Heat Dome

by Donna Schoenkopf

It continues.

I’ve kind of settled into an uneasy acceptance of the heat.

I don’t go out much. I start my little bit of yard work by 6:00 in the morning by laying the hose on the ground next to my cottonwood tree and letting the water run full force for an hour. Then I hand water my “yard.” Most of the grass is nonexistent now. Between the heat and the new dogs romping on it all day long and digging holes in it to stay cool, that poor grass doesn’t have much of a chance.

Except for the grass near the cottonwood. That grass, thanks to my special liquid fertilizer, is dark green and a foot high. The fertilizer is my urine in a 1 to 20 ratio with water, making the perfect liquid fertilizer for plants. Human urine has a 3:1:2 ratio of nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium, exactly what plants want.

We humans and plants were made for each other. Leaves have erupted all over the one large branch on the cottonwood tree that shows life, and leaves are sprouting from the trunk on that side of the tree, too. All are dark green and some are six inches across. I’m hoping that somehow this vigorous growth will heal the rest of the tree. My sweet, dear, wonderful cottonwood, which shades my house, which lowers my of energy use, which saves the world.

By 9:00 I’m done outside. Each day I watch the weather on television and see a solid week of triple digit numbers ahead. This week is no different.

Today, Sunday, 103, Monday 104, Tuesday 106, Wednesday 105, Thursday 105, Friday 104, Saturday 103.

Into August we go. We can’t expect anything but (at the very best) more of the same.

Hot is the new normal. 2010 was the warmest year ever. July 2011 has set 72 heat records across the country; 56 have been tied.

This drought equals the one during the Dust Bowl. The grass that cattle feed on doesn’t grow. It is charred and black. An old saying goes, “I don’t grow cattle or horses. I grow grass.” So when that grass goes ...

There is a livestock forage program in place (thank you, government!) and it is helping out ranchers by giving them checks to purchase feed for their livestock, but even so 6,000 cattle were sold at auction last week, way ahead of time, because ranchers decided to take the loss. Sort of like eating your seed corn.

A bale of hay cost $40 last year, $120 today. Alfalfa is $200 if you can find it.

Texas has a $6 billion loss due to wildfires. A agricultural loss of $250 million a day is adding up. Every day I drive by cornfields that never reached maturity. Usually the stalks reach way above my head, as high as an elephant’s eye, but they were dry and crusty by the time they got three feet tall. One day they were gone, mowed down, leaving dry dirt in their place. (I hope the winds don’t kick up.) It was as though that corn had never existed, and because everything is connected, we will see food prices go up.

But I watched one rancher on the local farm report, a smiling young man, talk about conservation stewardship. He practices “flash grazing,” quick rotation of grazing time in certain areas. Move the cattle in, take ’em out. Gives the grass time to grow. He was the only one who had a smile on his face when he talked about his livestock. I wonder if he learned this in college or got “good practices” advice from the local U.S. Agriculture Department. Again, thank you, government.

(I want to add, right here, that most people in Oklahoma think the government is bad, bad, bad, but they surely do put their hands out when they need something. I swear to God. It just makes me crazy.)

A lot of plant life is stunted or dead. Tom, a Master Gardener friend of mine who does good works all over town, told of weeding the gardens at his church, getting nine bags of weeds last year but this year only three.

Red cedars are becoming a huge fire danger. They’re like junipers, containing lots of combustible oils. (I remember my son playing with matches in a little secret clubhouse in the junipers beside our house in California and the junipers exploding into flames.) The embers from cedars travel long distances and stay hot for a long time. The grandest one on my property sags sadly at the bottom of the hill. They are supposed to be indestructible.

The ponds are all drying up. So are the lakes. The infamous Senator Inhofe, who leads the crusade against global warming, got horribly ill a couple of weeks ago when he went swimming in Grand Lake. Algae blooms had infected the water. Algae blooms grow when the temperatures rise. Kinda poetic, dontcha think?

I look at a drought map on the Internet. The heat dome, dark red, sits like a fat frog over Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Normally we get weather like this once every hundred years. In the past century we had two huge droughts, in the 1930s and the 1950s. We’re now getting decades-long drought, and many more than one per century.

Speaking of frogs, there is a bumper crop of them here at Chigger Lake. I find them everywhere. One night, about ten o’clock, I heard a strange sound. I have learned to pay attention to unknown sounds out here in the country. I turned to my left and there on my bed was the cutest little frog. Somehow he’d gotten into the house and had made a huge hop, and landed on my bed, kerplop.

A few days later I flushed the toilet and looked back in and saw another cute little frog scrambling to glue himself to the side. I had almost flushed him down. I ran to get something to scoop him out and when I came back he hopped out of the toilet and scooted under the cabinets.

I find them sometimes, petrified like mummies, in the runners of the sliding glass doors. I find them sitting like small porcelain figurines on cottonwood leaves. I find them everywhere. Trent, the neighbor boy, caught one two days ago and we named him Prince. The frog clung to Trent’s hand and rode along for quite a while before finally leaping to a leaf on one of my cottonwoods.

There are grasshoppers, too. They jump out of the grass in huge sprays as I water or walk. Trent also catches them to feed his dog, Abby, who seems to live here now. She and Joe Biden, my puppy, have learned to catch them in mid-air. A nice little amuse-bouche for them.

And there is the sad story of the deer. Does have been abandoning their fawns because they have no milk because there is no water.

Frogs and grasshoppers and deer. Sounds Biblical, doesn’t it? But rather than God punishing us for not worshipping Him properly, we are the cause of all the crazy weather and animal life and plant death.

During World War I our farmers plowed the earth in a patriotic effort to support our fighting men. “Food will win the war” was the message. But, you know capitalism, the boom and bust cycle raised its ugly head and prices plunged. So the farmers planted more to recoup their losses, which caused a glut of crops, which made prices plunge again.

Five million new acres were planted and in 1929 the crash happened. And then the drought began. And the winds came. And dust storms rose out of the plowed fields. 13 million of the 15 million planted acres eroded. 13 MILLION OF THE 15 MILLION ACRES!

And things had changed at the beginning of the century on another front. By 1910 family farms were beginning to be phased out. Instead of small family farms harvesting their own crops, seasonal wage laborers began doing the work. And we all know what kind of wages they earned. A new level of poverty, the kind farmworkers everywhere now have.

Our nation used to be a nation of farmers. Now we are a nation of corporations. We used to be a nation of families who grew their own food. Now we transport it from the far corners of the earth, creating more and more carbon dioxide which creates more and more heat, which causes more and more severe weather.

Did you know the arctic glaciers, melting from our contribution to carbon dioxide, are melting faster than predicted?

Did you know that cold water in the Pacific causes La Nina, which causes heat domes?

Did you know?

Well, you do now.

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