Drowning in Spite
A memoir of neighbors fighting over water — and a novel about a washed-up soul
‘BITTER WATER’
By Charlene Delaunay
Wind River Publishing (2022, 191 pp.)
In her introduction to this “memoir of discrimination in Indian Country,” author Delaunay cites the tragedy of the commons theory made famous in a 1833 pamphlet by William Forster Lloyd: when a shared interest is gradually depleted by human beings acting solely in their own interest.
Foster Lloyd used the example of land use for cattle grazing. Delaunay offers up water — a seemingly abundant natural resource that will be exhausted without restraints or laws put in place to protect its usage. “Finding an equitable way to allocate this most precious of resources could easily become the next tragedy,” she writes in this distressing personal tale of water wars.
The author, an educator, is a member of the Northern Arapaho tribe, and in the late 1990s she and her French husband, Manu, a former ski technician in Chamonix, took over her uncle Buzz’s 40-acre sheep ranch in the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. The couple know little about farming or lambing, but they are quick studies, and ecstatic to be on the wide-open farm, which shares an irrigation ditch with a neighbor the author is distantly related to, Gary Collins.
“Each ranch stood alone on the prairie like an island surrounded by the endless sea,” writes Delaunay in her initial enthusiasm, or call it naïveté. “No ranch and its family could survive without one thing — cooperation.”
When impediments to accessing their portion of the water for irrigating their alfalfa fields begin to occur — barbed wire fencing, dumping of rocks and debris in the ditch, tampering with the pipes in the culvert — Charlene and Manu suspect sabotage by the neighbors. But why?
The Delaunays know their tribal water rights, and Uncle Buzz never had problems accessing his portion of the water flow. The Little Wind River has high water, and these are not drought years. But when they learn that their neighbor and nemesis, Gary Collins, sits on the Tribal Water Board, to which the couple appeal for restitution, they know they’ve got a mountain of corruption to climb.
“Manu has no right to be on this reservation,” Collins growls at the couple, revealing the source of the animosity. “You are wasting our time,” another Water Board member tells them. “Get yourself a lawyer.”
They do, and it gets ugly, especially because the federal government has to step in because the tribal government will not help them. A case of civil rights violation ensues, emerging from what seems a senseless spat between neighbors. For years, it poisons the couple’s joy in their sheep ranching experiment, spoiling their life and love together. Their dinner conversation becomes sharing lessons from Sun Tzu’s classic military treatise “The Art of War.”
Summoning the courageous mantle of their respective ancestors — Charlene is the descendant of Sand Creek Massacre (1864) survivors, and Manu the fighters of the French Resistance — as well as simply being hardened by living out on the Wyoming prairie, the couple persevere, and this is their poignant story.
The author will hold a book signing and reading Friday (May 27) from 4-6 p.m. at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, in Taos.
‘SLOW TANGO IN TAOS’
By Phil Cline (2021, 330 pp.)
A sadly familiar story: a person once successful and prosperous in another life (usually somewhere East — in this case Chicago in the mid-1970s), experiences a sudden change of fortune (fired as vice president of Cyrox Corporation, through no fault of his own), and is cast out by family and friends (his wife Wilma only wants to keep her sable coat). He (and usually it is a he) must then have to roam the desert (arid regions of the Southwest), endure hardship, poverty, humiliation — before washing up in Taos, to reinvent himself.
The man gains a mystical perspective, sense of humility and, eventually, true love.
All of which happens in this rather platitudinous effort by Cline, a playwright who now lives in Tulsa, Okla. The antihero here, John Tollifson, who initially relishes the smell of the leather in his Mercedes 450SL, does change, once he is transplanted to Taos, and even tries peyote, as he reconnects to his collegiate artistic aims. He becomes an artist.
We wish only that the writer spend some goodly time in Taos, in order to really know the place and its people, so that characterizations are not of a type, but truly organic and authentic, and not just a name in the title.