818. Any court of law would support my claim that those rights, and in the amounts stated, are irreversible. Read Mottlv. Boyd and you'll find you cannot impede the flow of the Brazos.'

Tom and Fred Bartleson, fishermen, mouth of the Brazos:

'Water must be regulated, we all know that. But 1 would ask you to keep in mind that Texas eourts have said repeatedly and confirmed repeatedly that a constant flow from rivers like the Brazos must be maintained so that a proper salinity in the waters just offshore be protected. That's where we catch our fish. Those are the waters our restaurants and supermarkets depend upon.'

At the end of the conference it was pathetically clear that Nebraska, Colorado and all the other aquifer states would repel even the slightest attack upon their sovereignty, and that every user in Texas appreciated the need for others to conserve water so long as his inherited rights were not infringed. Almost every drop of water inland from the Gulf Coast had been spoken for, usually in the nineteenth century, and to reapportion it or even control it was going to be impossible. Since the Ogallala Aquifer was a resource which could not be seen, the general public had no incentive to protect it; the Brazos and the Colorado and the Trinity were already allocated and could not be touched. Arkansas and Louisiana needed the water they had, and would repel with bayonets anyone who attempted to lead away even a trickle. So all that could be done was to continue exactly as things were, and then sdmetime in the decade starting in 2010, when disaster struck, take emergency measures.

'No!' Cobb cried when the insanity of this solution hit him. 'What we should do right now is build a huge channel from the Mississippi into Wichita Falls, and pipelines from there to the various Texas regions.' The idea was not fatuous, for millions of acre-feet of wasted water ran off each year past New Orleans, but when he seriously proposed such a ditch as a solution, experts pointed out: 'Such a channel would have to run through Arkansas and Oklahoma, and that would not be permitted.'

When Cobb checked the water level at the new pumps the Erickson brothers had installed, he found that it had fallen by an inch and a quarter, and it was then that he decided to seek nomination as a member of the Water Commission.

A second Texan to become personally aware of the big shifts under way lived at the opposite end of the state. Gabe Klinowitz, the real estate operator who had sponsored Todd Morrison when the latter drifted down from Detroit, was immensely informed concerning land values. His last big venture had been with a group of seven Mexican political figures to invest the massive funds they controlled.

They had stunned him with the magnitude of what they wanted to do, but in obedience to their orders, he had quietly assembled

the costly land and then watched as they spent $170,000,000 on The Ramparts, an interlocking series of the finest condominiums in Houston. Irritated by this brazen display of wealth by citizens of a nation which sent a constant stream of near-starving peasants into Texas for food and jobs, Gabe consulted with a University of Houston professor who specialized in Latin-American finances: 'Tell me, Dr. Shagrin, how do these people get hold of so much money?'

'Quite simple. They've learned how to outsmart our New York bankers.'

'You lose me.'

'Don't apologize. Took me two years to unravel the intricacies.' And with that, he spread upon his desk a series of figures so improbable that they perplexed even Klinowitz, who was accustomed to the chicaneries of mankind: 'From impeccable United States government sources I find that our big banks have loaned the Latin countries to the south three hundred billion dollars. And from equally reliable sources in the recipient countries, I find that clever politicians and business magicians have diverted one hundred billion dollars into either secret Swiss accounts or business ventures here in the U.S.'

'Would you care to give me a synonym for that word diverted?'

'How about legally embezzled or cleverly sequestered or good old-fashioned stole?' He laughed: 'Whichever you elect, the result's the same. The money we loaned them is no longer in the country where we hoped it would serve a constructive purpose.'

'The original loans, will they ever be repaid?'

'I don't see how they can be, with the money vanished from the countries. I see no way that the Mexican government can recover the money your group has wasted here in Houston.'

'Have you the figures for Mexico?'

'I haven't assembled the accurate figure for the total loans, but I can prove that in 1980 they borrowed sixteen billion from us and allowed their manipulators to siphon off more than seven billion of our dollars into their private accounts.'

'As an American taxpayer,' Gabe said, 'I'd like to know what happens if the original loans go sour.'

'You guessed \t. One way or another, you'll pay.'

Gabe frowned: 'If the American money had been kept in Mexico, could it have forestalled the poverty we see?'

'Now you touch a very sore point, Mr. Klinowitz. From the very beginning, Mexico was always much richer than Texas. Anything we did for our people, they could have done for theirs.'

'What went wrong?'

'I use the word diverted. It avoids moral judgment.'

So Klinowitz was not surprised when the peso, its hackup funds having been so callously diverted, began to stagger: 36 to the dollar one day, 93 the next, 147 later, then 193, with a threat of further plunging He was prepared and almost gleeful when the Mexican politicians flashed the distress signal: 'For the time being, halt all construction '

But he was a professional real estate man and was actually relieved when the Mexicans rounded up some additional capital and resumed building, for as he told Maggie Morrison: 'I have pains m my stomach when a client of mine runs into trouble.' However, he was shrewd enough to add: if 1 were you, Maggie, I'd keep my eye on those three towers of The Ramparts.'

'I'm no rental agency,' she protested. 'That's a heartache business .'

i don't mean rentals I've learned that if a building falls into trouble once, it'll do so again.'

'What could I do for the Ramparts people 7 '

'Maggie! How I wish I was thirty years old, with a small nest egg. In a fluctuating market like this, a daring trader can perform miracles'

i don't depend on miracles,' she said cautiously.

'Real money is made in a falling market Look at the unrented space in this city.'

And when she did she perceived two startling facts. The sharp decline in oil values had caused the bankruptcy of many smaller firms servicing that industry, and this meant that space which should have been rented for offices stood idle. When she toted up the appalling figures she found that 32,000,000 square feet of the finest office space in America stood vacant in Houston.

But what alarmed her more, with the rich Mexicans unable to visit the United States because of the disastrous devaluation of their peso, some twelve or thirteen major Houston hotels were suffering from lack of business. Fine establishments accustomed to seventy-and eighty-percent occupancy were getting no more than twenty or thirty, so that those which had depended on the Mexican trade were shutting down for the time being while others were going onto a five-day week to stanch the hemorrhaging.

Every intuition she had acquired in Michigan warned Maggie to retrench; every lesson she had learned from wise old Texans like Gabe Klinowitz urged her to make bold moves. In this impasse she would have liked to consult with her husband, but he was preoccupied with other ventures, so taking counsel only with herself, she monitored the chaos that seemed to have struck Houston business,

but always at the end of day she drove past The Ramparts to check on what the seven Mexican politicians were doing with their beautiful chain of buildings, and every sign she saw whispered confidentially: 'Gabe was right, these Mexicans are in deep trouble.'

The precipitous fall in the peso endangered more than the Mexican politicians, because all along the border, from Brownsville to El Paso, the Rio Grande bridges that once had brought thousands of brown-skinned people into American shops, where cameras, fine clothes, stereos and perfume were sold at bargain prices unattainable in Mexico itself, were strangely empty. The devalued peso bought nothing. For three painful days the Bravo-Escandon bridge, so long the scene of Mexican inflow, had no visitors from the south, and then the activity resumed, but in an ugly way that brought shame to the United States.