THE OGALLALA ROAD

Julene Bair has inherited part of a farming empire and fallen in love with a cowboy from Kansas’s beautiful Smokey Valley. She wants to create a family, provide her son with the father he longs for, and preserve the Bair farm for the next generation. But...

...part of her legacy is a share of the ecological harm the Bair farm has done: in one growing season, her family—like other irrigators—pumped over two-hundred million gallons out of the Ogallala Aquifier, the sole source of water on the vast Western plains.

Haunted by this, Julene finds herself speaking up to Kansas Water Boards, fighting to preserve the Ogallala Aquifier, and battling the traditional and increasingly archaic values of her forefathers in the face of rapidly changing environmental and political pressures.

Updating the territory mapped by Jane Smiley, Pam Houston, and Terry Tempest Williams, and with elements of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, THE OGALLALA ROAD tells a new tale of the American West, and pointing toward a different way to love both the land and one another.

Julene Bair is the author of the essay collection One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter, which won Mid-List Press’s First Series Award and Women Writing the West’s Willa Award. Her essays have appeared in such publications as The Chicago Tribune, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review, and The Iowa Review.