The Whizzers Of Oz

The Kansas River is a filthy stepchild of its old self. Its water, once pure enough to sip from a settler's cup, is tainted with carcinogenic chemicals and stomach-curdling pathogens. Yet Mike and Laura Calwell embrace it as a 170-mile-long natural treasure. For a peaceful escape, they only have to drive an hour upstream from their house in Johnson County. "A lot of people say, 'You're going to canoe in that dirty old river?' But when we get back in there, it's amazing," Laura says. "We see parts of the river people never get to see. They just drive over it and say, 'Look at that ugly river.'"

As dusk settles into night, the Calwells relax on a sandbar in the Kaw, swapping stories with friends. A driftwood fire lights their faces as they share red wine from plastic cups. But even here at their calm campsite, the Calwells are reminded of their struggle to protect the river. Looking up at the stars, they notice a satellite. Mike indulges a sinister thought: "There's a senator out in western Kansas that'd go real good up there. We ought to put old Janis Lee on that satellite."

Janis Lee is a friendly, polite woman from the puny prairie town of Kensington, halfway across the state about twenty miles south of the Nebraska line. But in this crowd, she's a surly villain who has fouled the waters of their cherished Kaw. This past legislative session, Lee floated a proposal they refer to as the "Dirty Water" bill. When Governor Bill Graves signed it into law this spring, thousands of miles of Kansas streams were suddenly removed from the federal government's most stringent environmental protections. Many of those creeks flow into the Kansas River. Now, thanks to Lee, landowners who live and work along their banks throughout Kansas are free to contaminate the water.

Lee's bill was the most recent strike in a decade-long assault on environmental protection by political forces in Kansas influenced by the agriculture industry. On several occasions in February and March, the Calwells drove to Topeka to argue against it, just as they had against other similar bills. Zealous river boaters, the Calwells have devoted their lives to defending the Kansas River. Laura is president of the Friends of the Kaw, and Mike is former president of the Kansas Canoe Association. Both groups lobby on behalf of the river, to keep it clean and accessible for recreational use.

But there's more at stake than the freedom to have fun. Near Mike's feet stand a couple of two-liter plastic bottles filled with clear water. As he was preparing for this overnight float from the working-class town of Perry twelve miles downstream to Lawrence, he filled the bottles with water from his kitchen sink. Just like the hundreds of thousands of other taps in Johnson County, Mike's faucet connects to a vast matrix of pipes that stretch northward to a gated water plant near the overpriced homes of Lake Quivira. Two more pipes reach the plant from the north -- each as wide as a man is tall, each beginning at the Kansas and Missouri rivers. "We get our water from the Kaw," Mike says. "So I'm surprised we're still living now."

The campfire crowd laughs, but his joke carries truth. For years the government has considered the Kansas River an "impaired" body of water, meaning it's polluted beyond what is safe for fishing, swimming and drinking. And the Kaw pours into the Missouri River, which is the water source for most of Kansas City.

The Kaw isn't as bad as it was before the 1972 Clean Water Act, when rivers back East caught fire and in Kansas millions of gallons of raw sewage and industrial waste poured into the Arkansas, Missouri and Kansas rivers. But the currents of the Kaw still carry chemical contaminants and fecal coliform, a sickening bacteria carried by human and animal waste. And their source is an unlikely culprit. The state's biggest polluter is all the pristine ranch and farmland stretching toward the west.

Upstream about 260 miles, where a three-o'clock sun ravages the grassy fields of western Kansas, Senator Janis Lee steps from an air-conditioned sedan and squints into the brutal heat. A hawk floats by, clutching a small rodent. In the distance stands an abandoned church, its white paint nearly worn away by decades of sun, wind and occasional rain. The senator descends a slope of yellow grass and stops at a dusty patch of earth tucked into a low cluster of trees. The soil under her feet is marred with deep cracks.

She poses a simple question: "Why would you spend money on the quality of the water in this stream when there's no water here?"

Thus she reiterates the buzz that has gripped this and other rural counties across Kansas since May of last year. That was when environmental attorney Charles Benjamin stood on the patio of the Riverfront Mall in Lawrence and announced that his clients, the Sierra Club and the Kansas Natural Resources Council, had reached a settlement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Henceforth, he declared, more than 1,400 water bodies in the state must be made clean enough for boating, skin diving, water skiing, windsurfing, mussel harvesting, fishing and swimming.