We Have Met The Enemy
(The Duh Files • )
You can tighten down your electricity usage, grow your own fruit and veggies to eat better and save money, divert rainwater for your own use, batten down your home’s hatches for energy savings, dump your gas guzzlers for boring generic gas-saving Toyotas and stop eating out at restaurants to pinch your pennies and bank up against the possibility of hard times.
But if you can’t stop yourself from being a general dumb-ass, what’s the point?
I refer specifically to water, at least this stupid time around. For starters, we’ve just had six weeks straight of almost no rain and 97-104 degree heat. Our drought is so severe that the government drought measurers had to come up with a new negative superlative to describe it (exceptional, they’re calling it). It’s so hot that if you try to water a plant in the afternoon, half the water floats away in the form of steam before it hits the ground.
On top of that, my little town is among those mandated, by quasi-governmental edict of some sort, to have to convert from wells to treated Brazos River surface water for drinking purposes in the near future. So to pay for the monster treatment plants they’re going to need to turn that Brazos slime into something allegedly drinkable, Richmond, Texas has more than doubled the price of drinking water for the citizenry over the past five years.
In my imagination, I am conserving water, and walking a fine line between keeping my garden vegetables alive and allowing them to melt into the hot ground.
In the real world, I arose early this morning to give them a much-needed drink. When I went around to the side yard to turn on the water, the water already was turned on.
Nice.
Especially nice because I knew I hadn’t watered the morning before. (The morning before, I was up early getting the kids ready for their little summer vacation Bible school classes so I could get across town in time to see a doctor about my aching back and eventually learn that I am in constant pain because I am now an official Old Guy.)
So, as I was running through the back yard toward the end of what I knew was a cash-spewing hose, I calculated that the water must have been turned on full blast no later than the evening before yesterday morning – or about 36 hours – and possibly even the prior morning – or 48 hours.
I’d left the hose stuck in a little kiddie pool I’d been trying to fill as a way of bribing the birds into not pecking holes in so many figs and blackberries back there. The theory, put forth by certain gardening “experts” from places far away from here, is that the birds are just thirsty, and if you give them plenty to drink, they could care less about that inconvenient but juicy fruit. Turns out, in semi-South Texas at least, that’s pure bullshit. But I digress and am dutifully at least a tiny bit sorry for having done so. Back at the little kiddie pool, the water was dutifully seeping over the top like it had been for 36 to 48 hours.
Luckily, gallon after gallon was running right where it was most needed – around the foundation of a crappy shed the previous owners left out in back to store the neighborhood hornets and rodents.
A small amount also was trickling toward one of my blackberry plants. I’m not kidding, all the berries on that plant are now four times the size of the berries on the neighboring plants. I’m thinking if I just drench the others in $400 worth of water, I’ll have the most gi-normous blackberries in Richmond, Texas.
The best part about the whole episode was the part where I had to go ahead and continue using up a zillion more gallons of water on the actual garden about 10 yards away, which was dry as a bone but could’ve happily soaked up all that wasted water had the little kiddie pool been positioned just a few feet south of its actual location.
Later I went inside, bent over and asked my kids to kick me right in the butt.
→ B.Dunn, Jul 17, 2009, 05 58 am
