By Ma. Eugenia Guerra

As if it wasn't punishment enough to be in year ten of the seven-year drought, we had major water pump/water network problems on the ranch, problems that spanned nearly a month of determining by process of elimination where the problem lay.
The matrix of the ranch's water delivery system, which is pumped from a well and courses for miles from the major holding tank on a high hill, was designed and installed perhaps 20 years ago and not by me or my father. Every time a line gives out, we put together another piece of the puzzle of the PVC mystery we've lived with since we assumed ranch operations.
This one was tough to locate, and we'd tried all manner of repairs and upgrades to equipment that could have addressed the problem of the lack of water pressure at the corrals, troughs, and ranch house. I was about to ask Alex Leal at Río Grande Helicopters for a fly-over so that I could find a tell-tale green patch of earth on an otherwise grim and dry landscape. I'd criss-crossed the pastures by foot -- which I didn't mind because you can stumble across some mighty beautiful things on the ranchland floor -- and hadn't come across evidence of a broken line that could empty 25,000 gallons of water in an unbelievably short amount of time. In one last corner of a pasture I had not traversed, I stumbled across the tall-grass oasis quite by accident and didn't have to call Alex after all. The cool, well-soaked spot was paradise under a copse of mesquite trees -- soggy soil and luxuriant Buffel grass fairly bent under its own weight. The hieroglyphic record of animal traffic was incredible -- coyote, birds, bobcats, raccoons, mice. The force of flowing water exposed a two-inch coupling that had become unglued and a tee that took off in a direction I had not anticipated.
The good news was that I had found the problem for once and for all and fixed it. The bad news, once gravity carried water to all its destinations, was the destruction wreaked at the end of the line on float valves and household plumbing by the flushing of algae and sediment from those old lines.
It had been, as they say on BBC news broadcasts, a die-lemma, to have such diminished water resources all over the ranch. The cattle fared best, for they had pond water. It was the human bucket brigaders that fared worst as hoarded rainwater made it into the water pans and troughs of horses, chickens, ducks, geese, and dogs.
One water project inspired another and so we went about the task of cranking up the generator to pump out and clean all the water troughs on the ranch. We've fleshed out our rudimentary map of water lines to something now more realistic and are now in the process of recording the location of lines with GPS coordinates.
Despite the lack of rainfall, we've had a sloshing good time digging around water lines and slinging algae with pool skimmers.
If this was your work in Zapata County, there are three friends you needed to have -- one was Mark Wied, the submersible pump man from Hebbronville; the other was Juan Manuel Senties of House of Rentals, to rent you a very fast portable submersible pump; and the third was Mr. Valadez of Kiko's Plumbing in Zapata.

UPDATE
It's raining at the ranch, and it has been for two days. The generosity of the heavens have dumped 4.5 inches on this dry bit of earth near San Ygnacio.
Because we had planned for days to get this one project done, a quick fence patch on a boundary fence, we did not let the rain hamper us. It was rather wonderful to get that wet while we worked. With the truck in four-wheel drive, we made two trips to the back of the ranch to the farthest point you can be from our house -- once to survey the job and another trip to take the materials. The senderos were slippery with the recent downpour, but the truck seemed adequate for the trips out there. It was incredulous to me that two days earlier the world had looked the color of cardboard and was now taking a turn for the green. The presa near our house had visibly taken on volume as had the Presa Escondida near the place we worked that Sunday afternoon.
At day's end, pretty far into dusk, the rain had subsided and I couldn't resist driving back out to the hinterlands, and I did so alone, never thinking for a moment that I'd be making the return trip on foot.
I like my truck, a diesel vehicle I use to move a great deal of matter all over the ranch and to haul cattle. I've never gotten into a jam it couldn't get me out of.
Until that Sunday night at dusk.
Earlier that day, twice, I'd driven over the same spot that had just swallowed my two front tires. What a big sucking sound the juicy earth made at that moment that I was no longer in charge of my immediate future. I cursed a little, bewildered that my running boards were on the ground, and made a quick decision on what I really needed to have with me for the long walk home. From the variety of field bags, tools, and electronics in the back seat, I chose the pistol and the cell phone. I locked the truck and began the slippery walk home. A flashlight would have been nice.
The inner dialogue was way too chatty, and pretty angry with the person responsible for getting stuck. I called the first wrecker at 8:30, but only after speaking to an information operator who said she had no listings for Zapata. "ZEE-A-PEE-A-TEE-A!" I shouted to this humanoid at the end of the line. "It's a town in Texas!" The Zapata wrecker couldn't come, so I called my sister in Laredo and asked for numbers of tow companies, one by one. I had nothing with which to write. One could be here at 8 a.m. the next morning; another said they could make it by midnight. I asked the midnight operator to describe the truck they would use -- four-wheel drive dualie with winch and pole.
Earlier, when my truck had still been operative, I'd seen a beautiful Indigo snake and an enormous rattlesnake and that image was ever with me as I walked along the muddy sendero in the near dark. The sunset was beautiful, and I had never been sadder that there was no more daylight. When I got to the blue gate that is roughly half-way to the ranch house, I ran into some frisky cattle. I could barely see them, and they followed me to the white gate which would take me into the pasture that is a valley between two high points. I walked gingerly through dry brush and grass and saw something not small dart across the path ahead of me, not a bunny, something with a tail running on four feet. There went the inner dialogue again, its din commensurate with the spike of adrenaline in my system. If in peril, would I use the phone or the pistol? Was that the hiss of chicharras or a coiled rattler?
I picked up the pace and ran into a patch of mud that nearly sucked my boots off, told myself to slow down, and began to see the security lights at the ranch once I got on the gravel road.
I'd forgotten my damned house keys in the truck, but quickly remembered a secret set we'd hidden years ago. They were tentative in the lock, but worked nonetheless.
As though none of the evening's events had happened, I sat numbly before the television, clueless about what I watched. The day's lessons were not lost on me. I hadn't gotten stuck earlier in the day because the ranchlands hadn't begun draining in earnest. That spot is a conduit of water to the Presa Escondida and as the land drained through there, it became more treacherous.
I'm not one of those Lemonade-from-Lemons girls. I actually pout and am hard on myself for bad decisions that put me in peril. I want to say this, however: there was something humbling and good about being out there alone and getting myself out of trouble, one foot in front of the other. My predicament had also obviated thoughts of things so much less important than getting home safely. That time on the ranchland floor walking north-by-northwest was of great value to me, a sorting-out time, a moment to consider real time and real distance as opposed to time and distance marked on the landscape of the heart.
Near midnight assistance showed up in a big bad truck, bigger and badder than mine. Dodge. Five-speed stick shift and four-wheel drive on the other stick. Cummins diesel.
We sailed through the boggy terrain and backed up to my truck, which the driver pulled out with a cable the diameter of a pencil. He followed me home and I wrote him a check about half the value of a good calf.
My next truck, I thought, as he drove off in a clackety-clack diesel roar and I walked into my little house that is warm and a great comfort with its book-lined walls and familiar art.