Water rights

Pretend this is a story about getting my Master's degree.

In reality, I've stopped thinking about it as a big person job. Coffee cups and personal spotlit office desks aren't fooling anyone.  It is a servitude to my unflagging synapses. It is true it is the most fun I've ever had. Someone also once told me it is the best running I'll ever do. Hear me say "I agree" as I sit here with an unrun jelly knee. For example, I realized this week while mapdreaming that I nearly connected a third of the trails on my two National Geographic maps on backyard runs this summer. 

In this story, people and places are fictionalized and sensationalized. Any resemblance to persons or places living or dead is purely coincidental.

Tucked north of the Colorado, engulfed a vineyard of wrath, lays a Steinbeckesque valley, though only in character. In person, it's only shrubby dry land with squat little valleys. This land can be taxed as agricultural because its mostly sageland, rangeland and weedy hay fields. In character, the valley is weaved with silty roads leading to gleaming well pads riveted for permanence and economic dismemberment, or houses unplumbed by wind and winter. These are the homes, respectfully, of the man with the upper hand and his minions.

That's not very fair. Not minions like farmer ants, blindly following some scent, blazing some unforeseen trail. People with families, hard jobs, smart minds and belligerent self regard. Like you, and especially me.

The "man" with the upper hand should also not be misconstrued as anything different from his subsidiaries. Same family, hard job, smart mind, and belligerent self regard, just a bigger pay check to dress it with.

It's easy to dislike this guy, so delay the temptation. He towers like his machined blazing chimneys, but his disposition is no where near as hot. His good nature can be trusted, if only based on his signature spotless leather hat. His worn leather cowboy boots leave tenderer footprints than the cement ones he supervises. For months after we met, I could not relax around him until I discovered he obsessed over fluids other than the semi-gas he siphoned from earth's pitch.

Water! Water rights! You can't fix stupid! He was always says that last one. We became our own exclusive book club, teasing out embarrassing facts about water history and legislation. To him, water is the fruit of the loom dangling over the line we crossed when we sunk our teeth into this apple. Proof that it isn't his natural gas that made him owner of the land and its people.

Thanks to the book club, our conversations moved beyond land, past water, and onto ourselves. He told me I indulged too much, I told him he worked too much, we both agreed we spent time alone too much. He at least had an excuse. It is not easy to make friends if your job is to legalize and sanctify all human behavior. I just thought it was confusing making friends. We'd debate if our passion for solitude made us a wild beast or an Aristotelean God. I said he could be the God. Him, standing cast under the shadow of his leather-rimmed hat in his ropey artery watershed. All I saw when I closed my eyes was a stock chopped slide show of increasingly resolved topography.

Here is an interesting fact about surveying rivers. You can keep right and left bank straight in your head by facing downstream because you have to work upstream. That is how I arrived at my final site. Face down working against a current. A small current. These are only 1st or 2nd order streams. But still. I looked around at the pinnacle canyon walls that encompassed my last site, and saw my water was borne through a hole in the wall.