The Water and the Well

Our second day in town, I was standing on a porch talking with a neighbor.

I was doing what a person does on his second day somewhere. Introducing myself. Explaining what we intended to build, which was a small distillery, and saying it the way you say a thing you are proud of and slightly nervous about. I did not know the town yet. I did not know who I was talking to, or what he was, or what fifty years of standing in that spot had made him.

He listened. And then he told me, in the third person, using his own name, that if I messed with his water I was going to have a problem with him.

I have thought about that sentence for years. Not the threat, which was ordinary enough. The grammar. A man does not refer to himself by name unless he is invoking something larger than himself. He was not describing what he personally would do to me. He was telling me what his name meant in that county, and inviting me to go find out.

Here is the part that took me longer to appreciate than it should have.

He was not wrong to care about water. Nobody up here is wrong to care about water. But the specific fear he was describing could not happen, and it could not happen for three separate reasons, any one of which would have been sufficient.

The first is legal. Every well in town is limited to a third of an acre foot. There are no exceptions and no variances. Roughly three hundred gallons a day, the same for him, the same for me, the same for everyone. I could not have taken more water than my neighbor even if I had wanted to, because the state had already decided the question years before either of us got there.

The second is arithmetic. A batch takes me about a week to build. Call it two batches in a good week. One whole batch costs me fifty gallons. Set that against three hundred gallons a day and the threat evaporates. What I told him on the porch, because it was the truest thing I could think of in the moment, was that my distillery would use less water than a teenage boy showering for high school.

The third is topography, and it is the one I find funniest now. My well sits below his. Downhill. Water does not run uphill for anybody, which means that in a genuine drought, in the actual physical world, he draws before I do. If either of us was in a position to take the other's water, it was never going to be me.

So I gave him the true answer, in a form he could check against his own household, and it changed nothing at all.

That is the whole lesson, and it took me another four years and a county job to learn it.

A fact cannot answer a question that was never about facts.

He was not asking how many gallons. He was asking what happens to this place now that you are in it. What are you, what will you build, what will you want next, and what will I have to give up when you want it. Water was simply the nearest available instrument. It was concrete, it was scarce, it was something everyone in a dry county agrees to take seriously, and it let him ask the real question without ever having to say it out loud.

And I answered the instrument. I answered the gallons. I stood there on my second day and won an argument nobody was having.

I said I would not settle this without taking my share, so here it is.

I could have handled it better, and I know exactly how.

I should have asked him a question instead of supplying an answer. Not a rhetorical one. A real one. How long have you been here. What have you watched happen to this place. What went wrong the last time somebody showed up with plans. I had every reason to ask and no excuse for not asking; I was the newcomer, I was the one who knew nothing, and he was standing right there with fifty years of the answer.

Instead I did the thing I have done my entire career, which is to treat a challenge as an error to be corrected. Somebody states something untrue, I produce the correct figure, and I assume the transaction is complete. It has served me well in construction, where the specification really is the answer and the number really does settle it. It has served me badly nearly everywhere else.

The other thing I would do differently is smaller and matters more. I would have let the silence sit. When he finished, I filled the space immediately, because the threat made me want to be understood. But a man who has just invoked his own name is not finished talking. He is waiting to see what you do with it. If I had said nothing for ten seconds, I suspect I would have learned more about that town in the next minute than I did in the following year.

I did not. The conversation ended there. We both went back inside, and everything that came afterward, all of it, every argument and every meeting and every accusation that I was building an empire in a place I had barely unpacked in, was already fully present on that porch on my second day. I just could not read it yet.

If you move somewhere new and someone tells you what he is worried about, take the worry seriously and take the subject with a grain of salt. The subject is usually a stand in. Water, traffic, noise, deer, the color of a roof. Those are the things people can say. The thing underneath is almost always the same thing, and it is not really a question about you. It is a question about whether the place they know is about to stop existing.

You cannot answer that with a number. I have the receipts.