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The Chicken Lady

Greensburg is somewhere in Kansas, and somewhere in Greensburg, there is a very large, scary, hand-dug well, thirty-two feet in diameter, and 109 feet deep.  The Santa Fe and Rock Island Railroads dug it in 1887 to get water for their trains.  It was either to dig a big well, or wait for rain from heaven.  It was cheaper to dig the well, even at a cost of $45,000. 

There is a bigger well in Orvieto, Italy; ten feet wider, and almost twice as deep, and 360 years older.   It does not count.  You can take a mule down that well. 

It is Sue Lowden, the Chicken Lady in Nevada, who made me think of the well.  She, of course, is the lady who suggested that we have to think creatively about how to provide health care for people who cannot afford it.  She suggested that once people took a chicken to the doctor, in payment.  "You know," she said:  "that sort of thing".  Unfortunately, the Chicken Lady seems not to have won the right to run against Harry Reid for Senate.   She came up a few chickens short. 

Every time I return to Decorah, the small northeast Iowa town where I taught in college, I notice the number of people whose clothing has just a hint of the frontier and Amish about them.  The closer one gets to the co-op, the easier it is to note the hint.  They are not really in costume; just thinking about bartering, and drinking water from a hand-dig well, pulled up by bucket.  Maybe trading a chicken for a dental visit. 

O.K.!  I have a pair of cowboy boots I bought in Mexico in 1985, and another pair from Wichita, and I wear boot-cut Levis.  We pretend. 

We pretend that perhaps we can get back to simpler times.  Trade a few chickens for those boots.  Raise food nourished by whatever the cow left behind.  None of that chemical stuff!  Dig a well.  Live in a log house or, at least, a small one in the country.  We like to pretend that small-town meanness is kinder that big-city anonymity; that gossip is better than Facebook. 

It won't work that way.  There aren't enough chickens in the world to trade for chemotherapy, or a transplant.  Trading chickens for health care is what we think about when the problems are so large we cannot comprehend them.  It is a way to wish for a simplicity that never was.  Digging a well a hundred feet down into Kansas is a solution that stopped working in 1932.

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