For 3 years, she had been stealing from my well, 200 gallons a night. Every night. I had assumed the new irrigation reading was a leak. Her name was Berkeley Markham Stratton, HOA board president of Windmill Crossing Estates, Iowa. 45, polished, blonde, three-time featured grower at the Pella Tulip Time Festival.
Mine is Edmund Brinkmeyer. I am a retired Des Moines waterworks engineer. The night I figured out where the leak was going, I drove to the irrigation meter with a bucket of fluorescein blue tracer dye and a 50-pound bag of solar salt. By Saturday, her famous tulip show, 16,000 bulbs, four years of cultivation, the headline event of tulip time, was a Caribbean blue field with leaves the color of wet straw. By Sunday, she was in handcuffs.
My grandfather, Hendrick Brinkmeyer, bought the 47 acres on the south edge of Pella, Iowa in the spring of 1923. He had immigrated from Drenthe Province in the Netherlands in 1909 with his older brother and $17 in his pocket. He had worked 16 years for the Pella Hardware Company before he saved enough to buy a farm. The 47 acres had been a corn and soybean operation for a Dutch family named Kipers, who had moved back to Holland during the post-war years. Hendrick paid $1,800 in cash.
The deed was handwritten on linen rag paper. The original artesian well drilled by Hendrick himself in the summer of 1925 with help from his brother and a steam powered rotary rig taps a sand and gravel aquifer at 112 feet beneath the surface. The well has not gone dry in any year of the 101 it has been pumping. The well casing is the same 6-inch galvanized steel pipe Hendrick set in 1925. The pump has been replaced three times.
The casing has not. I was born in the original two-story farmhouse Hendrick built in 1925. My father, Cornelius Brinkmeyer, ran the farm from my grandfather's retirement in 1958 until his own death from cancer in 2004. I had grown up on the farm. I had left for Iowa State University in 1979 with the intention of becoming a civil engineer specializing in agricultural drainage.
I had ended up after a master's degree at Iowa State and 28 years at the Des Moines Water Works as a senior wastewater treatment engineer responsible for the operation and protection of the city's source water aquifers. I had retired from the waterworks at the end of 2015 and come home to the farm full-time in January of 2016 after my mother Henrika passed and the farmhouse stood empty for the first time in 93 years. My wife, Dorothia—Dot, everyone calls her—and I had been married since 1988. We had met at the Des Moines Public Library when she was the children's librarian on the second floor and I was a young engineer who came in on Saturdays to read groundwater hydrology textbooks. She had retired from the children's department in 2014 and moved back to Pella with me in 2016.
She is 60 now. She runs the small farm bookkeeping and the seasonal flower CSA. She volunteers at the Pella Public Library on Tuesdays. She is the quiet, certain center of the operation. She is also the only woman I have ever loved.
We have one daughter, Frederica—Freddy since she was 5—who is 36 and a partner at a Des Moines law firm called Beamster Vosen Stratton, where she specializes in Iowa water rights litigation. Freddy had not, as a child, expressed interest in the family farm. She had expressed interest in everything else, reading, swimming, debate, the trumpet, three different sports. She had gone to the University of Iowa for political science and then to Iowa law for her JD. She had clerked at the Iowa Supreme Court and gone straight into water rights practice in 2014.