Holy Earth!

In one of the plays, "The Day It Rained Forever," I was one of three old men sitting on their front porch in the middle of a terrible drought, complaining about the lack of rain. In the last scene of the play, I stood out in the front yard in the middle of a downpour I had to imagine soaking me to the skin, hollering for joy. Looking back on my performance from where I am today, I think I underplayed it.

Little did I know back then that I would actually become that old man — sitting on my front porch in the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia, smack in the middle of the worst drought in the country, anxiously scanning the sky for the slightest whiff of rain. My emotions in this circumstance are a lot edgier than that innocent young actor I used to be ever realized.

As I write this, the sky is filled with gray, fast moving clouds. In other, less jaded times, I would have expected rain at any moment. This is what I’m hoping for now, but my hopes have been dashed so often in this dry season I no longer trust the behavior of the weather.

For me that’s the worst thing about this drought –- the disorienting effect. The wind blows, the leaves swirl, the sky gets dark, and then —nothing. No rain. The sky clears. The hot sun reemerges to continue its relentless pounding on the parched and thirsty land. The Earth feels erratic and discordant —her rhythms off, her mood indecipherable and strange.

This takes a psychological toll. At the base of our sense of well being is a sustaining and nurturing Mother Earth, comforting in the predictable regularity of her cycles. When those cycles become chaotic and uncertain, our security is shattered. It’s depressing to helplessly witness wild plants dying, the leaves turning yellow and brown in mid-July. And for all the sweaty work involved, I’d rather be cutting the grass every week than sitting on the porch watching the lawn burn up and turn to dust before my eyes. The only green left is the weeds. I haven’t started the mower since the first week of June.

We’re worried about the well at our house, after hearing about wells twice as deep that have already gone dry. We’ve started taking our laundry to the laundromat in town, and collect our dishwater in buckets that we pour on the trees and shrubs we’re trying to save –- islands of lush dark green standing out against the pale landscape.

We’re also trying to keep our vegetable garden alive. All the time I’ve saved not cutting the grass has been spent instead carrying water to the tomatoes and green beans. We’ve got rain barrels under every downspout, and a 400-gallon tank to collect the excess. When that source runs out (as it has for weeks at a time), our friends who are only here on weekends let us get water from their deep and steady-flowing well. It’s good that people stick together in disasters –- because disaster is exactly what is happening here.

I walk across our hayfields, and the grass crunches under my feet. The fields were fertilized this past spring, yet we still only got a third of last year’s yield when the hay was cut last month. It’s barely grown since. The fields are all stubby and brown, except for pale green strips running down the hollows. Across the region, they’re talking about a 90 percent loss of the hay crop for this year.

This is an agricultural county, and it’s in the agricultural losses that the enormity of this disaster is most visible — $100 million so far statewide, and still climbing. Beef cattle farmers, who got slammed last year by the lowest livestock prices in fifty years (and they’re not much higher now) are watching whatever measly profits they could hope for dwindling away with every bale of hay they’re now having to feed their cows —the grazing pastures being barren. Whatever hay is left around here this winter will have to be bought at a premium price.

Talking about the federal government assistance that West Virginia farmers will need to pull out of their descending spiral of economic and weather-related disaster, a US Department of Agriculture official was quoted in the Charleston Gazette saying, "People keep asking how much it’s going to cost. Well, I don't know that. What I know is, we’re going to have a major elimination of our whole agricultural economy."

Around here, that would not only represent an economic calamity —and cultural genocide — but it would turn out to be an environmental catastrophe as well.

One of the biggest environmental problems we have here in Hampshire County — the fourth-fastest growing county in the state — is urban sprawl. Farmland that can no longer viably support a family in the cutthroat global agricultural economy is being rapidly sold off to real estate developers, who then turn it into subdivisions. The last line of defense against this suburbanization has been farmers trying to hold on to their generations-old way of life. The death of the farm economy would open the floodgates of sprawl. The ecological consequences of this — to soil, groundwater, rivers and wildlife — are nearly incalculable.

Of course the drought is itself a major environmental disaster, and even more, the harbinger of a larger one — global climate change.

Taking the cosmic view, there is a certain karmic justice being played out here, in that a state that has produced so many of the greenhouse emissions that have created global warming should be so intensely suffering from the results. In my most fevered moments of frustration at the weird weather patterns that carry the rain away from here, I sometimes wonder: did 300,000 acres of once beautiful and natural mountaintops (now destroyed and misshapen) once guide the wind along the Appalachian range in a delicate dance of nature? And in that dance, did the rain not fall equally on the evil and the innocent?

Who can say that in the intricate interplay of wind and land, we haven’t carved ourselves out an ugly glitch in the planetary jet stream? Who can say that the gods the continent’s natives claim once inhabited those disappeared mountains, now wandering homeless and in fury, haven’t turned their hot wrath against us?

No one.