Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

At seventeen, Floyd fell in love. Her name was Alice Criswell. She was sweet, demure, and very pretty, a little heroine out of Willa Cather. They met at a state convention; he was Master Counsellor for the Order of DeMolay, and she was the Queen of Job’s Daughters. Alice’s family lived in western Nebraska, near Chappell, a good two hundred miles away. Floyd was mad for her, but his father refused to let him borrow the car. Floyd had $30 to his name. He spent $25 of it on a beat-up one-cylinder motorcycle that, with luck, would take him to Alice. “It was a helluva trip out there. The roads were all dirt in those days. I wore out a pair of boots balancing that one-lunger, but I made it. When I got ready to go back home, the damn thing wouldn’t fire up. Alice’s father looked at it and said, ‘Your magneto’s shot.’ I said, ‘Can we fix it?’ He spent two hours trying, but the sonofabitch was beyond repair. I had to sell it for what I could get, which was five bucks, and start hitchhiking home. Hitchhike, hell. You hardly saw a car in western Nebraska in those days. I’d walked about three miles when I came upon an old guy with his head stuck under the hood of his truck. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ and I looked in and saw that his magneto was shot. Well, in the last two hours I’d learned about magnetos. I took his apart, saw right away what was wrong with it, and fixed it then and there. That old geezer was so impressed that he offered me a job on the spot. I never went home again.”