who'll stop the rain

As I sit here on Saturday morning, it has been raining now for days, weeks, maybe even a couple of months. It started in late June. We had a few breaks, where I could get outside and do some stuff. But the last four or five days, nothing but rain.

As far as I know, there has been some flooding, but most of us are ok. We only have a few thousand people in the mountains, and water goes downhill, so there are a few in the valleys or whose houses are on the downhill slope of wide washes, and there has been some flood damage I'm sure. Whole mountainsides have washed down into roads, leaving them a muddy pile of gravel until the road guys come along with their bulldozer. In some cases I'm nervous to drive to town because the water in the road is deep and it's impossible to tell how deep. After dark it's worse. The ground is saturated; the water is not seeping into it at all.

Over the long haul, because there was a drought of over twenty years, most people are grateful that the drought is at least somewhat alleviated. The whole southwest has been pulling water out of the ground for decades, by the billions of gallons, knowing full well that it wasn't being replenished. That's why, in my own analysis of what is the most urgent problem of our present environmental crisis, I've always said there's way too much water in the system. That is, the system of rain, hurricane, thunderstorm, runoff, swollen rivers. Iowa, where I used to live, has had three or four hundred-year storms in the last fifteen years. Key West is going under.

Of course, some of this, like Key West, is due to melting ice from Arctic and Antarctic. That's a crisis too. But if the southwest thought it could just pull these billions of gallons out of there without consequence, maybe now we'll look at this and say, well here's one consequence. A monsoon season with 25 inches and counting.

I'm not even sure how many inches we've had, or what all the consequences are. I think that when the ground stays so saturated for so long, other things start happening besides too much runoff. And I'm also sure it's a joy to see water in some of the rivers that haven't had it for years - like the Rio Grande, the Colorado, etc. People have been fighting so hard about that water they haven't even looked up to see, maybe it will come back. In spades.

A bigger consequence, for us, is that places might be overrun. It seems to me that a lot of lowlanders, people who are tired of being pounded and losing their houses to a foot of mud, will just be seeking higher ground. It won't be people that threaten our lifestyle, necessarily, but the increase in rent, land price, taxes, and those things. Mountain people are right - our lifestyle is threatened. But the reason really is that they shouldn't have voted in a guy who couldn't have cared less about the destruction of the environment.