Letter

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We’ve hit enormous amounts of water, sometimes as much as a twenty foot section of saturation. Easily 2000 gallons have come out of a 500 foot hole. That is a little abnormal, considering that we’re drilling in the places we are. But the Delores is running high and thick, so the spongy Dakota and Burro Canyon sandstones are taking a good load. It was a wet spring and so far a wet summer, not here of course, but over the rest of the state. Water never falls in one place, it is transported by its own weight to more and less interesting places. The skiers in Aspen probably give no thought to their playground feeding the aquifers and dusty farmers of Mexico. They only see powder pack and recreation.

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I found Meredith (I don’t think I told you about the new female flirting with me) yesterday nursing a fawn. That explains why she seemed sluggish and wide at the hips this last week. She bedded down in the sage and produced a brand new antelope. I’m not sure how this will effect our relationship, but I couldn’t help saying guiltily and aloud, “Damn it. Another Goddamn single mom.”

I have good luck with them. I can’t imagine what innate fathering ability an antelope would see in me. Then again, it is hard to take the opinion of a wild goat with racing stripes and nubs on its head seriously. I wonder if the tracks I saw running back and forth to the river belonged to her and her new family. I hope, though I know better, that the cougar starves before it finds her and her offspring. I’m a creature of sympathy.

[redacted...] If love is a product of knowledge, then I am afraid no one will ever be able to fully love me without standing on Big Gypsum ridge and being somewhere between heartbroken and enthralled at the vista given. [...redacted]

I’m glad the wedding you worried about went well. I’m sure you were the sort of beauty kind and full of grace that anyone would be fortunate to behold. I wish instead of thirsting and eating the blossoms of the cactus, I could have seen you, but that was not the plan. While you have bodies of the most human value buried everywhere in your anthropomorphic lithology, you have no U₃O₈ hidden as an accessory to vanadinite. Unfortunate for us both. The desert puts me in quite the mood.

Casey