Dot and I underwrote the founding gift. The first cohort of 12 children from Pella Elementary toured the farm in May. Ana 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 whatever the adults are doing. The well casing is older than her tennis shoes, and the die 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 1-hour talk to their incoming class of graduate hydrology students about the case. The audience was 23 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 42 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. Brinkmeyer, 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 9 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. " Ana, my granddaughter, has been carrying a small spiral notebook around the farm since she turned 4 in February. She writes in it the way a 4-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.
Ana 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, 16 pages full. Most pages have a drawing of a chicken. One page has a drawing of the wellhead with the plaque, which Ana had asked me to read aloud to her seven times in April.