Hot and Dry

The summers of 1996 and 1997 spoiled us. We had abundant rains both years and the grass was wonderful. Then came the summer of 1998.

We got a few showers in the spring, but nothing to compare with previous years. Our winter moisture kept our grass growing until the middle of June, then we began to face the possibility that the West Texas drought had found us at last.

There is something distinctive about a drought sky. The blue seems paler, thinner, and the clouds have a flatness about them, like a boll of cotton that has been pulled apart. In good years, our clouds begin gathering in the late afternoon. They pile up and rise and form huge dark mountains that seem to have a solid structure.

Drought clouds might come together, but then they fall apart. They raise expectations, then dash them. If they drop any moisture, it will be a light shower instead of something more substantial.

I have never thought of myself as a man who talks to clouds, but I was doing it that summer. Not just talking; yelling. “You miserable, sniveling, cowardly, cheating, lying, counterfeit, two-bit sorry excuse for a cloud! We’re burning up down here, and that’s the best you can offer?”

At that point I abandon English and begin speaking in tongues and shaking my fist. It didn’t help. It’s not easy to shame a cloud.

With the dryness came a month of terrible heat—cruel heat, was the term that came to mind, because it called our attention to the nasty side of Ma Nature. She’d been so sweet last year, so kind to us, and now she had turned into a vindictive old witch who was trying to kill us off.

This kind of heat affected all living creatures on the ranch. Crows, roosting near water at the shipping pens, didn’t bother to fly when we passed. Road runners came up into the yard to drink from the lawn sprinklers. Wild turkeys hovered in the shade of a hackberry tree at mid-day, panting in the still heat.

Our dogs hardly left the porch. They panted and stared at me when I came to the house for lunch. Even the cats were panting.

At the Canadian rodeo, I visited around with some of the other cowboys and ranchers and was pleased to learn that even the most ambitious of them were taking refuge from the mid-day heat. I had thought that I was becoming soft in my old age. Well, I was, but maybe they were too.

I heard on the radio that losses to Texas agriculture were estimated to run $1.5 billion, including most of the state’s cotton crop. That was a huge loss, especially for those little towns around Lubbock that depended on cotton.

Another way of looking at this was that Bill Gates, the president of Microsoft, could pay for the year’s entire losses with only 3% of his fortune. Microsoft produced nothing you could eat, drink, or wear, and Bill Gates didn’t have to drive a tractor, change irrigation water, spray his software, or yell at the clouds.

Drought years make it easier for parents to spank children who talk about going into farming or ranching. “Get back to that computer, and don’t let me hear one more word about agriculture!”

In years of drought and famine, ancient man looked up at the sterile sky and cried out, “What did we do to deserve this?” Modern man asks the same question and God gives us the same answer:

“I don’t remember right now, but it sure made me mad.”