Tag: drought

Mercy, Mercy Me

“Mercy, mercy me,

Things ain’t what they used to be, no no

Where did all the blue skies go?

Poison is the wind that blows from the north and south and east…”

Marvin Gaye

“I went inside my heart to see how it was. Something there makes me hear the whole world weeping.”

Rumi

I return to Oak Grove to look for a place to rent, and get off the road for the winter. It feels good to be back to the familiar, to know how to get where I’m going, and take my secret shortcuts to get there. Although everything is the same, it seems different. There’s a yellow pall across the sky from a fire somewhere, and it looks as if everything is covered with a layer of ash.

I go for a walk along the Willamette River. I’ve never seen the river this low. The land bridge to Elk Rock is completely exposed. Pine trees are filled with dry, brown needles, not a few here and there, but whole limbs.

Later, I walk around my old neighborhood. Yards are dry and dusty. The leaves on trees are curled and crisped, as if burned, from heat and lack of rain. It’s a tinderbox. A careless fire and a strong wind, and all of this would be gone in moments.

My body trembles. I can’t breathe. I crumple to the ground. I feel as if I’m going to die here, under a pine tree, gasping for breath, on a patch of dry pine needles. I think of once mighty rivers running so low that they are rivulets, and leaves on trees that are scorched from the heat, and the smoke from fires that have swept across the west that shroud the night sky, and I cry,

chest heaving,

sobbing,

wet and salty

tears.

 If only these tears could fill the rivers and water the trees. I want to save the world but I don’t know how.

In the past year, a firestorm swept through a large portion of Oregon that came too close for comfort to where I lived. Five months later, an ice storm brought down limbs and whole trees on power lines throughout the Willamette Valley. Some areas were without electricity for weeks. I felt fortunate to have been without it for only four days.

Mid-June it’s one hundred fifteen degrees in the Portland area for a few days. There’s a wildfire in Oregon, another in California. Lake Powell is so low; it seems a trickle between its two great banks.

Everywhere I go, roads are being re-paved, and new roads are made with black asphalt. Why do we continue to use it, when it absorbs the sun’s heat and then radiates it back at the end of the day where we live, making it uncomfortably hot, creating a demand for air conditioning, putting a strain on energy grids that, in many areas, are powered by dammed rivers that are reaching dead pool levels?

Through Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico, I notice many vehicles, usually trucks for small businesses, spew black exhaust. There are floods in Germany. Sardinia is on fire. It’s one hundred twenty-four degrees in Sicily. Because there hadn’t been enough rain, the people of Ireland are told to conserve water.

Flooding devastates the city of Zhengzhou in China, and the fires in Oregon and California are out of control. A shroud of smoke hangs over the night sky.

In Abiqui, there are dramatic storms with sharp lightning strikes and booming, rolling thunder, followed by downpours. In the morning the earth is dry, as if the rain had been a figment of my imagination. The Rio Grande is reduced to a stream by the time it reaches Albuquerque.

Sicily is on fire. And then Greece. And Calabria. Torrential rains flood Japan.

It seems there is a weather disaster somewhere in the world every week. I don’t understand how people can deny climate change. Do they not pay attention to how the Earth has changed during their lifetime? I don’t understand how they can excuse the climate chaos that is happening as simply another earth cycle.

I don’t know if it’s minutes or hours that I’m on the ground, weeping, my mind replaying all the things I’ve seen and heard over the summer. Earth is compromised. What will there be for our grandchildren?

I don’t know why I feel personally responsible to make changes beyond the daily things I do to live lightly upon the Earth. Words are all I have to offer to encourage people to make changes in their lives to help Earth’s healing process, and to our local, national and world leaders to make the sweeping changes that will make the greatest impact. Even though I have much to say, words fail me.

When there’s not another tear left, I get up and walk back to the room where I’m staying, picking pine needles off my arms and legs, and out of my hair.

It takes weeks to find a rental. Aside from the outrageous cost of rent, most places want a lease for one year. I plan to be here only until spring. Friends tell me that Waverly Greens has short term rentals. It’s easily accessible to everything I do, and it’s near the Willamette River for walks. By mid-October, I settle in for the winter.

Page, Arizona

“When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.” Benjamin Franklin

On the way to the Grand Canyon, I drove through Page, Arizona. The terrain beyond Page captivated me. The colors were vibrant shades of mauve, crimson, and dusky pink. I decide to stay there on my way to Cortez, CO and take a closer look.

On the drive up, I’m dismayed to see heavy machinery bite into the buttes to fill trucks with the colorful sand. I watch these trucks haul their loads on the highway and wonder what would be done with it.

When I arrive in Page, I go directly to the Air BnB where I have reservations. It’s advertised as “a cute caretaker’s cottage.” Close your eyes. What do you see? It’s nothing like that. It’s a remodeled storage shed behind an apartment building at the edge of a commercial/industrial area.  The inside is small, but has everything I need to spend the night. I bring in my suitcases, and go to check out the town and have dinner.

The energy in Page is heavy. There are few smiles, little eye contact. I came to learn that the Navajo people are the largest sector of the population in the Glen Canyon area, and the Navajo Nation was heavily affected by COVID19. The loss of elders of the community is also the loss of knowledge and traditions that are handed down verbally.

In the morning there is clanking and grunting of trucks in the parking lot behind the cute caretaker’s cottage. The room is heavily scented.  I have a headache and my eyes are irritated from the phthalates in the cleaning products. I can’t spend another night here. I check out and go to the hotel where I’d charged Freedom, and then on to view Lake Powell.

The visitor center is closed. I walk around and am disheartened by what I see. Lake Powell is quite low, a painful example of the effects of climate change from higher temperatures and not enough rain and snow.

I return to the hotel. There are washing machines down the hall from my room. I throw clothes into two washers and return to my room. Having seen how low Lake Powell is, I feel guilty for using the water to have clean clothes. Raised Catholic, I spent every Sunday morning at mass, on my knees in church saying “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” and to this day I feel guilty not only for my faults, but also for all the wrongs in the world.

Drought conditions are extreme and accelerating in the Colorado River Basin. It supplies water from Rocky Mountain snowfall runoff to around forty million people in seven western states and Mexico. Denver, Las Vegas, Phoenix. Tucson, Los Angles, San Diego and Albuquerque all depend on it.

Next year Arizona will lose eighteen percent of its share from the river, eight percent of the state’s total water use. The allocation to farmers in central Arizona comes from water deemed extra, making them the first to lose it during a shortage. They are the state’s largest producers of livestock, dairy, alfalfa, wheat, and barley.

“There is little to no livestock feed available in the West, farmers are considering selling their livestock or land, and many species of wildlife are suffering from wildfires and lack of water.” Democratic Representatives, Joe Neguse of Colorado and Jared Huffman of California, wrote in a letter to the President in August.

In July, the water levels in Lake Powell fell to one hundred fifty-three feet below full pool and have continued to drop, holding just thirty percent of its capacity. If the water level continues to drop below 3,490 feet, it will reach “dead pool,” meaning that there is not enough water to flow through Glen Canyon Dam’s gates to generate the hydropower to the West’s electric grid. It provides electricity for about 5.8 million customers from Arizona to Wyoming. Lake Powell’s water levels are projected to drop to around 3,586 feet by the end of the year. There is a one in three chance that the dam will not be able to generate electricity by 2023.

What can we do? We can be mindful of how we use water. We can take shorter showers and not run the water to wash dishes. A fully loaded dishwasher uses water more efficiently than handwashing. Do we really need lawns, not only in front of our homes, but in public places? We can plant native and drought tolerant gardens.

For energy conservation, turn off lights we don’t need. Use energy efficient appliances. We can weatherize and insulate our homes. Get a programmable thermostat. Do you need a new roof? Get a solar roof; excess energy that you generate is shared with the grid.

While we need to take responsibility for our day to day behaviors, the meaningful changes we need to make to the way we live, with forward thinking innovations, will take cooperation between government and business, locally and globally. We need investment in green energy and infrastructure. We need to stop seeing the ways we disagree and start seeing that we all have the same basic needs. People with jobs in fossil fuel industries need to know they will have training and jobs in green industries.  Write to your government representatives and let them know if you have positive input for change, or to business leaders if you have a novel idea to resolve the issues we are facing.

Elon Musk is offering a total of one hundred million dollars for workable solutions for reducing the planet’s CO2 emissions in a durable and sustainable way. The contest started on Earth Day this year and will continue to Earth Day 2025.

Recovering and rebuilding from fires, floods, and other disasters costs billions of dollars, and human, animal, and other species’ lives. That money could be used in making the changes needed before “natural” disasters becomes more extreme.

“Our motivation should not be fear, but hope.” Sir David Attenborough