Shelley Munro had a Grateful-For type T13 a while back that got me thinking. At the top of her list was hot and cold running water. It struck me hard because I have a kind of weird relationship with water. Let me tell you about it.
1. I grew up in the Rocky Mountains, for the most part. There are precious few places between Texas (the Western end) and Montana that aren’t simi-arid, if not desert. People who grow up in places where water is scarce hear a lot about it.
2. The saying around El Paso is, “Seems like we’ve been having this same drought for twenty years.” Actually, they have. It’s called a climate, but they don’t want to hear that from a snot-nosed brat like I was.
3. Starting from about the middle of Utah and going North from there, most of the year’s precipitation comes in the form of snow. You can actually sit in your living room and look at a fair chunk of your water supply for the year. If you have a view. Which I don’t any more.
4. It snowed on April 2nd this year. And again this morning. Ok, it’s cool to look at snow on the mountains, but enough already! Can’t we just have rain?
5. Water rights become a huge issue if you buy land in the country side out West. You may think whatever lands on your land is yours, only to find out it really belongs to California.
6. That didn’t happen to me, but I know people who were rudely surprised.
7. In the city the water that comes out of the faucet probably comes from the aquifer. It can take anywhere from months to thousands of years for the water to work it’s way through rock to reach an aquifer. It takes very little time to pump it out.
8. Some places use ground water on lawns as well as on fields. It’s call irrigation. I always thought it was funny to go visit a friend and find their lawn, but no necessarily any of their neighbors’, was under water on purpose. Sometimes the lawn was my own. I still thought it was funny.
9. Flooding out West isn’t anything like flooding in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, the water grows deeper in a way I consider gradual – mere inches over minutes. Out West it tends to come racing down the hills in arroyos or creeks, sometimes as a wall of water higher than the banks.
10. I’ve seen boulders the size of cars tumbled smooth and dropped in the middle of river beds, victims of a flash flood.
11. One day my grandfather ran into a couple for back East who intentionally pitched their tent in an arroyo bed because it looked like it might rain. They thought it was shelter. He spent way too much time explaining that the rain on the mountains 20 miles away was going to be racing through their shelter in about half an hour and might take them with it. Since I never heard word of their grizzly remains having been discovered down stream, he must have convinced them.
12. Once the rain stops, most of the time I can turn over as little as a quarter of an inch to find dry ground. That’s assuming there’s actually a quarter of an inch of dirt, and not just rock.
13. One day while crossing the boarder from Mexico to Texas the guard asked if we were harboring any wet backs. I was a baby at the time and wet my diaper, so they joked that I was the wet back. My family still won’t let me live it down.
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Daisy
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