Free The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols Page B

Rudy Noyes, knew more water law than the rest of the state put together. For the past seventeen years Bookman had been the state engineer, meaning he was more responsible than any other person or group for what water the state had obtained during that time through interstate pacts and reclamation projects and so forth. Rudy Noyes, who was still young at thirty-six, had been with the office, had, in fact, been Bookman’s personal sidekick, apprentice, and mouthpiece for eleven of those seventeen years. During that time they had weathered the heaviest political storms to sweep the state. They had also sweated, plotted, finagled, begged, twisted, and driven their way to what they felt was their state’s fair share of Colorado River Basin water; they had made deals with Texas and California, with Arizona and Colorado and Utah; and they had created lobbies in Washington to have dams built and rivers channeled; they had set into motion adjudication suits to determine how much water people did or did not have in all areas; they had literally decided how the rivers would run and which people must benefit the most from those rivers. In so doing they had constantly played the state’s southern agribusinessmen off against the small northern farmers, and somehow they had come through. The conservative farmers in the south hated State Engineer Bookman and his little sidekick, Rudy Noyes, because they felt the north was getting too much water—in fact, they felt any water allocated to the north was wasted water. If Bookman and Noyes explained that the northern farmers owned priority rights because they had been using the water for centuries, the southern farmers pointed to their cotton and grain fields, asking, “But who’s growing cash crops, who’s providing the stuff for export, who’s keeping the state’s economic head above water?” And you couldn’t argue with that. Farming in the north was subsistence farming, nothing more; and nothing could be less.
    But the farmers in the north hated Bookman and Noyes also because those two had betrayed their water interests and rights, they had worked deals whereby much of the north’s centuries-old water rights had gone to the southern agribusinessmen, and they felt that Bookman and Noyes, more than any other state political figures, headed those forces most responsible for the death of little towns like Milagro, whose residents spoke a different language from the people of the south.
    But Bookman and Noyes did not have it in for the Northerners. They divided up the state’s water—as nearly as was possible—in direct relationship to a region’s political clout and economic pull. It was that simple, and it meant that by dealing with the realities of the given situation, Bookman and Noyes had quietly overseen the transfer of water and water rights from the small-timers in the green northern valleys to the big businessmen and development enterprises in the flat plains and deserts of the south. Both Bookman and Noyes believed in the American concepts of “growth” and “progress”; hence, they could see no justification for the small farmers’ wrath. “Why don’t those fucking old-fashioned irrelevant Tinkertoy coyotes face up to the economic realities?” was the way Bookman usually put it. “Who do those pathetic illiterate old geezers think they are, sitting on one-acre beanfields, demanding more water, when there’s a man down south with an eight-thousand-acre farm that’s crying to be irrigated?”
    Noyes, a skinny red-headed man, never said much. And certainly not in public. He wore impeccable three-piece Brooks Brothers suits, Bostonian loafers, and staid horn-rimmed glasses, and he knew the law. He sat beside Bookman at Interstate Streams Commission meetings—when, say, the environmentalists were trying to defeat a Bureau of Reclamation water salvage project—and while