The Drought

I'm on to my next book club selection: Elmer Kelton's The Time It Never Rained, a book about the great Texas drought of the 1950s, something I recall very well from my own childhood. I can tell already that I'm going to enjoy this. Kelton writes well and draws some striking portraits of familiar Texas types. But I'm finding the descriptions of persistent dryness a little too familiar now that I've moved back home. While I'm enjoying the warmth of the Texas sun, there are times when I wish for a spell of wet weather and some significant rainfall.

Before we moved back, we gave some thought to the impact of the drought, which had already taken a firm hold of the state, and which promised to continue for a few more years. I suppose no one knows for sure what the future will hold. If we follow the pattern of the 1950s, then eventually there will be a change in the weather, and a return, at least for a while, to a wetter climate. But I'm one of those who believes that global warming is real, and that weather patterns of the past may not be good indications of what will happen to the climate in the near future.

Already, I find myself following the news of water allocation and conservation. I'm thinking about putting in a water collection system so I can collect whatever rain water comes our way and use it for watering my yard and garden. And I'm determined to keep our yard as natural as possible, little grass and mostly native, drought-resistant plants. Living near what used to be Lake Travis, I find myself hoping that we will see a return to something closer to a full pond sometime in the near future, but that may be a long time coming.

Even so, this is a very beautiful part of the state, and I can understand why so many have come to live here since I left more than forty years ago. But I fear we are all loving it to death and putting a strain on ecosystems that now depend so much on the central Texas lakes for the water that sustains all of this for a growing population. Kelton captures the sense of foreboding that takes hold when the rains don't come. Even when you've seen it before, a drought is a hard thing to endure. You really do start to hope that every cloud potentially has a silver lining.