By Mark Patterson
I hate rain. Who wants to stay indoors or endure getting drenched? And it takes about two droplets to constrict my twitchy bronchial tubes, making every breath an effort, sometimes for up to a week. Bring the heat and I bask. Let winter rage and I’ll go about my business, even scoffing at fellow citizens averse to traveling snowy roads (thoroughfares they have beaten to the punch by stocking up on enough Charmin and Spam to ride out an apocalypse). Four-wheel drive , I figure, just goes with the territory for people within the gloomy greater Pittsburgh area, where clouds loom an average of 306 days per year-and often mean business.
Since I was born and reared in adjacent Beaver County and am thus inured to the near constant threat or presence of precipitation, I’m still unaccustomed, even two years into social security, to somebody shutting the tap off. Completely. I mean, nature delights in dumping the water from our own lakes and oceans right back down on our heads, right? (No blasphemy intended, but was rain REALLY the best idea for irrigation some divine creator could come up with?) So why, during each of the last two Augusts, has Hancock given new meaning to the term “dry county”? Some divine prohibition act on H2O? Not that I’m complaining-or deserve to. We could have it worse.
Consider that catastrophic drought shaped the very course of mankind by forcing our ancestors to migrate from Africa, and profound lack of rain some 4,000 years ago precluded Egyptians from constructing more of those mystifying pyramids (My brother swears by the ancient alien theory-but also plasters bigfoot stickers onto the windows of his jeep.). Right here in America, a series of dry spells so devastated midwestern culture during the 1930’s as to whip up dust storms that blackened skies as far distant as New York. So, no big deal when the “World’s Largest Teapot” (I’m pretty sure puny earthlings built that.) sits perched atop parched ground for a couple of weeks. Cry me a river (just not the Nile).
Stone me in town square for this, but to an extent, I ENJOY a good drought. Aside from easy breathing that comes with clear skies, there are other selfish benefits. Burnt -out fairways produce longer roll on my tee shots. I may never break 80 at Turkana again. Plus, my grass-cutting costs plummeted. Small inconvenience, then, after a fortnight of nothing but dew , to drag the hose around back and water the new arborvitaes we put in just this April. During an additional half-month of record drought- At almost three-inches below this region’s average rainfall for an August, these ranked as our driest dog days in some 14 DECADES-my golf scores continued to improve, but I would soon be too busy lugging buckets all over our water starved property to even think about a mulligan or foot-wedge (both of which I’ve been known to resort to-so much for the legitimacy of that 79 in Calcutta). And an incredibly parched September had not even piled on yet.
Resisting the morbid urge to rubberneck a surely receded Tomlinson Lake for deceased, dry things, I decided to do something potentially helpful, consult Wiki, of course. While some Native American tribes actually tracked weather patterns and performed proprietary rain-inducing rituals in exchange for goods from thirsty settlers, the Zuni peoples stuck to traditional dance moves and came dressed for the occasion, adorned in feathers and turquoise. Nix to that, since flamboyant displays of cultural appropriation might not go over big in a neighborhood dotted with “Trump ’28” signs (and Amazon doesn’t sell headdresses in 3xL, anyway). Other anti-drought measures made brown lawns seem the lesser of evils, considering that most involved dead, squishy reptiles. Just, though, when I had cornered a hapless turtle and determined to suspend the poor thing, in accordance with “infallible” ritual, over some “body” of water (a five-gallon bucket on our patio would be the best I could manage), came the merciful pop of approaching thunder. Wed, Sept 24. You know the rest: An historic drought ended-and one fortunate tortoise slogged away.
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