We are in a drought. We are in a severe drought. That means that if Texas was a face, it's nose would be crackled and pointed fiercely downward. The eyes would glimpse this nose, from above, just slightly, and know that it's vanity was destroyed.
I remember I was sixteen. My family decided to go somewhere for Christmas, somewhere warm and strange, I suppose. And we did. We ended up in Arizona, a state not so far from California, but when we arrived I had to trace the sky with my pinky, to remember the lines of blue.
The ground was red. I remember thinking it strange, that the soil would not be dark, stained brown beneath my feet. When I touched it I recoiled, my hands could not dig beneath it's wrinkled edge. I would never delve within it and plant a snapdragon. Even at sixteen, this was a devastation of sorts.
As we drove by houses I noticed that trees were plucked from the landscape, gone altogether. Instead there were cacti. No one ever kissed beneath a cactus, I thought, and I was right. It was as though we were in a refugee camp; there were people everywhere but their most precious limbs were missing, the ones that stretched up and out and made them graceful. I could hardly rejoice in that loss.
"Spectacular," my father mumbled, as we made it to Sedona. There, the rocks were abundant and it looked much like what Mars had been woven into in my cinematic past. The winds slapped us as we walked on.
"But where are all the trees?" I asked.
"It's the desert," he replied, stretching his arm to show me the expanse, "there isn't water for all that."
No water.
It was impossible to think of. My town, in Northern California, was famous for floods that let people row down cul de sacs in canoes. At school, we would name the pockets of flooded area after great lakes, and lines would form to inch your way across the slim passageways between puddles.
But, after all that rain, spring erupted. It was almost violent, all that green. So much so that when I went to Ireland, I felt as though it were home. Our town relied on the rain. When we lacked it, the farmers went hungry and the people grew restless. We, too, had to be fed by the falling water, and when it didn't come people grew agitated. And then, on a cloudy afternoon, as the rain fell, you could see people sigh ever so slightly, as though an old friend had come back safely from a trip you never got a postcard from. We would complain a little, about the greyness of it, but secretly we twirled and spun to that grandiose cacophony. As a child I even fell to my knees, trying desperately to hear the grass drink.
I think that was one of my graces in Thailand. Even in the illness, the madness and unyielding heat, the rain always came. We would stand in the ocean, warm salt water up to our hips, and watch as the the water came down, as though coming home. It was one of the most enchanting things in the world, that return from sky to earth, and I knew that to be cradled in the ocean was something we both shared.
So, sitting here in Austin, during an extreme drought, is trying. There is moisture in the air, and trees to be sure, but there is a void. I must feel the rain, taste it upon my tongue and feel it drip into every follicle of hair before I am satisfied. I even make the rain, to my plants, from a big red watering can. But it not the same.
I see now that where I grew up, we didn't want the rain, we needed it. We could not survive without storms and brutality of water. We beckoned it, danced for it, sang endlessly to the strips of bark that lined our rivers until they flowed again, the mighty veins carrying our spirits and blood from one side of town to the next.
This is what I miss most: those days and days of unforgiving rain, when the earth opens its mighty jaw to drink from the pouring heavens.
