“Your father would have thought this was crazy.”
That made her stop.
She wiped one hand on her jeans.
“My father spent nineteen thousand dollars deepening this well.”
The farmer frowned.
“So?”
“He hated that.”
“He did what he had to.”
“Yes.”
She looked toward the fish tanks.
“So am I.”
The farmer shook his head.
“You young people always think the old way is stupid.”
“No.”
She stepped down from the platform.
“I think the old way worked under old conditions.”
“That isn't the same as working forever.”
He stared.
The farm woman continued.
“Your father's well was what, ninety feet?”
“About that.”
“Yours?”
He did not answer.
She knew.
Three hundred sixty.
“That's not tradition.”
She said quietly.
“That's chasing something downward.”
He did not laugh this time.
But he did not agree either.
By May, heat arrived early.
The valley usually endured hot summers.
This one became something else.
Temperatures crossed one hundred degrees repeatedly before June.
The sky stayed hard and blue.
Wind pulled moisture from everything.
The reservoir east of town dropped visibly.
Irrigation districts issued warnings.
Farmers checked wells.
Pumps ran longer.
Electric bills rose.
The farm woman modified her system.
Shade cloth over the most sensitive beds.
Additional insulation around fish tanks.
Nighttime irrigation cycles.
Evaporation covers where practical.
She increased aeration because warm water held less oxygen.
Every gallon mattered.
Her father had installed a 25,000-gallon storage cistern years earlier for irrigation balancing.
She cleaned it, lined it, and incorporated it into reserve capacity.
Winter rain captured from barn roofs had added modest volume months earlier.
She had stored it because every drop she did not pump mattered.
The older farmer saw the cistern work.
“You planning for the end of civilization?”
She smiled.
“No.”
“Just July.”
He laughed.
The first well failed June nineteenth.
Not permanently.
At first.
A farmer on the south road switched on his pump.
Water came.
Then air.
Then muddy spurts.
Then nothing.
He shut it down.
Waited.
Tried again.
A weak flow returned.
Two days later, the same thing happened.
His static water level had fallen below the pump during heavy draw.
He called a drilling company.
Three-week waiting list.
The second well failed four days later.
Then another.
Nobody laughed at fish tanks that week.
They were too busy listening to their own pumps.
The older farmer who had first mocked the farm woman drove past one evening.
He slowed.
Her crop beds were green.
Not lush in some impossible fantasy.
But healthy.
Leaves upright.
Roots cool beneath shade.
Water moving.
The galvanized tanks reflected sunset.
He stopped his pickup.