In the Southeast, Weather That Saps the Soul

At first, we didn’t call it a drought. When the rains failed to come in December, then January and February, few people noticed. By planting time in March, farmers had begun to worry, backyard gardeners to complain.

But the back roads still held promise. Tiny, green shoots of corn poked through the ground. The second week in May, almost an inch of rain fell. A weather forecaster said, “Things are really looking up,” and some metropolitan reporters said the drought was easing.

It got worse.

A farmer looked me in the eye the other day and said: “You’d never understand what this feels like. I can talk to another farmer about the drought, but I don’t think somebody in town reading a paper knows what it’s like out here, knows what it feels like to lose everything.”

He stood on the edge of a milo field in North Carolina, where the worst drought on record has hit harder than in most parts of the scorched Southeast. The hot sun had baked the ground rock-hard, leaving 33-acres of bare, bleached soil with spotty patches of pitiful stalks. What milo had managed to break through the crusty rows stood little higher than his ankle, when it should have nudged his waist. “My wife didn’t want me to tell you this,” he said. “She went to work in a restaurant three weeks ago. It really kills my pride.”

The cruel hot weather is drying up the land, the life styles and the livelihoods that define the region. It is sapping our soul.

Generations of Southerners have depended on the soil. More than 100,000 people still farm in the Carolinas alone, where chicken and tobacco plants remain more plentiful than microchips. But agriculture losses in the Southeast are expected to top $1 billion this summer.

I met Paul McCulloh at a livestock market near Salisbury, N.C. His 90-acre pasture was parched brown, his pond knee-deep and going down. He had prayed for rain, and it didn’t. So he was selling off his cattle.

McCulloh, 65, a longtime farmer with a day’s gray stubble, waited two hours to unload three black Angus calves. Dozens of other farmers in a herd of dusty pickup trucks joined him in 100-degree heat. McCulloh didn’t wait to see what the calves brought; it didn’t matter.

“I can’t afford to feed them,” he told me matter-of-factly. “I’ve got to get rid of them at any price.”

I met Eunice Cain in Lloyd’s Chapel, Ala., a rural community outside Anniston. She hasn’t had running water to bathe in, flush the toilet or wash dishes for three months. Cain was embarrassed that she hadn’t mopped the kitchen floor for three months, that plastic containers filled with water cluttered the counter and garbage cans brimming with still more crowded the bathroom. She looked tired.

One day recently, she had loaded 15 empty milk jugs into her ’68 Chevrolet Impala for the two-mile drive to National Guard tankers supplying water to 100 households where wells dried up in April. The car wouldn’t start.

“I sat down and took me a cry,” she said. “But it didn’t help any. I still don’t have any water.” Shyly, she admitted she slips “a little now and then” on her petunias. “I got to have something blooming in summertime,” she said.

Cain is 70, a soft-spoken grandmother with white hair, and I don’t think anyone would begrudge her a gallon or so of water every week for the red and purple petunias that hang from her front porch.

There are so few bright spots in the Southeast this summer. From the air, the view is devastating. Squares and oblongs of farmers’ fields that once wove a lush green onto the Southern quiltwork now lie dingy brown. Rivers and lakes are shrunk, their shorelines thick bands of cracked red clay and bleached white sand. Lake Allatoona, an 11,000-acre man-made lake north of Atlanta, has dwindled to 8,000 acres. I talked with Jerry Leonard in his favorite fishing hole. He was riding his son’s red dirt bike across the dry lake bed; I was walking. Leonard, a railroad carman from Marietta, Ga., used to catch crappie from a johnboat 20 feet above lake bottom. Now, the fishing hole is an expanse of cracked sand where fish swim only in his imagination.

On another arm of the lake, 48-year-old Sondra Phillips carries a .22 automatic on the short walk through pine woods from her house to her boat dock. She’s scared of snakes prowling for water; she’s already shot a few. Phillips used to jump off the floating dock into the lake, where the water was as deep as she was tall--5 foot 8. Now, she must walk three-fourths of a mile to wet her big toe. “We haven’t had much drop-in company this summer,” Phillips told me. “Why come?”

For city dwellers, the drought is mostly an inconvenience. Most of us have water in Charlotte, the largest city of the Carolinas with 353,000 residents. But there’s so much demand, the flow to outlying areas often slows to a trickle. Sometimes it takes residents in fancy, two-story suburban homes 10 minutes to fill a pot for spaghetti, almost an hour to draw a bath for dirty children.

We’re used to almost 26 inches of rain in Charlotte by this time of year; we’ve had less than 10. We measure the drought by the bushels of peaches stunted in dry weather, the thousands of dairy and beef cattle sold for slaughter because of dried-up pastures and ponds, the hundreds of thousands of chickens and turkeys dead in poultry houses. We see it in corn that won’t silk, cotton that won’t boll, cows that won’t milk.

We can water outdoors only between 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. Water-service technicians patrol the city daily in search of violators, ready to slap them with fines of up to $100. My neighbors, wearing only nightgowns, wander sleepily outdoors at 2 a.m. to take hoses and spray wilted vegetable gardens and scraggly lawns. But basil and tomato plants are the least of our worries.

Charlotte is proud of its trees, landmarks sometimes compared in tourist value to San Francisco’s cable cars. On one street corner alone, six willow oaks, 50 years old and 80 feet high, have pale green leaves and bare branches. They aren’t expected to survive the summer. When I cringe at the thought of Charlotte without its cathedral of trees, I think of Reba Shidal in nearby Monroe, N.C. It’s so dry that her prized pink and white azaleas, the ones she coaxed from seedlings and lovingly tended for eight years, turned yellow-brown and died.

“I don’t worry about it,” she told me. “I look out and say, ‘How terrible.’ But there’s nothing I can do about it. Only God can do something about the drought. I don’t dare go out and water my azaleas . . . . I’m afraid our well will go dry if I water. You can’t live without water. You can live without azaleas.

“I just feel very fortunate we’re not these farmers who have lost everything they have out there, who are depending on rain for their bread and butter. I really can’t stand here and feel sorry for myself because so many people are worse off.”