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Around here, the promised harsh winter of El Nino was a disappointment, but La Nia, the hot dry spell that is supposed to follow an El Nio winter, has lived up to all her advance billing and more.
A friend who keeps a rain gauge reported a grand total of 1.68 inch of precipitation (about an hour's worth in Ohio or Michigan) so far in 1998, which is half over.
To be sure, we don't expect much, living as we do in the rain shadow formed by the highest range in the Rocky Mountains, but at midpoint of an average year, his gauge would have shown about 4 inches of water from the sky.
Nor are we alone. Most of the West is dryer than a Baptist wedding this summer, with forests, brush and grass frequently catching fire.
It's so dry that some rural county governments, long thought to be run by wool-hat ranchers who think Rush Limbaugh is a squishy liberal, have started acting like Boulderites -- they've banned outdoor smoking.
We could look at La Nia as a reminder of an abiding truth uttered by wise men like John Wesley Powell, Wallace Stegner and Walter Prescott Webb: the American West is a desert with a few scattered mountain oases.
Not that truth was popular. Powell, after pointing out that there wasn't enough water in the West to irrigate more than a tenth of the land that was offered for sale toward the end of the last century, was roundly denounced by the boosters of Western development and lost his government job.
About 40 years ago, Stegner had the temerity to mention
that Denver sat in a desert, and came in for some hot words
from that city's newspapers, whose editors perceived
desert
as an insult instead of a description.
Webb forthrightly addressed this traditional but
peculiar Western form of political correctness: It does
not make a writer popular to speak of the shortcomings and
deficiencies of a country, and to do so is to bring down
upon one a local storm of adverse criticism. Even the
scientist has to apologize for designating certain regions
as arid or semi-arid, and some of them have used term
'sub-humid' in order to shield themselves from the local
critics.
Early American explorers like Zebulon M. Pike and
Stephen H. Long were quite honest in their descriptions of
the Great American Desert
of barren soil, parched
and dried up
like the sandy deserts of Africa
where not a speck of vegetable matter existed.
But
they weren't trying to sell real estate.
The denial came after the Civil War, when the promoters agreed that the West might have been a desert way back when, but the advances of modern civilization would solve that.
Rain follows the plow,
some argued, and indeed,
there were wet years in the early 1880s as much of the West
came under cultivation by hopeful homesteaders. Others
proposed that the smoke from steam locomotives was the real
cause of rain, because rain often followed the clouds of
smoke produced by major Civil War battles (fought in places
like Georgia and Virginia where rain is not a novelty).
A prolonged drought which began in 1889 should have
cured such delusions, but the fantasies returned in this
century with Hardy W. Campbell's scientific soil
culture,
today better known as either dry
farming
or what caused the Dust Bowl in the
1930s.
Not that we've given up trying to moisten our weather. A friend recently suggested inviting some Ute ambassadors for a rain dance, until we realized that, if rain dances worked, then the remaining Ute lands would already be garden spots and they wouldn't be lobbying for the Animas-La Plata water project.
We have practiced the traditional rural ways of trying to make it rain, such as leaving pickup windows rolled down and convertible tops open. Some people have been so desperate as to wax their cars -- cars that hadn't even been washed since sometime in the first Reagan administration.
We leave clothes on the line long after they're dry, pour concrete and cut hay. We start those home-remodeling jobs that involve removing the old roof and leaving the place vulnerable to the ravages of weather -- which hasn't bothered to ogle, let alone ravage.
The most reliable storm-starter -- some community
festival which absolutely needs clear weather, like Art
in the Park
-- hasn't even generated clouds, let alone
rain.
But perhaps there's a bright side. These climate cycles, perhaps related to sunspots, often correlate with growth in the West. A few wet years, like the 1880s or 1920s, produce prosperity for real-estate promoters. And the ensuing drought years undo their work.
Sure, some rain would be nice, but La Nia -- especially if she inspires some combustion near those gated ridgeline trophy home developments -- could be an important ally in the struggle to keep the West livable.
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