It just won’t rain around here. It’s disturbing.
Maybe you don’t care if you don’t live around here but hear me out. The rain goes right around our town. I’ve watched it on radar. Disappointed again.
Now there’s a 97% chance of rain for Thursday, the day this post will go live. I’ll bet you a dollar we barely get pissed on. Excuse the vernacular. I’m a little disturbed, discouraged, affected, dejected. Makes me mad. I need rain like the trees and the grass.
My pecan tree is half dead because of the drought. All the upper branches are bare. I love that tree. It’s my friend. One year it dropped so many pecans you couldn’t help but step on them and crack there’s another broken pecan shell.
It’s called a ‘mast season’ designed to overwhelm the squirrels and the deer who will eat as many as they can. Ofcourse there are no more deer in my backyard but there used to be.
It’s a massive tree, the biggest tree I have. It’s in my book. The protagonist lives under a giant pecan tree in his backyard. That’s me. I’m the protagonist in my book. That’s why I could write it so good.
Anyways. Pecan trees are dying all over the neighborhood. Not the Spanish Oaks though. They are impervious.
The desert is moving in. It stretches all the way from Pecos in west Texas to Silver City in New Mexico. Then another desert starts on the other side of the mountains and goes all the way to California. Now do you care?
This place used to be an oasis. Ten thousand years ago, the archaeologists tell us, it was cooler and wetter around here. The springs flowed all the time. Now the springs are empty holes. Arroyos would fill with water and flow regularly. Now they’re paved over, concreted in, or just plain forgotten in the backyards and alleys of the neighborhoods all over town. I ride my bike around. I know this.
The aquifer (that used to feed the springs) stretches all the way from Brackettville to Austin in a broad arc but it’s been drained down. We built a city over the aquifer and covered it with streets for the cars to drive on. Remarkable. I mean the aquifer.
Hundreds of feet underground it lies, a huge reservoir made from limestone with lots of holes in it made from an ancient ocean 100 million years ago. It took a long time to make and fill up with water and then slowly leak out in the artesian springs that used to drive the rivers and creeks around here.
Now we pump city water from the water treatment plants into the river beds otherwise we would have no riverwalk and the tourists would all go away. Well except for the Alamo.
So I’m sad. I tried praying to Chac Mool, the rain god of the Maya. The only rain god I know of. Nothing. I tried complaining and cursing. Nobody listened. I mean nobody of importance, I mean baristas. But, hey wait, baristas are important. They are the original ancient archetypical characters who served the drinks: the geisha, the bar maid from the middle ages, Shiduri in the epic of Gilgamesh, the sartorial women of Genghis Khan, the Valkyries, your mother.
I’m parched, psychologically. I need the rain. I need to see the heavens be bountiful. I need to feel the vegetation drinking deep underground in the dark soil. I need to see storm clouds in the sky. I need to hear the rain on my roof all night.
But life is like that, right? Drought and flood, feast and famine. We go forth in our day hoping for the best and dealing with the worst. Put on your hat of resignation but keep your hat of celebration in your purse just in case.
Be happy, I tell myself, rain or bloody shine. Find the inner oasis. Yeah, yeah. I know, I know. But I wish it would rain.
Here’s a story. A few months ago, actually the day after Labor Day, early September, sometime around mid-morning, a rain cloud appeared over the city and then all her brothers and sisters came and joined her. They started raining and they didn’t stop. I was out on my bike at the cafe and I thought, ah, it’ll stop soon, but it didn’t. It rained harder and harder. I thought hey I’d better get home, my windows are open. So I started out, slowly and carefully making my way thru the rain and the water, trying not to get deluged by a passing bus.
When I came to Broadway, where I had to cross, the water was streaming down the street like a river which is what Broadway used to be before they put in all the drainage projects and paved it over. I watched trash bins sailing down the street, washed away from the driveways and curbsides of the neighborhood but didn’t think much about it as I dismounted and prepared to walk my bike over to the other side. That’s not what happened.
The water knocked me down and dragged me along for a couple of blocks, seemed like, I don’t know I wasn’t counting blocks. I was trying to grab hold of something and drag myself out of the raging torrent, one hand holding onto my bike and the other grasping at the curb, sliding along down the gutter.
Well, folks, I finally grabbed hold of something, a gap in the curb maybe, and got out of there. I noticed a pickup truck parked nearby on a side street with the engine running so I went over and asked for help to get home. He said throw your bike in the back and let’s go, I’ll give you a ride a ride home. So I did, climbed into the cab soaking wet, bleeding from my ankle to my elbow and he gave me a ride home. We had to go all the way around, up on top of the hill and down the other side to get away from the raging torrent and into my neighborhood. The storm was flashing and clashing above our heads and the water was pouring down.
That was a rainstorm. The last one I remember.
Maybe it was a warning. Maybe it was a reminder. Maybe it was a love tap from the rain god saying I haven’t forgotten you.
Music for the podcast was from All India Radio - Desert Tapes. Thank you.
03:42 2. Rust 1
15:18 7. Rust 3
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