My writing desk circa 1980. Five Points, Davenport, Iowa
Editor’s Note: Part of my autobiography in progress presents my experiences regarding work juxtaposed with the Reagan Revolution. This opening of part two is how I introduce the dialectic between my work experience, family life, and social changes after Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. This social environment would affect our family a lot through the years. Per every author who writes about writing, this is not the final draft.
Working title: Transition from bachelor to husband
Returning to Iowa from military service, it was tough to find work after graduate school. I made a conscious decision to stop moving from place to place, from activity to activity, and settle down. In June 1981, I looked for work that would pay the bills to stay in Johnson County. Then, and to some extent now, that’s where social action is for young, liberal-minded people in Iowa.
Buying every local newspaper, I marked each job in the help wanted pages with an “X” after contacting the company. The work environment had changed from a decade previously when all a person had to do was make the rounds of major employers to find a good paying, union job. No more.
My application for work got extra points for consideration at the university because of my military service. That led to more job offers. I took a job at the College of Dentistry because it was offered. At the University of Iowa there was a small retirement plan, no pension, and no health benefits.
About a month later, on Aug. 3, 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on strike. President Ronald Reagan ordered them back to work and on Aug. 5, he fired 11,345 workers who did not cross the picket line, breaking, and ultimately decertifying the union. While on a later business trip to Philadelphia, I met Reagan’s chief counsel in the PATCO action. We discussed the strike and Reagan’s handling of these government employees. My understanding of the action was confirmed. It was political.
What started in 1981 with the PATCO strike continues, without apology, as part of Reagan’s legacy of breaking unions. The unintended and maybe not considered consequence of Reagan’s union policy was to make life harder for middle class workers like me.
I met my future spouse at the beginning of the Reagan Revolution while we both worked at the University of Iowa College of Dentistry. We got to know each other, and a year after the PATCO strike, I proposed marriage on Aug. 18, 1982.
I basically wear a uniform: jeans, t-shirts, sweatshirts, socks, underwear, footwear, and that’s pretty much it. I own a couple of woven shirts with a collar, and I kept one blue blazer from when I worked in transportation and logistics ending in 2009. I am a plain dresser these days.
Among issues discovered during the year-end budget reconciliation was an unexpected $451.52 spent on clothing for me. I was stunned. Clothing. For me. I researched each transaction and purchases were my basic wardrobe: three pair of jeans, three pair of footwear, t-shirts and underwear. These were not designer items, although I bought them new. I’ll be getting the broad axe out for this budget item.
The single wardrobe change this year was buying longer t-shirts to cover my behind when bending over in the garden. It was with a sense of social responsibility that I now possess seven “tall sized” t-shirts with logos like The Legend of Zelda, NASA, Smokey the Bear and Star Wars. I bought the cheapest cotton ones available and they should last a long while unless I get into something while working in the garage or outdoors.
The problem with blue jeans began when I started buying inexpensive Lee jeans while working at the home, farm and auto supply store. They fit well but were poorly constructed and wore out quickly. Now I’m buying Levis which in their current iteration as a company are durable and should last. Levis cost double the price of Lee, yet represent the better value.
Footwear wears out. I bought a pair of rubberized boots to wear while removing snow from the driveway. The soles fell off my previous pair. I also got a new pair of slippers for $13.28 to wear in the lower level of the house where I do my writing. I don’t want to track things from the unfinished lower level to upstairs and the old ones wore out. I got an inexpensive pair of red Skechers for fancy when my walking shoes wore out and my “fancy” Nikes changed to walking shoes.
I continue to use my Army-issued combat boots when digging in the garden. I walked all over the Fulda Gap in Germany in them, and have run hundreds of miles in them while in the military. What should I say? They are well broken in and nowhere near end of life. They are good shoes to last almost 50 years.
I don’t do a lot of styling around here, not even with scarves. The outerwear is pretty old, and the caps I wear are mostly advertising for tires, farms, seed companies, a Twitch stream, and The Climate Reality Project. Some of the caps date back to the 20th Century. I get a lot of wear out of these items.
Though not really complaining, this post helped me calm down about the expense. Any more, peeling myself off the ceiling has become an important part of aging. Hopefully the four and a half c-notes was money well spent and the 2024 expense will be cut at least in half or completely eliminated.
Lafayette Flats, Buffalo, New York. Photo Credit – Wikimedia Commons.
Millennials seem unlikely to purchase homes in the same numbers as my cohort did. So many are sharing an apartment or house and paying rent. It becomes difficult for them to build equity the way I did when we paid down a mortgage. There are other consequences of living with others in a shared apartment or house.
The worm has turned on millennial home purchases according to some. When student loan payments were paused during the coronavirus pandemic, newly available funds were directed into home-buying. According to CNN, “The Department of Education said Wednesday it has approved the cancellation of nearly $5 billion more in federal student loan debt, bringing the total amount of student debt relief provided under the Biden administration to $132 billion for more than 3.6 million borrowers.” This should be a catalyst for more home-buying in the millennial cohort. Maybe they will catch up.
The other part of this financial equation is the lack of good-paying jobs. In part, this is driven by consolidation and outsourcing of functions in the business world. Pay packages have changed so more of compensation goes into hourly wages or contractor fees. Thanks Ronald Reagan and the Republicans for this crappy economic environment for younger people.
The change in types of jobs available also has to do with automation. The automation revolution began some time ago, yet it is taking off with force in 2023. Anything that can be done by a computer or robot will be. Human workers? Not needed as much any more.
Stuck living together with unrelated others is an issue, in particular, during the continuing coronavirus pandemic. According to the University of Minnesota, older adults made up 90 percent of U.S. COVID deaths in 2023. While the younger people the virus targets may be less likely to die of COVID, they continue to get sick and it’s debilitating. A goal for mixed households is to prevent the coronavirus from entering the residence. If it does get in, isolating individuals so they don’t contract it in close proximity to each other is a priority. For some that means shutting the door to a private room if they have one and not leaving one’s room except to use the plumbing.
I had a conversation this week about what food could be eaten in isolation from COVID without going to the kitchen or refrigerator often. It came down to only items that could be eaten as is, or made with boiling water. It didn’t take long to develop something both nutritious and filling. I had some ideas to contribute to the conversation.
When I was younger, I rode buses a lot. From time to time I encountered Hispanic men heading North for agricultural work from Mexico and points south. They solved the food issue for a long journey by making a meal of two cans of food: one beans with sauce and the other some kind of vegetable. They carried the full trip’s supply with them in their bags. It was shelf stable, filling, and reasonably nutritious. They could eat them while standing in a bus station and did.
When my group of Army officers left Germany in 1979-80, one of my buddies was assigned to the U.S. Army’s Fort Natick Labs. He participated in development of meals, ready to eat (MREs). Modern versions of these are available to the public, yet are too expensive for a person who has to share an apartment in order to live in a large city. They make nutritional eating, and people keep them in their bug-out bags to use in case of an emergency. The reality is there exists a generation that can’t afford to live, even in the most ideal economic circumstances, let alone in difficult situations during a time of contagion.
Eventually all the housing stock will become available as older generations die off. Perhaps prices will decline enough for millennials to buy. When I was born, I came home to a three generation home where an aunt and uncle lived along with Grandmother, Mother and Father. It was how they coped with limited income from mostly menial or low-skilled jobs. If I believe being related to housemates makes a difference, it’s because I have experience it has. Multi-generational households are a tradition that goes back deeply into my Appalachian roots. My forebears were dirt poor in many cases.
Being unrelated to others in a shared house is something different, though. I don’t have good advice for those who must do so. What may be the first step is realizing shared households have become a permanent fixture in the American landscape, a significant change from what has been. With such acceptance may come peace of mind if not riches. Peace of mind is well needed in a modern society that evolved around wealth migrating to the richest among us. It’s become a place where we must fend for ourselves.
Waterfowl swimming in dawn’s light on Dec. 7, 2023.
The nearby City of Solon contributed about $1,000 to a four-year study of the Silurian Aquifer. By comparison, The U.S. Geological Survey contributed $153,000, Johnson County contributed $310,700, and the City of Marion, much larger than Solon, and a subject of the 2011 Silurian Aquifer study, didn’t give one penny. Johnson County is hosting the study and expected to eat cost overruns of about $50,000 thus far, Josh Busard, Director of the Johnson County Planning, Development and Sustainability Department said in a meeting I had with him yesterday.
I’ve been following sustainability of the Silurian Aquifer, where much of east-central Iowa draws groundwater, for almost 20 years. The meeting with Busard was prompted by County Supervisor Rod Sullivan after I sent him a link to this post. After the meeting, the good news is there is plenty of groundwater for the next couple years. Cut to the chase: Y’all should be conserving water where ever you live. The study is about a year from completion, said Busard.
The study is important locally because Solon, Tiffin, and North Liberty are among the fastest-growing cities in the state. Solon alone grew 50 percent in the 2020 U.S. Census. If Solon does nothing more than build out already approved subdivisions within city limits, it could easily add another 750 to 1,000 residents. That’s not to mention the many subdivisions surrounding the city. Each new person will bring increased demand for water. The entire area draws from the Silurian Aquifer.
I have a lot to say about what the study does and doesn’t do. I’ll save that for another post.
The main outcome of my meeting was to get up to date on what the county is doing. It is always positive to find someone else working on the same issues. We had a good conversation. Busard sent me some public documents to which I link below. If interested in the sustainability of the Silurian Aquifer, I recommend you read them.
Waterfowl on the move, Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023 on Lake Macbride.
My first was a handheld transistor radio purchased about 1963. I used it to listen to KSTT AM’s weekly Top 40 countdown. That year, the station moved from the Hotel Davenport to a new building at 1111 E. River Drive. When I was in high school we would drive past the station and wave at the disk jockey through the large picture window that faced the street. The corner drug store distributed paper copies of the KSTT Top 40 list and I tried to get one each week so I could follow along with the countdown. I have a couple of those in a scrapbook. The thing about radio was I could listen without the supervision of parents. If I plugged in the earphone, they wouldn’t know I was listening in bed. As a grader, that was important.
There was a large radio in the basement of the American Foursquare home from which I attended grade and high school. It was more a piece of furniture, standing taller than my waist. There was an AM dial yet I mostly used it to receive short wave signals from around the world. I spent a lot of hours roaming the dial and seeing what people said in English. It felt good to be exposed to radio signals from outside the United States. This is something I wouldn’t have done in my Midwestern life without that old radio.
I have few memories of listening to the radio in the series of Volkswagen vehicles I owned in high school and at university. I suppose I did listen to the radio, yet it made no lasting impression on me.
Upon arrival in Mainz, Germany in December 1976, I bought a General Electric multi band radio at the Post Exchange. It used batteries or could be plugged in. It gave up the ghost during the last few years, yet it produced high quality sound as I searched the AM, FM, and shortwave dials. I recall listening to live reports from the Vatican on Armed Forces Radio. The conclave of cardinals was electing a successor to Paul Paul VI and the reporter described the smoke rising from the Sistine Chapel after each vote. It seemed like a big deal when Pope John Paul I was named pontiff. It surprised everyone when he died 33 days into his pontificate.
While serving as an infantry officer, our unit had a long deployment to Baumholder for a training exercise that brought in much of Eighth Infantry Division and some of V Corps. The training was about readiness for a potential invasion of West Germany by the Warsaw Pact Armies through the Fulda Gap. I had roles to play at Baumholder, yet was also responsible to maintain garrison operations back at the kaserne in Mainz-Gonsenheim where we were based. I drove home from Baumholder most Saturday afternoons in my Chevy Truck while listening to Armed Forces Radio. The play list those days was old serialized mystery plays like The Shadow. The same playlist each Saturday helped make the 110 kilometer trip pass quickly. As each program ended, I ticked off the miles on the journey home.
In 1988 our family moved to Lake County in Northwest Indiana. We lived in a tract home in a neighborhood where all the homes appeared to have a similar design that included a ranch-style structure situated on a crawl space. Our version had a detached garage where most of my stuff lived in boxes. I had some space on the built in living room book shelves, an easy chair I received as a Christmas gift, and in the corner of the dining area we placed a word processor where I could write. I listened to local radio in our garage, mostly on weekends when I worked on projects.
Indiana, during the six years we lived there, was in transition. The heyday of large steel mills had ended and was being replaced by smaller, more efficient steel production facilities. Manufacturing across the Midwest was suffering because of the Reagan Revolution which drove it to locales where labor was cheaper. The local radio warned about developing a “steel-mill mentality” and to develop interests, especially among younger people, outside the mills.
There was a radio swap show on Saturday mornings. On it, callers would report items for sale and leave contact information. At the trucking terminal I managed, one Friday there was a theft from one of the parked trucks. The stolen consumer goods turned up on the radio swap show.
Folks in Lake County were mostly good people, although of an attitude that reminded me more of grouchy Bucks County, Pennsylvania folks than Iowans. Our daughter went to public school beginning in Kindergarten and it was a type of experience where kids, especially Hispanic kids, would be pulled out of school without notice, never to be seen in school again.
I traveled extensively throughout Indiana, visiting most parts of the state in my six years there. The radio was a constant companion even if I can’t recall to which stations I listened. About the only sure thing was listening to one of the two Chicago traffic radio stations when I had to make a trip into the city.
We moved back to Iowa in 1993 which was the heyday of Iowa Public Radio’s Saturday afternoon lineup. Programs like Thistle and Shamrock, Mountain Stage, and A Prairie Home Companion made an afternoon leading to supper time for me. It was more times than I can remember. I also listened to Car Talk while working in the garage on Saturday mornings. Listening to Iowa Public Radio on Saturdays was a thing until it wasn’t, due to budget cuts, Garrison Keillor retiring, and the coming to the air waves of local musician Bob Dorr who dominated the afternoons. To be honest, I could take only so many instances of Dorr going through his collection of vinyl LPs. It was the end of an era.
Today I mostly listen to afternoon news reports on public radio while fixing dinner, classical music when working in the kitchen during the afternoon, and to country music while driving in my automobile. The garage radio is usually tuned to country music. Automobile listening has become more important because the station to which I tune in is targeted by political advertisers. I can tell who’s got the dough for ads and who doesn’t. That, along with messaging, informs my view of what Republicans in the state are up to. Democrats don’t spend as much on radio advertising, simply because they don’t have the dollars.
The story of my radio listening isn’t just this. However, this post provides a sample of my life, something basic to my personality.
When our child lived in Colorado, before Keillor went off the air, I cooked dinner for us in their apartment with a Prairie Home Companion on in the background. It was a shared family experience that remained important to us. I value such memories. They can’t be repeated, only remembered. Memory of radio listening has become increasingly important as I age.
Yesterday I updated my profile picture across much of my internet presence. The 2011 image I had been using was taken in our garden by my spouse. That I’m now choosing a selfie is a sign of the times, the meaning of which is to be determined. Eventually the new image will be propagated throughout my accounts. I felt it was time for a change. An indoor shot in lieu of a garden image is indicative only of the season in which it was taken. The books in the background? Don’t make too much of those as it was a setting of convenience. In December it’s time to move most activities indoors and I spend a lot of each day in my writing room where there are shelved books.
The more impactful change is deactivating my X account on Nov. 22 after 15 years on the platform. That, combined with becoming more active on Threads decreased my personal mental tension almost immediately. I’ll miss certain people and accounts from X, yet the clean break will serve me longer term. So far, so good with Threads. There is so much more positive engagement on Threads it’s hard to believe that vibe will persist. In any case, there’s no going back to X.
I think the myth of the “big account” sustains X. That is, folks there feel like all the key players for their conversations remain. Likewise Threads in particular, but other new microblogging sites as well, have a paucity of news accounts. Some great news and commentary folk from X are moving or setting up accounts on other microblogging platforms, yet don’t post a lot. X is not dead, but gonna die, I predict, once news and political accounts abandon it. For now, I have newspaper subscriptions to get news when I need it. If I get desperate, there is always radio and cable television to backstop me.
As the year winds down, it’s time for budgeting as well as determining if this life in Big Grove Township is sustainable. Living on a fixed income has been challenging. I hope we can make it this way for a long while. Sadly, in American society, life is more often about financial numbers than fulfilling our wants and needs. This blog is an attempt to change that.
The challenge of winter is to continue exercising at least half an hour each day regardless of weather. Taking a shovel to a couple inches of snow on the driveway is a natural, yet as warm as it’s been, isn’t a consistent source of exercise. Walking the trail is out, although some neighbors do it. I don’t enjoy the slippery surface the snow and ice mixture creates. A few days ago, I was getting a bit panicky as I hadn’t found anything to do.
I ended up searching the internet for ideas and came up with walking in place. I tried it a few days last week and based on how I felt after my half hour sessions, it is a better form of exercise than trail walking. Going forward, when I can get outside, I will. When I can’t, I’ll put on a CD and listen to music while stepping in place for a half hour. It’s something I can do until it’s time to begin working in the garden.
The message of this post is pretty simple. Unless we stick to the idea we need exercise in addition to what we get on an average day, our health will suffer for it. I’ve come to believe keeping at it — doing a set amount of daily exercise — is as important as the exercise we do. So, problem solved — for now.
Farmer spreads manure while we were on maneuvers with the French Infantry Marines in Brittany, late 1970s. They keep the horse before the cart in Brittany. Photo by the author.
Three and a half years into retirement I’m not close to being finished culling belongings. It takes time, yet it’s more complicated than that. In particular, when I find a neglected packet of photographs, I can spend hours chasing memories close to whatever main event prompted me to take them. Moving to digital photography in 2007 hasn’t made it easier. If anything the number of photos multiplied each year because of the ease in taking them. Digital files mount up and I developed a special back up process so I don’t lose them. There are so many.
Everywhere I look in my archives, I find more photos all arranged in a hodge-podge manner. Once found, I remember taking most of them, yet how to tap them for pragmatic narrative is problematic. Each batch leads down a different rabbit hole.
I enjoy time spent with photographs yet need discipline in how I use my writing time, which sorting photos is. With the explosion of film photographs when I was a pre-teen, followed by digital in 2007, there are so many that simply looking at them is a huge task. There are six decades worth!
Luckily, Mother was keen on downsizing while living. Included in her belongings were many photos and she let me go through them, taking some prints, but mostly scanning them to files. That, too, was a massive undertaking. I got the images I wanted leaving the hard copies for my siblings.
When writing any book, the number of photos that can be included is small. I’m reading Rachel Maddow’s book Prequel and she used one or two images per chapter. That seemed like a lot. When I print my blog book each year, the photographs make the pages vibrant. They are a small subset of what’s available. I recently changed the size of them after recognizing the photo was as important as the text in many cases.
Sometimes I use a photograph as inspiration to write a paragraph or two without planning to include the snapshot in the book. A photograph can stir living memory from that mystical storage place in our brains. Often the narrative is better than the image. It focuses the reader’s attention on aspects of the story that drive narrative. Too many photos can get readers distracted from the narrative.
I have a short term project in my writing, but big picture I need to distill the boxes and crates of belongings to a usable number. I should pick photographs that advance a narrative, or record some specific moment in time. Seems like writing 101 and I’m only just arriving at this forking path.
Modern Woodmen Park (formerly Municipal Stadium), July 29, 2013. Photo Credit: Bohao Zhao, Wikimedia Commons.
Municipal Stadium in Davenport, Iowa was an important part of my growing up. As much as anything, it was a central gathering place for big events for the local proletariat in this sleepy city on the Mississippi River. Our family or I attended events there, including musical performances, high school football games, professional wrestling matches, and a revival meeting. I once attended a Minor League Baseball game there.
By the 1950s and ’60s no culture of big community events existed in Davenport. Segments of the population did gather at a stadium for events tailored to their interests. Promoters tried to make something of our sports teams, yet everyone seemed to have their own life with accompanying other things to do. Here are four things in which I participated at Municipal Stadium, as we called it then.
Herman’s Hermits
On Aug. 27, 1966, Herman’s Hermits played in Davenport at the Municipal Stadium. In the wake of Beatlemania, this was the best our Midwestern city could do. My cohort had watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show and talked about it at school. I had visions of becoming a musician, having gotten a guitar at the King Korn Stamp Store soon after the British Invasion began.
I don’t recall how I got tickets, but I had income from my newspaper route. Mother made the arrangements for bleacher seats. It was a sunny day for the concert.
If I wrote down everything I remember about the concert, the paragraph would not be long. Besides the concert, the Times Democrat story of Peter Noone and other band members shopping in the book section of the M.L. Parker Department Store struck home. It was the same place I had begun buying books with my own money. That made everything pretty real. A few of my classmates also attended the concert. The songs the band performed were not memorable, even the ones played on the radio.
All Star Wrestling
Father and we kids attended a professional wrestling match at Municipal Stadium. The stands were not packed although because of the popular Saturday morning television program, All Star Wrestling, the event drew a good-sized crowd. Patrons were unruly, with arguments breaking out among them. I almost got into a fight after mouthing off to a stranger. That day there was a cage match during which constructing a cage of chain-link fencing was part of the spectacle. Young women would visit the motel across the river where the wrestlers stayed and attempt to accompany them on tour. Such plebeian entertainments were typical in my home town.
The American Wrestling Association (AWA) was an American professional wrestling promotion based in Minneapolis from 1960 until 1991, according to Wikipedia. It was founded by Verne Gagne and Wally Karbo, originating as part of the Minneapolis Boxing & Wrestling Club. Unlike modern professional wrestlers of the WWE, Gagne was an amateur wrestling champion who was an alternate on the U.S. freestyle wrestling team at the 1948 Summer Olympics. He ran the AWA with a conservative sensibility, Wikipedia said, firmly believing that sound technical wrestling should be the basis of a pro-wrestling company. Cage matches reflected no basis in technical wrestling as Gagne had come to know it.
New Flying Buttresses
When Mother settled with the elevator company in 1973, after Father’s death, we kids got a share. Mine amounted to about $4,000, which I hastily spent on a Volkswagen micro bus, a Fender Telecaster Thinline guitar, a public address system and two Peavey guitar amplifiers. Some stage crew buddies and I formed a band. I’d call it a garage band but we mostly played in the basement of the bass player’s family home, or in Mother’s dining room. Because we invested in equipment from a music store on the Illinois side of the Quad Cities, when they staged a concert for bands to whom they sold equipment, we were invited to perform.
Municipal Stadium is the largest venue in which I played. We only performed a song or two, which made the rigamarole of setting up and tearing down, the main part of the time we spent there. We were all stage crew, so we lived in that realm. We played Six Days on the Road by Earl Green and Carl Montgomery. I remember breaking a string during the performance. We didn’t have a name and were introduced as Paul Deaton and his New Flying Buttresses. The name lasted exactly for that single gig.
Johnny Cash
On July 22, 1974, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and their band traveled to Davenport to perform at Municipal Stadium at the request of the Rev. Tommy Barnett, then of the Westside Assembly of God. During his tenure as pastor, Barnett grew the congregation from 76 to more than 4,000 members. Westside buses could be seen each Sunday, plying the neighborhoods throughout the lower part of Davenport, picking up its church-goers for service and then delivering them home.
Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash playing at a Tommy Barnett Revival at Municipal Stadium. Screenshot from a video of uncertain provenance.
Cash was supportive of Barnett at the time, although he recanted his support in one of his memoirs. In researching this post, I found numerous stories about the concert, and having been there, found almost all of them to be greatly exaggerated. A short video of Barnett and Cash includes a panoramic shot of the crowd at Municipal Stadium (Link is here). The stadium and bleachers show the concert was well attended. I’d come to the concert to hear my shirt-tail relative June Carter Cash, but she stayed behind in Tennessee at the last moment. Since I had already been baptized, I passed on the opportunity to walk to the stage and be saved.
These are the kinds of events that attracted working class families in Davenport during the 1960s and ’70s. We weren’t Marxists, yet the word proletariat fits.
Will the Silurian Aquifer have enough water to support the population that draws from it? Answers to that question are a bit sketchy due to infrequent research into groundwater projections. A 2011 study published by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources had this to say about nearby Coralville, which draws water from the Silurian Aquifer.
The City of Coralville may have to limit its future withdrawal of water from the Silurian aquifer to maintain the sustainability of the resource. Contingency plans should be prepared by the City of Coralville to evaluate alternative water sources.
Groundwater availability modeling of the Silurian Aquifer in East-Central Iowa, November 2011.
Read that quote again and say after me, “Yikes!”
Last summer, water usage on our community’s public water system surged with the drought. We are also on the Silurian Aquifer. So much more water was used during the worst days of drought the well faltered. We instituted voluntary conservation practices and the issue resolved. Usage dropped by 26 percent the following month. The question repeats itself. Will there be enough water in the aquifer?
In 2006 a similar study was published by the U.S. Geological Survey. While I was on the board of health, we reviewed it, and saw it’s conclusion that until 2025, projections indicated there would be enough water to serve the population. That was good enough for the Public Health Department and the Board of Supervisors. It may be time for a new survey, and perhaps one of the involved entities has already undertaken it. I hope so. The message was clear in 2011: decrease reliance on the Silurian Aquifer.
Things have shifted. Two of Big Grove Township’s neighboring cities, Tiffin and North Liberty, are among the fastest growing in Iowa. All those people will need water and their public water systems draw from the Silurian Aquifer. Similarly, there has been an exodus of population from rural parts of the state with many moving to urban areas where there are jobs, healthcare, and commerce. This also creates more localized demand for groundwater. Finally, our rivers have been a source of drinking water, as they are in Iowa City. Surface water quality in Iowa continues to get worse with extractive agricultural operations going on in almost every square inch of the state. For how much longer can cities rely on river water for humans to use? Drawing more from the Silurian Aquifer may not be a reasonable alternative when Coralville is being told to make other plans.
My point in this post is ground water is not a limitless resource. We should each be taking steps to minimize household use and if on a public well, use more of our water during off peak hours. The talk about water used for flushing the toilet, watering the lawn, and fixing household leaks is not a liberal conspiracy. Conservation benefits everyone.
We don’t know if there will be enough water for human populations. We cannot live without adequate water and our scientists and governmental organizations should make sure the projected usage models are accurate, and then work on solutions to shortages. If the Silurian Aquifer goes dry we are in for a wake up call. I predict it won’t be pleasant.
Editor’s Note: I checked with the county and, in fact, a new study of the Silurian Aquifer is in progress. Looking forward to reading it when finished.
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