Heat and Water

7/23/11

As I tipped the watering can toward him, my husband lifted the rain barrel and carefully poured its murky bottom liquid into a watering can. Then I hefted the three-gallon can and dosed each plant in a bone-dry bed.

We live in a good-sized town in a house on a standard city lot. On our little piece of ground we grow raspberries, blackberries, pears, and three four-by-twelve beds of vegetables and herbs. We also have perennial and flower gardens, mostly home to prairie plants that aren’t too picky about how much water they get.

Even so, some plants, especially those in the vegetable garden, need help when the summer gets hot and dry. Today is our eighth day in a row with temperatures over ninety degrees and heat indexes over one hundred. We may endure this for another couple of days, at least. During that stretch we’ve had one brief rain shower. Every third day without rain I water the plants that need it.

We don’t use city water for the garden. Instead, we draw water from the three rain barrels in the backyard. Today was the second time I’d had to draw on our barrels during this hot stretch and we drained them. At least now I know how many days I can keep the garden going without rain. I’ve never emptied them before. If today’s cloud cover doesn’t deliver a good drench, I’ll have to draw on city water in a day or two. I hate to do it but I don’t want to lose the vegetables I’ve been tending since May.

I am experiencing a reality that will become common more frequently in coming years. And I’m not the only one who will turn to city water supplies when the summer sun grows more fierce.

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According to the research and education center, Environment Illinois, climate change from now until 2025 promises to bring increasingly volatile weather events to the Midwest such as torrential rains, increasingly frequent periods of drought, violent storms with damaging winds and hail, tornadoes, and unexpected extremes of winter weather. The average temperature in the Midwest is expected to increase by 2º in the next few years and 7º by 2025. http://www.environmentillinois.org/reports/energy/energy-program-reports/global-warming-and-extreme-weather-the-science-the-forecast-and-the-impacts-on-america. Accessed July 23, 2011.

According to the National Resource Defense Council, water worries in the U.S. will result from decreased precipitation amounts, increased population, increased water use by each inhabitant, and increased periods of drought. The NRDC’s report, “Climate Change, Water, and Risk,” doesn’t sugar coat the situation. “Current water demands are not sustainable,” the report announces on page one. And on a “Water Supply Sustainability Index for 2050” that color codes each state’s county to show how severe the water shortage will be, the county I live in was colored red to show its water shortage problem is expected to be “high” in forty years. www.nrdc.org/globalwarming/watersustainability/files/WaterRisk.pdf. Accessed July 23, 2011.

A more detailed report released by the University of Southern Illinois, “Countywide Projections of Community Water Supply Needs in the Midwest” breaks down the problem into discrete variables. Illinois’ public water supply use from 2000 to 2025 will increase 17 percent, with over half of that increase attributed to population growth. Though 82 percent of that growth will come from demand in just five northern counties, central Illinois counties will experience a nine percent increase in demand. That may not seem too bad, except that Illinois counties will be asking for more water at a time when it has less to provide—because of decreased rainfall, population growth, and drought’s effect on the evaporation of water off the land and its plants. www.mtac.isws.illinois.edu/mtacdocs/.../FinalReportMidwestCWSProjections.pdf. Accessed July 23, 2011.

As my clothes grew wet with sweat—and it was 6:30 in the morning—I wondered about this baby I’m dreaming about. My child might grow up in a world where watering the garden by hand like this was something everyone had to do—or give up on gardens.

What’s weird is how much water we could be collecting. In five minutes of steady rain, my water barrels are overflowing. I wish I had three more of them when I see the water pouring off the roof into the gutters.

My ability to imagine how precious water can become actually started when I was in high school. I found Frank Herbert’s novel Dune on a local library shelf, borrowed it, and read the first volume in a single weekend. Dune’s characters value water more than gold. Many years later I came across a West Coast novelist named Octavia Butler and read Parable of the Sower. The struggles of a gated community in Los Angeles to survive without city water and little rain dominate the beginning chapters of that book.

Our current stretch of hot days offered a short respite. After the first three days of 90° weather, black thunderclouds reaching high into the heavens unleashed a downpour. My dog and I walked happily through the neighborhood in that warm wet.