Hey KEH - they probably would put something (slightly controversial) in a news story just to spice it up... Anyone who has been at a newstory firsthand and then sees or reads about it later and sees how garbled the story can be portrayed knows how that goes!!Yes, that is an interesting article about the bird watcher... It IS easy to make fun of building a dam there and not seeing it fill up - not exactly sure how that happened, but if I was guessing, the state folks looked at the map and thought that would be a good location based on the huge drainage basin and the distance to any other state park lakes around... It DOES make sense from that angle. But for the average cross-country bird watcher to come out here and laugh about us being low on water is a little like laughing at a blind person for not being able to see!! No one wants it to be that way! They'd do anything to be able to change the situation! No one appreciates ample water supplies more than persons who live without them in such an arid area as ours. I guarantee you there has been a WORLD of misery experienced by farmers and ranchers over the years out here in watching crops burn completely up and grass wither away to nothing when the rains didn't come... I was visiting with an 85 year old neighbor one time - one of the finest cattleman to ever live - and we were talking about a cloud building in the west - and I casually said "oh, no big deal if this cloud misses us, we're bound to get a rain soon..."... and he sort of drifted off and mumbled "... one time it didn't rain...". And he got such a cold distant stare and almost went into a trance for a minute or two - it was almost spooky - I was overwhelmed by the raw emotion and pain still present from years long ago. I felt bad for being so cavalier when I know a lot of these old timers sure saw some very hard times... I wish there was some way to bottle up some of the flooding in other parts of the country and dump it right into that lake!
Howard
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