We are not damaging a thing that belongs to anyone else. We are tracing our own water. Are you ready? I told her I had been ready for 2 years. Between the phone call and the Friday injection, I prepared the wellhouse the way Freddy had asked me to.
I cleaned the trunk line manifold of any sediment. I calibrated the chemical dosing valve. I tested the backup hand pump. I made up a written chain of custody protocol with timestamps, signatures, and serial numbers for every container that would touch the system. Dot photographed every step on her phone.
Freddy had told me that any future criminal case would turn on the cleanness of the dye injection record. I spent the two days the way I had spent 30 years of Water Works incident response work. Slow, careful, redundant. The way you prepare a system when you know somebody else's lawyer is going to look at every line of the record. By Thursday night, the protocol was eight pages long.
Freddy reviewed it by email Thursday at midnight. She approved it with a one-word reply. Excellent. She drove up Friday morning. She brought the 5-gallon jug.
She brought a handheld UV flashlight for fluorescein detection. She brought a clipboard with a tracer injection protocol from her old water rights professor at the Iowa Geological Survey. She brought Ana, who was excited to spend a weekend at the farm with her grandmother. We injected the fluorescein into the main irrigation trunk line at 6:03 p.m. on the 26th of April. The injection was 4 ounces of concentrate diluted to a volume of 2 gallons introduced through the main service tap with a hand pump I had designed in 2017.
We sealed the tap. We waited. Dot and I sat on the back porch from 8:00 p.m. Friday evening until 2:00 a.m. Saturday morning waiting for the first reports.
Freddy sat with us until midnight, then went up to the guest room to sleep 4 hours. Ana was already asleep in her room. The April night had been cool but clear, 51°, no wind, a half moon over the Christmas tree rose. We had drunk three pots of coffee. We had not spoken much.