Ain't Fit to Drink

The Upper Basin Chronicles

Chapter 6

Ain't Fit to Drink

With shoes padding quickly on smooth clay tracks, Ruthann Garcia and Laura Paruzzi walked toward a pale blue and yellow Iowa sunrise. After strong winds yesterday, the inbound high gripped a frosty-calm Monday morning. The mile-long stretch of minimum maintenance road ran straight east before them. Treasured by the two friends, the narrow, hilly, and unfailingly-muddy-when-wet township road made a great dry walking route. Few 60 mile-an-hour pickup commuters bothered with it. Yet the deer, coyotes, turkeys, possums, groundhogs, fox, pheasants, and other little critters tracked it often.

Birds in abundance worked the fence rows and ditches feeding, nesting, and singing like the KSUI radio opera on Saturday afternoon. ("Kay-soo-ee, soo-eee!" sang Rose Murphy when she discovered hog calling and classical music in the same year.)

Of the two friends, Ruthann was taller and Laura the more athletic. Their gaits swung in and out of phase with the length of their strides. They usually walked the two-mile circuit in 25 minutes or less. Once in a while they turned it twice just to get in all their visiting.

Ruthann Garcia farmed 640 acres between Harold Mundt and Alexander Murphy, while her husband Rick was a district conservationist with the U.S. department of agriculture's natural resources conservation service, the NRCS. Their two kids, Rachel and Ramon were nearly old enough to mind themselves, but not quite. The two bought the farm six years ago, learning from Alexander Murphy of the opportunity before it became public knowledge. Harold Mundt did not appreciate his old neighbor Henry Van DeMer selling to"outsiders." Mundt had barely acknowledged the Garcias' presence in all this time. Yet, Ramon's best friend, Michael Murphy, Alexander's son, affectionately called the family "the Ar-gees" because of their all-alike initials.

This morning the early chit-chat covered the usual family, food, and personal health updates.

"I had fun yesterday checking out the Murphy prairie wetland," said Laura before long.

"Aren't you glad you took my advice on that?" Ruthann teased.

"I do enjoy Rose Murphy a lot; she's such a sweetheart," said the teacher.

"What about her dad, Laurie, what about my widower neighbor?" countered Ruthann.

"He's ok, not too talkative most of the time, except about that prairie. He was sure on the soapbox then."

"So, what gets you on your soapbox, girl?" Ruthann asked.

"Well, water for one thing, clean water. I did it full time, all the time out of college. It still burns me how we let it go like it's not important, like we can just pretend the problems don't exist," Laura said.

"You know the cancer map is red in the upper Midwest with Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, don’t you? It's pretty clearly tied to nitrates in drinking water. The irony is that farm families are drinking that water. Pour nitrogen to the corn, then drink it in the well water. Feed the corn to the cattle in feedlots, then put the manure on the land, and get those nitrates in the groundwater, too," she continued.

"Did you know that Owen Murphy has Non-Hodgkin's cancer?" asked Ruthann.

"He does? I just saw him yesterday. He looked ok, played his fiddle so well for us. Teresa on piano. It was a joy. Such a sad thing! What's the prognosis, do you know?" Laura exclaimed.

"Teresa told me it's in remission right now," Ruthann answered. "He had chemo and radiation treatments in Iowa City last year, and they hope they got it, but it can come back stronger, too, I hear."

The clay roadbed lifted the walkers toward the six a.m. dawn. They squinted in anticipation of the yellow ball sun they would see at the top, a rush of light so powerful it could almost take their breath some days.

"Damned if you fertilize, damned if you don't," said Ruthann, shaking her head. "Ain't fit, water ain't fit to drink, uh-uh," she hummed.

"It's not just that cancer, and maybe stomach cancer, either, Ruthie," said Laura. "My mama lost a blue baby, too. She would have been my big sister. No one knew back then that it was the water, that the tiny babies' guts changed the nitrates to killer nitrites. I don't think Mama ever got over it, that little Ella died before she was six months old."

"Oh, I'm sorry, hon'!" consoled Ruthann, taking her friend's arm in her hands, then pulling their shoulders together as they climbed in step and arm in arm.

The redwings' ringing trills buzzed all along the road where each male, here only days, had staked his territory, and sang for all his might to lure a female to nest.

Quiet now to listen to the singing, for any stray, oncoming traffic, the walkers increased their pace to top the hill. They were eager to see the sun rise.

From a narrow gold arc in one stride to a hemisphere of fire in the next, and finally with the third, they stepped into a brilliant circle of yellow light warming them full in the face.

"Oh, that's something!" enthused Laura.

"It surely is, my, my!" replied Ruthann. The panorama of gray and brown hills seemed frosted with low angle golden light, rippling in bright and dark waves before them. Auras of frost crystals stirred in the air as a new breeze shifted bluestem stalks, red osier dogwood stems, and osage orange branches. The scene was so bright, they could only sweep glances past the rapidly rising, shrinking sun.

A perched redwing male right nearby flaunted scarlet and golden epaulettes at them. He trilled his very loudest as they passed.

"We hear you, mister, aren't you the dandy today?" said Ruthann to the blackbird. She turned to her friend, "So did Alexander sing for you like that yesterday, Laurie?" The road dipped off the hilltop. Their feet flapped on the down stride.

"Don't I wish, woman" answered Laurie, laughing, with a gloved backhand swinging toward her friend.

"So, he did, then, a little? Tell me, tell me!" Ruthann encouraged. The two walkers chatted on. The blackbirds sang in sunlight.

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Next week... "Smells Like Money," Chapter 7.

Link to the National Cancer Institute's interactive map server per cancer type:
http://bc3.mapinfo.com/scripts/hsrun.exe/distributed/nci/mapxtreme.htx;start=hs_nci

The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 6 was written and edited by John Gabbert.

Comments? Email feedback to The Upper Basin Chronicles, Chapter 6

The characters presented here are purely fictional, and neither bear resemblance to persons living or dead, nor represent the views or opinions of Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota.