"At the time, you know—people just couldn’t believe it. They couldn’t believe that this huge area of the good old USA would just end up abandoned by everybody, that the people who settled the land and tamed it—they used to say that a lot, ‘taming the land’—that those people would just be driven right out of existence. I mean, at the time it was unprecedented. Seemed really unlikely and abnormal. Of course, it’s a pretty damn common business now.... But at the time there was a lot of government talk about how it was all just temporary, that they were gonna resettle West Texas as soon as they learned how to pipe water down from Minnesota, or melt icebergs, or some other such damn nonsense.... Hell, Alex, they’re never gonna move the water. It’s a hundred times cheaper just to move the people. They were all living in a dreamland."