Reviewed by: The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning by Julene Bair Susan Naramore Maher Julene Bair, The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning. New York: Viking, 2014. 278pp. Cloth, $26.95; e-book, $12.99. In the opening section of Julene Bair’s compelling new memoir, The Ogallala Road, the author is seeking vestiges, what the section title calls “a rare find.” Some of these remnants are echoes of the ancient grasslands biome, what Bair calls “pre- us”; others are places from childhood memory: a canyon, a creek, a pasture (4). As Bair searches this landscape, she encounters layers of loss. Most troubling are signs that the life- giving Ogallala Aquifer is drying up. A small pond fed by the aquifer is one of these rare finds, and Bair spends a moment touching this “live water,” feeling its warmth and energy (8). Such a place, in her assessment, “ought to have a tall fence around it” (8). It should be a “monument” to the original landscape, a place for schoolchildren and tourists to visit. But the Ogallala Aquifer is not protected, and its waters are being pumped up to the surface like there is no tomorrow. To tell this story of love and reckoning, Bair juxtaposes time scales, presses past life against the present, and interprets the surface signs of change and diminishment. The big question that she and her brother Bruce must resolve is whether or not to sell the family farmlands. Bair fled this landscape in young adulthood and through two failed marriages sought new home places in California. The Mojave persists [End Page 412] as a sacred place in Bair’s journey. Graduate school took her to Iowa City and teaching to Laramie, Wyoming. As Bair traverses the roads, creek banks, and canyons of western Kansas, she does so knowing that her own rooting to this place has loosened. Bair is a singularly lyrical writer, which makes the harsher elements of her story stand out in relief. Escaping an abusive second husband, she returns to Goodland broke, with a baby, and seeking shelter with her parents. This period in Bair’s history is at once affirmative and personally difficult. She becomes expert at riding her father’s farm machinery and takes pride in her ability to do the men’s work that had been off-limits when she was a teenager. At the same time she struggles against her father’s patriarchal commands and questions farming practices that extract resources recklessly. She worries about her young fatherless son maturing within a cultural landscape that rigidly dictates sexual politics. Years later, when Bair meets a Kansas rancher named Ward, she presents this courtship with such honesty that the reader is uncertain whether to root for this budding relationship or wish its end. The personal challenges that Bair has faced flow parallel to the reshaping of the High Plains around an industrial model of agriculture. The life’s water of Goodland, the Ogallala Aquifer, is being sucked dry at an astonishing rate. The ties between personal grief and the land’s exploitation are palpable in Bair’s narrative, and the fates of the family farm, of fragile newfound love, and of the larger landscape are intertwined. At story’s end Bair is discovering pockets of resistance sprouting up rhizomatically across the High Plains: organic farmers, new cooperative models, growing environmental and bioregional awareness. She knows the struggle to save this landscape and its aquifer is daunting; hope lies in the long view. “You know you exist,” she states, “and that you exist in relation to the sun and to the world. It makes you aware of the imprint you are making on the land” (274). The imprint is not lasting, but in accepting that fleeting reality, Bair finds “a certain level of self- awareness” and peace (274). Reckoning for the reader, however, is less assured in the shadow of such environmental and emotional disturbance. [End Page 413] Susan Naramore Maher University of Minnesota, Duluth Copyright © 2015 Western Literature Association