A Meditation on Water

Biweekly ramblings by The Motley Fool

It’s sifting out of the sky, drifting lazily groundward this time, not a stinging horizontal sandblast headed toward Nebraska, the way it often does. Although it seems like a lot, the water accumulates a little at a time. Little crystalline

Receiving less than 15 inches of water from rain and snow each year, the Laramie Plains are technically a desert.

The Indians knew enough not to settle here – nothing to feed your horses in the winter. Even the cottonwoods that grew along the watercourses were of the narrowleaf variety – can’t strip their bark to feed saddle stock. It was a no-man’s land.

And yet there is a town where the Union Pacific crosses the Big Laramie River. Water was scarce in the 1860s, and it presence with the approach of the transcontinental railroad, coupled with the ability to float railroad ties downstream from the Medicine Bow Mountains meant enough commerce to support a railroad camp. The railroad tie industry gave us our first major environmental problems: The tar from railroad tie manufacturing leaked into the groundwater, creating a plume of pollution that ultimately would become a SuperFund cleanup site.

Sight-Unseen

Part Two of a serial by Vic Miller

Read part one, The Narrator's Gaze

She walked for blocks, the rubber band spreading between her slender fingers. She stretched it and twisted it and bit it. And then at one corner she stopped. Above her towered an old stone building. She bent her head back so that the tip of it came into view. More times than not she stopped here, at the Division of Care, and sometime she went in. To go in she needed to be strong, and on this day she felt up to the challenge. She bit the runner band hard, and pulled on it rapidly with both hands, before pulling open the massive doors and walking inside.

The lobby was maddening. Throngs of people, all dirty and most sick, were being shuffled around and guided into different bronze gates. Above each gate was a number, one through sixteen (the signs were a stark white, with black numbers, and their appearance did not fit with the wood and bronze and brick), and as one looked, from gate to gate, it was very much apparent that the higher the number, the dirtier and sicker the people. Liza took and sip of water from a fountain on the wall, looked around at the nightmare before her, and walked slowly to gate number sixteen.