Drouth

Drouth

By Peggy Cline

An old-fashioned word for drought which I had to look up, was used by my father and now, my sister, Joyce, also a wheat farmer and cattle rancher as was my father. I was surprised to hear my best friend's husband us the word too, in a recent trip to Wyoming.

Since my family had moved from northeastern Colorado, life with neither an abundance of rain nor a comfortable sufficience existed. I remember feeling the pain and need as I watched American Idol a few years ago. A teen-aged black girl with a faded old-fashioned house dress sang, with a pleading look of desperation, as she prayed for rain. I imagined a family of former slaves and sharecroppers, released from their bondage, to grow their own crops, heavily reliant on some meager moisture from the sky, unable to afford a loss.

We had experienced some nearly desperate times waiting for rain on our farm northeast of Greeley. At least my dad had made friends with bankers! Friends who had developed an area in Hygiene and planted a forest of trees, worried that they would lose their expensive gamble. My repeat Denverite renters at my condo in Silverthorne told me that they had "watched the mountain melt away beneath our skis."

This drought-stricken year caused me to make sacrifices on my property in Erie. I was used to pumping water from my pond to support my line-up of trees and pasture grass, but for the first time since I've lived here, no irrigation water from Marshall Lake filled my pond; it looked like Lake Mead with its cracked mud segments, so jagged, they were dangerous to walk on. It was "Lake Me' this year, and woe is me!

It hurt my heart to see the reduction in the pond I could wade in to a circle the size of a child's wading pool. Within the circle crowded the frogs that had hatched this year, along with the miniscule remainder of small fish. The frogs' skinny legs and tiny bodies suggested malnourishment or no nourishment at all; they should have been nearly full grown by late August. When I walked by in the blazing sun, I watched them frantically thrash for freedom and oxygen.

On one of the extremely rare days we had rain, I was walking to the pond to appreciate the pounding drops which darkened the mud, changing it from its alkaline pallor, when I had to stop abruptly to avoid tripping over a large adult frog which had hopped quickly, seemingly to catch up with me. As I stopped, so did he within 10" of me. I wish I could have discerned what this frog was trying to communicate in his froggy way. I missed the cacophony of frog choruses outside my bedroom windows that had filled the nights every summer, sometimes so loud and lusty it was hard to sleep. Was he missing those nights too? Did he want me to save his progeny, his undersized kids that were barely surviving in that brown, nourishment-lacking mudhole? I remembered that I had hardly needed to slap mosquitoes this summer or smack flies. What were those green beings eating?

I began running a hose on the edge of the pond which drew some frogs but most mainly stayed within their ever diminishing pool. Oddly, on a 10 minute episode of hard rain, they scurried out of the pond to the dry ground outside the perimeter.

The mud in the pond is like quicksand or wet concrete which keeps me from going in to round them up and net them, but where would I move them? There's no water anywhere near-by.

A friend got stuck above her knees. I had to flip over a metal lawn chair to aid my pulling her out. Minutes later, I was stuck and had to leave my polka-dot boot in the greedy muck.

When I returned after a 6 days' absence, all the frogs were gone. No vestige of mud was left. I've read that wetland creatures will estivate, find a wet area into which to bury themselves until conditions are conducive to their reappearance. I don't know if my overabundance of cattails has any moisture that could sustain my loyal frogs. I'm hesitant and even afraid to test them.

Weather predictions say we'll have a more usual season of moisture this coming year, but I believe it will take two years or more to entice the birds and frogs to return to their sanctuary. Life around the pond in the spring will be different and full of expectation, for croaking frogs and trilling birds, filled with silent cheerleading for their much- anticipated appearance.