The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories (20 page)

He's one of the winningest coaches in the game. During his 30 seasons at Texas Western/UTEP his teams have won 579 games and lost 256. Six of his teams have won the Western Athletic Conference championship, five have played in the National Invitational Tournament, and 13 in the NCAA tournament. Crippled by injuries and the scholastic ineligibility of a key player, the Miners didn't make it to the NCAA this year. It was the first time in eight years that they weren't there.

Today Nevil Shed is the director of intramural athletics at the University of Texas at San Antonio; David Lattin is in public relations in Houston; Harry Flournoy is in sales for a baking company in California; Bobby Joe Hill is senior buyer for El Paso Natural Gas in El Paso; Dick Myers is vice president of a clothing manufacturing company in Florida; David Palacio is vice president of Columbia Records in California; Orsten Artis is a detective on the Gary, Ind., police force; the others—Jerry Armstrong, Louis Baudoin, Willie Cager, Togo Railey and Willie Worsley—are teachers and school administrators in Texas, Missouri, New Mexico and New York state.

On the day of the 1991 Miners' last home game and the close of Haskins' 30th season at UTEP, fans by the hundreds would stand in line at El Paso's big shopping malls to have the 1966 champions autograph posters, pictures, pennants and basketballs. Later, during halftime of UTEP's game with New Mexico, the crowd would rise to its feet and cheer the aging heroes once more, and their school would present them with replicas of their old jerseys.

First, though, they would talk deep into the night, reliving their days of glory.

“We won some games while you guys were here,” Coach Haskins told them, “but the thing that makes me the happiest is that each and every one of you has turned out to be a fine citizen and a good person and all of you are doing well. That's the most important thing of all.”

He's in the twilight of his career, he said. He has mellowed, he said, and is no longer bitter. It's finally sweet to have won.

“It was all a long time ago,” he said. “A lot of bridges have been crossed. The entire country has come a long way in the way people think. Tomorrow night, I'm going to start my best five, regardless. And that's what I was doing then.”

March 1991

BECAUSE IT'S STILL HERE

For more than 100 years, the people who live in the Davis Mountains have gone about their business - which is ranching - with little interference from the world beyond their horizon. And that's the way they like life to be. Lately, however, the teeming world outside has begun to encroach on them. People in cities far away see the vast open as the perfect place to dump their garbage, sewage and nuclear waste. And the only city in the region, El Paso, is casting a covetous eye upon the only resource the ranchers have - their water. The city of El Paso now owns Ryan Flat and its water. What it will do with it is anybody's guess
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E
VEN
BEFORE
SO
MANY
PEOPLE
LIVED
IN
THE
FAR
WESTERN
CORNER
OF
the Trans-Pecos desert, water was scarce. El Paso City Ordinance No. 1, passed at the first meeting of the first City Council in 1873, made it a crime to bathe in the only municipal water supply, an irrigation ditch.

Since then, as El Paso has grown into a city of more than half a million residents and the population of Ciudad Juarez, its sister village across the Rio Grande, has burgeoned to more than a million, the scarcity has constantly worsened.

“El Paso has been mining ground water—taking more out of the ground than rainfall can replace—since 1917,” said Ed Archuleta, general manager of El Paso Water Utilities. “In the Hueco Bolson, where we get 65 percent of the water we use, we're now taking water out 20 times faster than nature can recharge it.”

The Census Bureau estimates that El Paso will be a city of 1.1 million by the year 2040. How large Juarez, which gets its water from the same underground source, will be by that time is beyond anyone's guess.

And since the water scarcity is growing even faster than the metropolitan area, it has begun to inspire fear and worry in people far beyond the city limits, among the ranches and small towns that share the vast, arid Trans-Pecos with Texas' fourth-largest city. El Paso is casting a covetous eye in their direction.

In the city, which gets only seven or eight inches of rainfall in a normal year, the problem has become inescapable. Billboards urge residents to conserve, and water makes Page One of the morning paper every day: “Water odd,” the headline reads on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. “Houses with addresses ending in odd numbers may water today, except from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.” Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, the headline reads: “Water even.”

Environmental enforcement officers patrol the streets looking for violators. And, under a new water conservation ordinance, residents who are caught watering their yards on the wrong day—or hosing down the driveway, or washing the car without a bucket or a shut-off nozzle on the hose—may be fined $50 to $500. The rules are permanent and are enforced year-round.

Despite the conservation efforts, it's estimated that the Hueco Bolson will be sucked dry in 35 years, and El Paso is forced to look elsewhere for new sources of supply. The city's Water Resource Management Plan, in which problems and possible solutions over the next 50 years are projected, calls for greatly increased use of water from the Rio Grande and more recycling of waste water, which would be purified to drinking-water standards and then pumped back into the ground to recharge the Hueco Bolson.

But it's the city's search for new water outside El Paso County that's causing anger and unease in the sparsely populated counties of the Trans-Pecos.

“The fear is, El Paso is water-starved and it's getting desperate,” said Jeff Davis County Bob Dillard in Fort Davis. “The fear is, they're coming to get our water, and the lives of the people here will mean nothing to them. The fear is that they'll drink the cup, and when it's empty they'll go find some more somewhere else.”

El Paso spent $8 million and 10 years suing the state of New Mexico for the right to drill for water in the nearby Mesilla Bolson and pipe it across the state line. When the suit failed, the city turned its efforts toward its weaker—and almost equally dry—neighbors in Texas.

Last month, the city's Public Service Board, parent body of El Paso Water Utilities, announced a contingency contract for the $2 million purchase of a 25,000-acre farm 150 miles from the city in Jeff Davis and Presidio counties.

Under the land in the Ryan Aquifer, the board believes, is enough water to supply 80 million gallons a day to El Paso for 17 years.

Under its contract with the seller, Connecticut General Life Insurance Co., the Public Service Board will drill several test wells on Antelope Valley Farms, as the tract is called, to determine whether its estimates of the quality and quantity of the water are accurate. If they are, the sale will be completed.

“What scares people here is that El Paso has put that year amount on it,” Judge Dillard said. “They say it's a 17-year supply. The question is: What happens after the 17 years? Once the water is gone, what do we have left?”

The Ryan Aquifer is believed to be a basin of ice age water trapped deep below the surface of the earth. It extends under a sizable portion of western Jeff Davis and northern Presidio counties and is the only source of water for the small town of Valentine, near the Jeff Davis-Presidio county line, and a number of ranches in the mountains and flats. Its recharge rate, from an average rainfall of about 14 inches a year, is very low, estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey to be about 5,800 acre-feet annually.

If El Paso were to pump the projected 80 million gallons a day, the annual recharge would provide the city only a 23-day supply of water. After that, the pumps would be mining water, and the water table would begin dropping.

Antelope Valley Farms has been a worry to area residents ever since the late 1970s, when Olsen Farms, a subsidiary of Connecticut General, bought the acreage and converted it from grazing land to irrigated crop land.

Albert Miller, a neighboring rancher who also operates the municipal water system for Valentine, a town of about 200, believes the operation has affected the water table significantly during periods of heavy irrigation, especially in years of little rainfall.

“In 1989, we had only 6½ inches of rain at the ranch,” he said. “And Antelope Valley was pumping real hard. The pump on Valentine's city well started pumping air. I had to lower it almost 100 feet to get water.”

Indeed, it was the high cost of pulling water from hundreds of feet within the earth with diesel-powered pumps, Mr. Miller said, that made Antelope Valley's crops of beans, corn, wheat and milo unprofitable. Eventually the operation went bankrupt, and Connecticut General has been trying to rid itself of the property for years.

“Some people in the area think El Paso buying the land is better than the alternative,” Judge Dillard said. “It was rumored that the city of Houston or the state of New Jersey was interested in buying the land and using it as a place to dispose of their sewer sludge. But a lot of the ranchers, especially the younger ones, are just as alarmed at what El Paso might do.”

“I'm really apprehensive,” said Chile Ridley, whose family has ranched across the highway from the Antelope Valley site for generations. “Are all of us out here going to have to deepen our wells in order to run livestock on our land and get drinking water? What about all the wildlife that's dependent on our windmills and stock tanks?

“Is El Paso going to suck the water away from Valentine? Will it affect Maria? What will it do to the springs in the Davis Mountains? What will it do to the springs below the rimrock, down near the river? Nobody has done a study of the effects that much pumping is likely to have on the land or on us. We're all extremely concerned. Without water, our land's not worth a flip.”

Although Trans-Pecos ranchers tend to be highly independent folk who loathe government regulation and bureaucracy, Mr. Miller, Mr. Ridley, and others have asked the officials of their counties to investigate the possibility of forming an underground water conservation district in hopes that it could regulate and limit the amount of water El Paso could remove from the ground.

“You've got a willing seller and a willing buyer here,” Mr. Ridley said. “You've got private property rights. You've got to respect that. But you're talking about a resource that we have conserved over the years and treated with respect, which they haven't done in El Paso. And the reason they want it is because it's still here. So we're in a battle.”

Jeff Davis County Attorney Ann Barker said dozens of residents of all parts of the Davis Mountains area have phoned her and even come to her door to express their worry. But their legal options appear bleak so far.

“An underground water conservation district may not afford us much protection from what El Paso is contemplating,” she said. “Such districts mainly control the flow of water within an area by permitting procedures and well-spacing requirements, but they don't really restrict anyone from removing water from property they own.

“And we just don't have the budget to go get a crackerjack water lawyer from Austin or Dallas or Houston to fight this for us. This is a county with a total annual budget of around $500,000. So who's going to look out for these citizens?”

Bill Colbert, public information officer for the Texas Water Commission, confirmed that Ms. Barker's fears are well-grounded.

“The way the current state law is structured, ground water belongs to the property owner,” he said. “It's like a mineral right. The landowner can take as much as he wants out of the ground, even if his neighbor's wells are drying up.”

Mr. Archuleta of El Paso Water Utilities calls Texas water law “the law of the biggest pump.” And in the Ryan Aquifer, El Paso's pump would be the biggest by far. But he says the residents of the rural counties are worrying prematurely.

“Because that's a finite source of water out there, it's not in our 50-year plan,” he said. “If we can buy more tracts of land in the same area, it might be economical, in time, to build the pipeline and pumping stations necessary to bring that water to El Paso. But our plan now is to purchase it and then just kind of hold it for many, many years, probably.”

The people of Jeff Davis and Presidio counties don't believe El Paso's reassurances. “We hear the horror stories from up there, about people not having water and sewers in southern El Paso County,” said Judge Dillard. “If they buy this land, I don't see how they can wait long to come get the water.”

And Jeff Davis County's worry already is spreading to neighboring Culberson County, where El Paso is rumored to be eyeing land in Lobo Flat, between Valentine and Van Horn.

At a recent meeting of the Rio Grande Council of Governments, Culberson County Judge John Conoly buttonholed an El Paso County commissioner and told him, “If you try to come and take our water, we'll be waiting for you at the county line.”

“We're not just going to sit here and let them come and take it away from us,” Judge Conoly said later. “We'll fight them with whatever resources we can muster.”

September 1991

THE REAL PEPPER-UPPER

It's strange, the things that stick in your memory from your early childhood, and the things that slip away without a trace. I'm sure more important things than an occasional trip to the Dr Pepper plant in Dublin, Texas, must have happened to me when I was a small boy, but few events remain more vivid in my mind. When I returned, almost 50 years later, I was amazed and reassured to discover how accurate my memory had been
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