The cab of the truck was like the computer cubicle where he spent his days at the water authority. The indicator lights and numbers were familiar. He felt more at home negotiating the terrain of a computer model than traveling across the land.

Water had left its marks all over this land. But there was no water left on the surface that wasn’t owned by someone.

Jack roamed a geographic information system, a vast computer database surveying facts about every square mile of the earth, twisting them until they made sense. And there he found it, buried in the digital underworld. It was all underground, just waiting to be taken.

It had been waiting for millennia. But when the price rose high enough the water authority would move it across deserts and mountains to quench the city’s thirst. And all the credit would go to his boss who sat in the corner office with the view of the old well fields surrounded by palm trees.

Jack stopped to get gas in Eureka, a jumble of brick buildings in a narrow canyon at the high end of Paradise Valley.

“Morning,” he said to the old man behind the counter as he clunked down a six pack of beer. “How’s the road up the east side of the valley these days?”

The old man shrugged. “Nobody but Von Erickson and those hippies up there anymore,” he said.

Driving south Jack saw center pivot sprinklers circling emerald fields in the desert. The sprinklers looked like metallic praying mantises astride giant golf greens.

The farmers eked out a living, like modern Tom Joads worrying about the thousand dollar electrical bills to keep the sprinklers turning, steadily inscribing their inevitable failure, as the Farmers Home Administration hounded them with threats of foreclosure. Farming in the desert was a spectacularly bad bet. Only a handful ever made much money growing alfalfa here. Many went under. Some farms changed hands a dozen times in as many years. They had barely scratched the surface of this hard unforgiving country.

Jack prided himself on not being a gambler in a state that lived off suckers taking bad odds. He might drop a quarter in a slot machine once in a while. But he preferred to bet on the side of the house. He liked a sure thing. He wanted to write the code that ran the computer.

After the new farms there was nothing to catch Jack’s eye until he passed the hippies tumbledown gardens. They were using the meager drippings of the springs that once gushed out onto the playa. Now all that was left of the lake was a mirage on the crystal white alkali flat at the lower end of the valley.

Jack opened a beer as the rooster tail from his pickup billowed behind him. Those crazy romantics, he thought. One time Jack stopped to ask some questions about water in the valley, They invited him in to their communal kitchen. Jack felt at home. He felt claustrophobic.

His parents had lived like this in a series of ill fated homesteads around the west with an ever changing menagerie of other families. They may have even passed through here looking for their own nirvana and dragging him along.In the darkened dining room they had piles of papers and boxes full of pumping reports, geological studies of the valley, and pictures of the place in better days. They were alway collecting documents. They believed the boxes of paper history would somehow change the future and bring back the past. He wished there were a place they could survive. But there wasn’t anymore.

The hippy place receded in the rearview mirror then disappeared. When he passed Von Erickson’s shotgun shack, he didn’t slow down. The playa glared so bright he had to turn away from the light.

He didn’t see the land. He drove like he was driving on a map, a virtual landscape, where roads are branching paths of on and off decisions. If he looked at the mountains, he saw cutaway diagrams of the layers of rock. He traveled through the strata of the earth in his mind.

No one had thought to look for water out here. All the water seemed to come from the other side, where the springs on the hippy place gushed year round before the alfalfa farms blossomed to the south. Their pumps drew down the water table until the springs ceased flowing.

Now that the water authority managed the water, every drop had to be productive. It had to be used to provide jobs, work, money, an organized life. But there were inevitably leaks. And there were outlaws who lived off of the leaks.

Paradise Valley would be the last place to be hooked up to the grid. It was far away. But Jack’s discovery made it economic. Before the powers that be had been content to let the alfalfa farmers fail and the hippies live off the diminishing springs. But soon the pipeline would come here too.

Jack was surprised to find the turnoff to the well covered with water in the low spots between hummocks covered with the wind battered tufts of greasewood. He muscled the truck through the muddy stretches. The remote monitoring equipment at the well had failed. It had disappeared from his computer.

When he got to the well, he saw why. The gate to the well was open. Water was gushing and flowing on to the flat. He walked to the well. Water leaked into his low boots. He bent to look at the casing.Water spouted from a dozen bullet holes. Frayed wire fell from the electrical box that housed the remote monitor. The ground around the well was churned up with tracks from truck tires and horses.

Probably rustlers, rounding up the last of the wild horses for the black market, he thought. They were scavenging off the system as the springs and creeks in the surrounding hills went dry.

He sat in the shade of his truck, ate the sandwich he had brought, drank a beer, and emptied his mind. He watched the water flow out on the desert.

Jack awoke with a chill. The shadow from the mountain range to the west was racing across the valley. He felt the temperature dropping. He hadn’t come prepared to camp. He felt a sudden sense of urgency. He had been dreaming of warm rays of sunlight splitting into rainbows through the mist of a sprinkler in a green garden.

He spun the truck around and immediately got mired in the mud. He jumped out to lock the wheels. When he got back in he was muddy and wet. The wheels still spun, spraying mud, digging deeper. Jack slammed the steering wheel with his hand.

He trudged up the nearby slope, yanked sagebrush from the ground, and dragged it back to the truck. He took a shovel from the back of the truck and dug out trenches in front of the wheels. He lined them with the pungent branches. After several trips up the hillside to gather more brush, he was cold and sore.

Night had fallen. He climbed back in the truck and started the engine. He held his breath as he let out the clutch. The wheels caught and he eased away from the well. His dim headlights barely illuminated the tracks ahead. He should have wiped the mud and dust away. But there was no sense in stopping now. The watery playa was oily black and speckled with starlight. The night was pitch and offered no landmarks. When the tracks forked, he had to choose. But the water on the road was getting deeper and deeper. He kept going until it was too late. He was stuck again. He opened the door and stepped out into two feet of water.

There was no way he could dig out. He would have to spend the night after all. He turned the radio on, popped open a beer, and found a baseball game coming across the astral sky from Salt Lake City.

When dawn broke Jack tried to start the truck. The battery was dead. He had fallen asleep in the sixth inning. He grabbed the beers by the plastic ring and set off through the water. The mud sucked at his feet. When he reached dry land, he sat down on the road and drank another beer. It was fifteen miles to Von Erickson’s and another ten miles to the hippy place.

The sun rose in the pale blue sky. He stumbled down the dusty road. He could see the leafless cottonwood trees of the ranch in the distance. When the sun was high overhead, he found shade under a big sagebrush. A jackrabbit hopped away lazily and stopped to look at him before settling under another sage. He squirmed under the fragrant branches and finished the last beer. He was feeling light headed but it was all he had for sustenance.

He startled himself awake.He was only half way to the ranch. He had better keep going. The glare from the white playa assaulted his eyes. He closed his eyes and let his heavy legs carry him down the road.

As he stumbled up to Von Erickson’s place, the sun seemed to rest for a moment on the crest of the mountain range to the west, then fall, casting the valley in shadow.

The ranch had even more of an abandoned air than the surrounding dry range and alkali valley. The yard was a graveyard of abandoned farm equipment. The cottonwoods and willows seemed brittle and unwilling to bud.

Jack pounded on the door. It swung open under his blows. “Hello?” he called out. He was surprised at how thick his own voice sounded. When no answer came back, he tried again, then stepped inside. “Anybody home?”

The dryness outside pressed through the walls. Jack lurched into the kitchen. He pawed at the faucet. But nothing happened. Only dry silence pounding on his ears. He heard a dog whining. He stumbled outside and down a dusty path to where a skinny sheep dog guarded a circle of rocks where a spring once bubbled to the surface and flowed out across the fields below.

Jack groped for a rock. The dog limped off a few yards into the brush. Jack fell on his knees at the spring. The dog watched and whined. The water was covered with a thick slimy film. He plunged his hand in and brought it to his lips. The stench made him gag. He forced himself to drink. When he could take no more, he pulled himself to his feet. He had to go on.

Night had fallen. Stars appeared in the black sky like data points glowing on a computer screen. He saw the lights twitch and turn in their wheeling across the sky. His leaden legs carried him to the road. He faced north. A crescent moon hung over the horizon like a cup ready to be filled in Paradise Valley. It was cold. But he felt the moon’s dying warmth.

Up ahead he heard splashing water and laughter. He heard his parents calling him to come swim in the pond. The cottonwoods were twirling in the breeze, casting a moving mosaic of dark and light.

He laid down on the road. He had to rest again. Then he could go home.