Fragments From Floyd

As much as anything, the blog here has been a four year weather report--of ordinary lulls and storms that come, of remarkable events, and remarkable non-events--like drought. Last April, we had regular rains to the point that the garden never quite dried out enough to till until mid-May. This spring, should I run the tiller over the garden, I'd best have on a respirator for the dust. We're 40% behind on rainfall already, this early in the year. I've never seen such a string of weather alerts for FIRE hazard, with the bone-dry conditions combined with the constant winds we've been having. I don't think we've had a spring so windy since we've been down here on the creeks. A line of thunderstorms is about a half-hour away now, sweeeping east towards us, and I confess, I think about that single lightning strike on the ridge west of us that would start this unbroken swath of tinder aflame.

Thinking about it, though, unlike many forests I've wandered, I have not seen fire sign on our oldest trees within a half mile of the house in any direction. On the other hand, there was once a house just around the bend. The owner came home from town one night after a bad thunderstorm. He got out of his car with a sack of groceries; walked up to the house in the pitch black dark; and beyond the concrete steps, there was no house. Ann and I went there yesterday to pick the jonquils that still bloom beside the foundation.

But it's not just gardens that stand to suffer from another drought this year. Floyd County's water resources are limited by rains that replenish the fractured rock where ground water is stored in this Blue Ridge geology. In the drought of 2002, hundreds of wells went dry and never came back; the replacement wells had to go much deeper to find water.

Checking again, the solid green on the radar is breaking up, the closer it gets to us. The promise of rain once more is a cruel tease, and we'll have another day or week or more of dusty clouds when the few cars come down Goose Creek. The creek will flow a little lower, and the ground water will discharge into the streams by the millions of gallons, headed to the coast, with nothing to replace it. Not today, anyway.