The first cohort of twelve children from Pella Elementary toured the farm in May. Antje was the youngest. She showed her classmates the wellhouse plaque. She read the Dutch words aloud in her four-year-old voice. The other children clapped, because four-year-olds clap at whatever the adults are doing.
In the meantime: read your meter, test your trunk lines, plant slow. The well casing is older than her tennis shoes, and the dye does not lie.
A second small kindness happened the following October. The Iowa Geological Survey field office in Iowa City—the office that had supplied the fluorescein concentrate—invited me to give a one-hour talk to their incoming class of graduate hydrology students about the case. The audience was twenty-three students and four faculty. I had prepared slides. I had brought the eight-page protocol Freddy had reviewed. I had brought a small sample bottle of the original dye concentrate. I talked for forty-two minutes about meter calibration, baseline drift, tracer injection, chain of custody, and the difference between a leak and a theft.
At the end, a student in the second row raised her hand. She asked in a soft Midwestern voice, "Mr. Brinkmeer, how did you know to keep your records all those years? Most people would have given up after one ambiguous data point."
I thought for a moment. I said, "Young woman, my grandfather drilled a well in 1925 and set a brass plaque at the wellhead that read, Water is the life of the farm. Some plaques you can throw away; some plaques you cannot. I have been reading that plaque every morning for nine years. The plaque is older than the thief. The water is older than the thief. The records keep themselves if you remember what you are keeping them for."
She wrote it down. I do not know her name.
The faculty wrote me a hand-signed thank-you card that hangs in the wellhouse next to the plaque. The card says, in pencil: From the next generation of water people: thank you.
Antje, my granddaughter, has been carrying a small spiral notebook around the farm since she turned four in February. She writes in it the way a four-year-old writes: squiggles, picture-letters, one real letter when she gets it right. She told her grandmother in March that the notebook is for the chickens. Dot asked her what she meant. Antje said, "The chickens have things to say." Dot did not correct her; she handed her a pencil.
The notebook is, by my last informal count, sixteen pages full. Most pages have a drawing of a chicken. One page has a drawing of the wellhead with the plaque, which Antje had asked me to read aloud to her seven times in April. The drawing is recognizably the wellhead. Antje had drawn an arrow from the plaque to a stick figure with her name spelled wrong above it. The arrow caption reads in her four-year-old hand: Mine to take care of someday.
Dot has framed the page. The frame hangs in the wellhouse above my morning coffee mug.
Antje comes out to the wellhouse with me on every weekend visit. She stands on the small step stool I built her in March. She reads the plaque aloud. She reads the brass monogram. She reads the date. She traces the Dutch letters with her index finger.
Her great-great-grandfather would have liked her thoroughness. He would have liked her patience. He would have liked the fact that the fifth generation of Brinkmeer has decided, by herself at age four, that the well is hers to inherit. She will inherit it in 2078 by my conservative estimate. Hendrik would have liked the math.
He had himself inherited the farm from a man, Reinder Kuipers, who had inherited from a man before him who had broken the prairie sod in 1859. The well runs through five generations of Brinkmeers and three generations of Kuipers before us. It will run through the children Antje will one day have. The water is 120,000 years old at the aquifer; the casing is 101; the plaque is the same.
Dorothea polishes it every spring with a small cotton cloth she keeps in the wellhouse drawer. She has done it every March since 2016. She does it on the morning of the first warm Saturday of the year, which she has informally named in her librarian way, "Plaque Day." Antje has joined her for two Plaque Days in a row now. Antje brings her own small cotton cloth; she works the lower corner where the dust collects. Plaque Day takes Dot about twenty minutes alone; Plaque Day with Antje takes an hour and a half. We do not mind. The wellhouse is the kind of building that rewards patience.
That is the story of the Brinkmeer well.
First, this was about a small-town engineer who knew water like other people know their own names. Berkeley Markham Stratton did not lose because Edmund Brinkmeer was a mean gardener; he was not even a competitive grower. She lost because she had been stealing his water for three straight years to grow her own ribbons, and a retired Water Works engineer had spent thirty years learning that water always tells you where it has been.
The lesson, friend, is that the property you own can defend itself if you have the patience to read it.