Weathering the Weather and Other Storms

The weather here in Wichita and south central Kansas has been eerily perfect for our urban and convertible driving tastes the past few weeks, with gorgeously blue skies and the temperatures in our favorite warm but not too hot mid-80s range, but otherwise it’s been a tough year for the farmers here in the heartland. The winter was bitterly cold and dry around here and brought blizzards to the north, the spring was so extraordinarily wet that the rivers around our Riverside neighborhood threatened to spill over and many of the nearby fields were under several inches or several feet of water during planing season, and now those same fields are too dry to sustain what crops did get planted.

We’ll leave it to the scientists to figure out what role humankind plays in our lately unusual weather, and what can be done about it, but there’s no denying that humankind and its inevitable screwups have aggravated the farmers’ most recent problems. Because of global overproduction commodity prices had been in a years-long decline even before President Donald Trump’s trade war provoked retaliatory tariffs from key foreign markets for America’s soybeans and corn and wheat and cattle and pork and other agricultural products, and lately someone or another has let a crucial irrigation system that previously provided water for 100,000 acres of farmland from Nebraska to Wyoming to break down.

Things have become so bad just north of here that even the city slickers at The New York Times have taken notice, and on Monday they unleashed a tear-jerking account of hard times in the country. One farmer they interviewed outside Gering, Nebraska, even said he’d had to put off the purchase of a much-needed new Ford F-150 pickup truck, which is the stuff of a crying-in-your-beer country-and-western song. Others testified that their crops were dying from dryness even as their neighbors’ fields were still a lake. Farm bankruptcies are up 19 percent over the past year, the biggest increase in a decade, according to the reliable Farm Bureau.

Which is bad news for everybody, even if you’re an urbanite enjoying the dry and moderate weather with your top down and wondering what those farmers ever did for you. The state governments here in the heartland have been struggling to balance their budgets even in the best-ever economy that Trump brags about, and the less than bumper crop harvests in the a couple of months won’t help. People everywhere will notice their grocery bills going up, and the national debt slowly rising, even if the heartland’s share of the gross domestic product is relatively small.

Those farmers and ranchers from Nebraska to Wyoming deserve some sympathy, too. You’ve probably never driven from western Nebraska to Mount Rushmore and the Dakotas and over to Wyoming, as the official Nebraska tourism slogan actually is “Nebraska, It’s Not For Everyone,” and people are few and far between and the scenery is very subtly beautiful, but if so you’ve missed out. The few folks you’ll find along those blue highways are invariably hard-working and friendly and likable sorts, and in its own subtle way their land truly is beautiful, and when the idiocies of nature and humankind conspire against them they deserve the full attention of the nation they have been such an essential part of.

Nobody, including our own brilliant selves, knows what to suggest. The recent weird weather might well be caused by to a significant extent by anthropological activities, as an apparent majority of climate scientists insist, but none of them can explain how to reconfigure the world economy without mass starvation. A lot of those Nebraska and Kansas and Dakotas and Wyoming farmers probably believe Trump’s assurances that his temporarily painful negotiating tacts will eventually yield the best trade deal ever, and they’ll all be buying Ford F-150s for their grandkids, but for now we’d suggest they keep their most important foreign trading relationships tariff-free. We’ve absolutely no idea why that irrigation system has shut down, but we hope that despite Trump’s deregulatory zeal the regulatory agencies responsible for the situation will be able to figure that out.

Between nature’s nature and human nature life is always a challenge out here in the heartland, not to mention what some city slicker from New York might do to further muck it up, but so far we’ve always struggled through. Here’s hoping that trend continues.

— Bud Norman

Rainy Day Blues

Rain is falling on the just and unjust alike here in Wichita, and has been for most of the month, with no end in sight on the forecasts. The nearby Arkansas River is already flowing over the adjacent bike paths, the Little Arkansas River is no longer little, and West Street is once again a third river in town. At this point we’re thinking of stocking up on gopher wood and reacquainting ourselves with the cubit system just in case an ark is required, and it is not helping our mood.

There’s the gloominess of the constantly gray sky, the disappointing chill of the late May nights, and of course the stir craziness that comes from being rained indoors through three weeks and a Memorial Day weekend. In our case the curse is exacerbated by our habit of reading the news, which lately is even worse than the weather. The Islamic State continues its sadistic romp across the Middle East, impeded occasionally by forces backed by Iran, whose leader was bragging to his national military academy’s graduating class that the deal they’re working out with the United States won’t allow any inspections of military sites or interviews with the scientists working on their nuclear weapons program, and more formidable powers such as China and Russia seem to have noticed that the Pax Americana is no longer operative. Over on the domestic front things seems just as gloomy, with the economy continuing to slug along on increasing debt and money-printing and interest rates that even the Federal Reserve Board is realizing must come up, the ongoing culture wars were best summed up by an excellent but depressing essay at National Review about how we traditionalists find ourselves “strangers in a strange land,” and even the sports pages offer nothing but the latest  defeat in the New York Yankee’s prolonged slump.

Most infuriating are the latest rants of the global warming alarmists, who had promised us that the good days of the drought would last forever but are now trying to blame all this rain on us and our aging four-cylinder internal combustion automobile for causing “climate change.”

While we were homebound by the rain, and Iran’s Ayatollah was giving that nuclear pep talk to his nation’s most elite military academy, President Barack Obama was warning the graduates of the Coast Guard Academy that the greatest challenge of their career will be dealing with a changing climate. So far as we can tell the American military has been dealing with a changing climate throughout its history, with Redcoats and Spaniards and Prussian militarists and Nazis and Commies and lately Islamists proving thornier problems, and we’re not at all sure what the Coast Guard can do about our landlocked difficulties, much less the even worse situation occurring down in Texas and Oklahoma, and we’re quite sure that if human causes are to blame it’s probably more to do with the president’s jet than our aging automobile, so we can imagine that the graduating class gave the oration the same eye-rolling that we did. We’ve lived through enough prolonged droughts and incessant rains here on plains, and have read enough about the same phenomena in the journals of our pre-combustion engine forebears to know that they lived through their share as well, that we’re reluctant to accept that the weather is our nation’s most pressing problem. Given how bad the weather’s bad been, that is a depressing realization.

We’ll deal with all the wetness as best we can, and with gratitude that God and the Big Ditch and West Street will probably keep the Arkansas and Little Arkansas Rivers away from our Riverside home and that the neighborhood’s basements don’t have the problem with leakiness as those snobs over in College Hill. Our collection of vinyl records and CDs includes such sustaining seasonal fare as Willie Nelson’s “Rainy Day Blues,” Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women,” Buddy Holly’s “Raining in My Heart,” The Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” Lena Horne’s sultry rendition of “Stormy Weather,” and Esther Phillips’ inspiring recording of “I Can Stand a Little Rain,” among other rainy standards, and the latest reports suggest that our beloved Wichita Wingnuts might be able to get a home opener of the baseball season in today. After that it’s all chances of rain in the forecast, and big green and yellow and red blotches on the radar, so we should be able to cope with it, but even the inevitable summer sunshine won’t help with the rest of it.

— Bud Norman