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The trouble with droughts is that they're a chronic condition, rather than an acute injury, and so they're hard to talk about in the same way that we talk about other dire events that happen at a specific time.
For instance, anybody who was in Salida a year ago will remember the Great Dump of '01 -- five feet of snow at the start of May. That's a specific event.
Likewise the Great Blizzard of 1949 that struck the Great Plains of Colorado and Wyoming. I wasn't born when it happened, but my parents and their friends and relatives all had stories about it, like how my Uncle Jim went to check on a neighbor and disappeared incommunicado for a fortnight or so, and when he finally called home, he was running a road grader somewhere in western Nebraska, 200 miles away.
Floods are also specific events; my Fort Morgan relatives often spoke of the Flood of 1965, which also struck Denver. It started as a thunderstorm on the Palmer Divide, which swelled Plum Creek to Nile proportions, and consequently the South Platte roared through Denver.
But that storm also poured water into Bijou and Kiowa creeks, which headwater in the same area but join the South Platte just above Fort Morgan, so the river was several miles wide there. For many years thereafter, a visit to Fort Morgan involved a tour of flood scars, as well as much local bragging about the old concrete-arch Rainbow Bridge, which survived the flood that took out its newer neighbor.
Fires, tornadoes, blizzards, floods -- they come in fury and depart quickly, and leave indelible memories. But droughts just sneak in and persist, so you there's no single event to remember.
Perhaps that's because it's hard to notice the onset of a drought. As in 1977 and 1981, this year's drought began last fall with reports from the ski industry that some resorts might have to postpone their openings.
But the ski industry is always complaining about something -- if it isn't a lack of snow, it's that the state doesn't plow the snow off the highways quickly enough, or that storms delay air traffic, or that the depressed Canadian dollar is attracting skiers to British Columbia, or that Utah got all the publicity this year, that visitors are spending their money in lodging and retail establishments not owned by the resort corporation, etc.
So, it's a lot of work to find something that might matter to the rest of us in all that whining, and thus it's no wonder that we don't notice the onset of a drought in the same way that we observe the arrival of a flood or blizzard.
The next signal that a drought is upon us comes from the
Water Buffaloes. They will announce that we need more
storage because Two Forks and Narrows dams weren't built as
once proposed, and so water that should belong to Colorado
unfortunately obeys the law of gravity instead of sensibly
following the Love Doctrine (named for the late Gov. John
A. Love, who once observed that in Colorado, water flows
uphill toward money.
)
However, the Water Buffaloes are always telling us we need new reservoirs -- if not for storage during dry years, then for flood-protection during wet years, and for irrigation and recreation in the middling years. Indeed, it's impossible to imagine a situation that would not inspire them to call for new reservoirs, so the ordinary citizen can be forgiven for not noticing the arrival of a drought.
How to respond to a drought? We'll be asked to conserve water in our homes. But since agriculture uses about 85 percent of the water in Colorado, a few bricks in our toilet tanks aren't going to make much difference.
In ancient times, people had a perfectly sensible response to drought -- they moved from the dry place to a wetter one, as with the Anasazi, who apparently abandoned Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon for pueblos along the Rio Grande.
However, that practical response would just depress the real estate market. So we can take another tack and look for something to blame -- global warming, ozone depletion, deforestation, etc.
That will take a while, though, and innocent people could get hurt in the process. So as a public service, I will step forward and accept responsibility.
Here's how I did it. Our house was built in two parts. The one-story back part, with a normal pitched roof, was erected in 1885. The two-story front part, circa 1908, has a flat roof. It leaked, as did the back roof near the joint with the front.
We'd get it patched frequently by Greg Truitt, a local contractor who has a journalism degree but fortunately found a career of much greater benefit to society. He enjoyed the steady income from our dripping roof, but last fall he said that it was reaching a point past patching.
Since one reason to have a house is to stay out of the weather, and the other reason is to keep vast sectors of the American economy in operation, we borrowed money and got a new membrane roof over the afflicted portions of the house.
And of course, not one drop of water has fallen from the sky since then. It's my fault, I know, but what can I do about it now?
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