This is how they do things in Holly, Colorado. The Holly Library once had a computer system, but it crashed and the vender no longer makes it. So they've gone back to the old system of handwritten check out cards and a due date stamp.

The librarian, Nola Mae Ice, doesn't mind. She has been the town librarian for forty years. "I'm so used to the old system that it's not a problem at all."

Nola Mae "loves books" and her job. She asked nearly every person who came in about how they liked one of the books they were returning and then recommended a book the person might like to read next. I didn't ask but I suspect she wouldn't be happy working in Denver's book-version of Red Box.

She appears to know all the volumes on the shelves of her library. I was sitting near a shelf of history books, cooling off. To pass the time I pulled a volume off the shelf and discovered it was an original copy of the 1941 WPA guide to Colorado. I had visited Camp Amache earlier in the day and was pleased to find the book included a letter from Colorado's Governor Ralph Carr praising the authors and the book.

Nola Mae stopped to say "Oh, I'm glad you found something." I told her I had found "a very interesting book." She glanced at the book and said "Yes. That is indeed a very interesting book. Did you notice that it's the original? There's an updated version next to it if you'd like that better." When I told her that I liked this version because I had never seen an original . She replied that Denver "almost certainly has a copy but I don't know whether you could check it out."

She then pulled another volume from the shelf and said "Have you seen this? It's really marvelous. I never knew that President Wilson had watched Jeff Davis get carted to prison. If you like history, I think you'd enjoy this." It was a volume of collected Civil War esoterica, and she was right: I found it fascinatng.

She sat down and we started talking about the drought, farmland, rationing of pumping from the aquifer, the difficulty of returning irrigated land to dryland farming, and the Dust Bowl. I confess that I was surprised at the depth and detail of her descriptions. When I told her I thought some of the places I had ridden through looked like photos of the Dust Bowl, she pulled a volume of Dust Bowl photos off the shelf to show me what it looked like. Then she told me a story about what it looked like first hand in Holly, since she had lived through it.

I was sort of spellbound looking into her clear, blue eyes and listening to her talk. She has a knack for explaining things clearly and a way of telling stories that made their relevance clear without interfering with their drama.

A marvelous afternoon.