Chapter 18 - THE WELL THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN DRY
We did not open the well ourselves.
That frustrated every twenty-year-old impulse I possessed.
Dr. Ortiz was very clear.
“No dropping cameras.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“No improvised pumping.”
“I know.”
“No rope.”
“I said I know.”
“You sound disappointed.”
I was.
The Kentucky Division of Water had the original file.
Drilling contractor:
Harlan Geological Services.
The company still existed.
Its founder, Walter Harlan, had retired, but his daughter found the 2010 job book.
Client:
Cedar Hollow Watershed Partnership.
Not our family.
Funding:
university extension grant plus local match.
Purpose:
recharge characterization.
Dad’s authorization allowed access.
Not ownership transfer.
The old drilling crew had installed monitoring wells on four farms.
Three were abandoned.
Ours remained capped because the initial yield reading was unusually high.
But Walter’s notes contained a warning:
Do not interpret BH-04-771 as extractable reserve without dye trace / spring connection study.
Stonebranch’s offer suddenly looked worse.
They had found the yield number.
Perhaps ignored the warning.
Or understood it perfectly.
The state agreed to inspect the well because Stonebranch had filed preliminary paperwork for high-volume groundwater exploration nearby.
A hydrogeologist named Mara Whitfield came out in December.
Cold.
Gray sky.
Molly stood fifty feet away with Dad because Mara refused to let a twelve-year-old treat a monitoring well like entertainment.
The cap came off.
Downhole probe descended.
Static water level:
twenty-nine feet.
Almost identical to 2010.
That surprised everyone.
We had been through multiple dry summers.
The aquifer beneath us remained pressurized.
Mara measured conductivity.
Temperature.
Dissolved oxygen.
Then lowered a flowmeter.
Groundwater was moving laterally through the borehole.
Not sitting.
“This isn’t a storage pocket,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Possibly a conduit intersection.”
Translation:
an underground highway.
Then she asked about surface features.
Sinkholes?
Losing streams?
Seasonal depressions?
I showed her my notebooks.
Not because I wanted to be the genius farm kid again.
Because eleven years of rainfall and moisture measurements were useful.
She read.
Then turned to me.
“You measured runoff into the north swale?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because water disappeared there fast.”
“How fast?”
“After heavy storms, sometimes within an hour.”
Dad frowned.
“You never told me that.”
“I wrote it down.”
“That is not telling me.”
Fair.
Mara walked toward the old orchard.
Near the surviving pear trees was a shallow depression I had always assumed belonged to a rotted root system.
She knelt.
Pulled leaves aside.
Limestone.
Solution opening.
A small recharge sink.
My tree rows and permanent ground cover had reduced sediment moving into it.
Not intentionally.
I had been trying to keep topsoil on the farm.
Possible consequence:
I had also kept the sink from clogging.
I felt excitement rise.
Then stopped myself.
One finding.
Not theory proved.
Mara apparently approved.
“You’re less annoying than most undergraduates.”
“Thank you?”
She stood.
“Now we need to know where this water goes.”
Dad looked toward town.
“The spring?”
“Maybe.”
Then a truck appeared on the county road.
Stonebranch logo.
It slowed.
Driver watched us.
Kept going.
Mara said:
“They know the state is here.”
I asked:
“Is that bad?”
“No.”
Then:
“But I’d like to see what they already know.”
So would everyone.
We got the answer two weeks later.
Stonebranch had drilled a test well on Wade Mercer’s property.
Its estimated yield was even higher than ours.
1,100 gallons per minute.
And they had scheduled a seventy-two-hour pump test for January.
Mara read the permit.
Then called me.
“Eli.”
“Yeah?”
“You might want to come home that weekend.”
May you like
“Why?”
“If that well talks to the town spring, we’re about to find out.”
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