The mere fact that Pickens can do that, in a hauntingly literal way, is the beginning of a parable about regulation and the environment that starts in the Texas Panhandle, winds its way through Austin and resonates in post-inaugural Washington. It's a cautionary tale suggesting that even in a certain recent governor's home state, whose laissez-faire mind-set he'd like to see replicated nationally, free enterprise is fine, as long as it's not your resources that it exploits.

In the 1980s, Pickens, a kind of entrepreneurial equivalent of his namesake, frontiersman Daniel Boone, became wealthy by launching daring takeover bids against oil companies -- Gulf Oil, Phillips and Unocal were among his targets. Even though his bids didn't always succeed, they provoked terror in corporate boardrooms and usually left Pickens enriched, sometimes by many tens of millions of dollars. Now, at 72, he has shifted his attention to another scarce liquid, just as it's emerging as a valuable commodity.

In state after state and in scores of foreign countries, the demands of industry, agriculture and a burgeoning population are chafing against a finite supply of fresh water and the neglected needs of enfeebled environments. After four years of drought, Texas is a leading example.

As Texas' metropolises grow, the search for municipal water has become expensive and intense. Pickens hopes to capitalize on this by tapping the groundwater of four Panhandle counties and sending it by pipeline hundreds of miles to one of three Texas cities: El Paso, San Antonio or Dallas-Fort Worth. The 654-mile pipeline Pickens envisions for El Paso would cost a cool $2.1 billion, but he figures he can amortize that with the high water fees the city would have to pay.

On Dec. 26, the New York Times carried a front page story about the Southern California Metropolitan Water District's plan to buy 145,000 acre-feet of water per year from Cadiz, Inc., a private company, yet Pickens' plan is bigger and more audacious. For starters, Pickens says Dallas would have to pay $675 per acre-foot for the water, while El Paso, separated from the Panhandle by a mountain range, would face a $1,400 per acre-foot charge. By contrast, the Southern California deal sets an initial levy of $230 per acre-foot.

Water for Pickens' plan would come from the Panhandle portion of the Ogallala Aquifer. One of the largest underground repositories of water in the world, the Ogallala stretches from Texas to South Dakota and once held more water than Lake Huron. That was a century ago, before the advent of cheap electric pumps gave farmers the power to lift water hundreds of feet. Statistics on the Ogallala are unreliable, but here's one: The aquifer waters one-fifth of the nation's irrigated land. And here's another: In less than a decade from its peak in 1978, the area of agricultural land irrigated by the Ogallala fell by 20 percent, at least partly because of the Ogallala's depletion.

The Ogallala isn't like rivers, lakes or even most other aquifers: It has no source of replenishment. It holds "fossil water," sealed underground for hundreds of thousands of years. Once it's used, it's gone forever. Now, as the Ogallala's water level continues to fall, Pickens is proposing to expand its use, so far chiefly agricultural, to include supplying large, distant cities.

He's anything but apologetic. "These wild statements like 'Pickens is going to dry up the Ogallala' and 'It's going back to a Dust Bowl' and all that stuff are baloney," Pickens said over the phone. "Hell, I'm not about to dry up the [Ogallala] reservoir. But I don't mind selling surplus water." Alas, one man's surplus is another's unsustainable resource.

In most states, Pickens wouldn't enjoy the right to buy and sell groundwater, but Texas is the heart of the heartland, where regulation is considered inconsistent with the God-given right to make a ton of money. Thus, it's the only state in the arid West that legally acknowledges the "right of capture," by which landowners have title to the water beneath them. (Surface water is another story: Even in Texas, rivers and lakes are part of the state's realm.)

One problem with the right of capture is that aquifers don't come in lot-size, watertight compartments: A landowner who slurps from his straw will eventually imbibe some of his neighbor's water, in addition to his own. It wasn't until he faced precisely this prospect that Pickens starting paying attention to water. Not one to miss out on a potential moneymaking deal, Pickens found that his proposal taxed the sensibilities of even the most free-enterprise-loving Texans.

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