Debbie was new to Texas, but brought with her one habit from
Michigan, where she'd been before. On rainy days, which were rare here, she'd
get kind of thoughtful, and would mull things over on her walk to her job at a
writing lab in the university. Ironically, she lived near a street called Flint,
and walked on it every day; because she only lived a few blocks away, she
couldn't justify driving and paying a fortune to park in the garage.
But on rainy days, the water would collect at Flint and 19th
street, and there'd be a huge puddle there that she'd have to cross to get the
three blocks to her job, and this could be a huge ordeal. On this morning a guy
in a truck splashed her as he drove past; he was angry, and in a hurry; it was
possible he didn't even see her. Generally people were polite here; they didn't
do that. The intersection was orderly, more so than those in Michigan, but it
was so wide and busy that people didn't always see everything, so it was always
a challenge to get across it; it still scared her.
They told her about the playa lakes that were common in the
plains; this is where the rain would collect on days like this. At first she
thought they were talking about the huge lake that collected right there at the
corner of Flint and 19th. But no, they were talking about parks and fields,
large low places the city had set aside to collect the water when it rained,
because the city didn't really have a good sewer system to haul the water off.
So these wide open low parks would collect the rain water, and the water would sit in the middle of these
parks for a few days, and eventually evaporate, because the ground was so hard
that most of it couldn't get back down to the water table anyway. This didn't
make much sense to Debbie, but lots of things didn't make sense. For example,
in her neighborhood, why did they water lawns so much? The water table was
running dry. Rain didn't replenish it, and neither did anything else. Most days
it was sunny and dry and everything evaporated, even the water she'd put on her
flowers.
Outside the writing lab was a little courtyard, with a
statue and trees that often had mockingbirds or doves in them, especially if it
rained. Today she got to the writing lab, put away her umbrella, and got ready
for work by cleaning up a little, what had been splashed up upon her. She liked
her job; most of the students were friendly, and polite; they'd call her
"ma'am" all the time, and she came to like this. People were friendly
all over town. She couldn't help but think: if she had just a little water left
herself, she might not be nearly so generous. Nevertheless, they were
incredibly welcoming to her, and she'd also gotten used to drinking tea
everywhere, though she'd have to specify "unsweet" or she'd get this
really sugary tea that she couldn't handle. She liked "unsweet"
though, and now was getting it almost everywhere she went in the city.
Once she'd found this little canyon, Yellow House Canyon,
that snaked through the city, had some water in it, and seemed to be about the
only place for hundreds of miles that wasn't flat. Someone told her that the
plains itself was once called the Comancheria, the place of the Comanches, but
that the Comanches had met their end in this very canyon. They were fighting
over buffalo, apparently; the settlers were taking the last of them. But she'd
read, at one point, that killing all the buffalo was the problem with the
water; if they'd let the buffalo wallow in the playas, like they used to in the
days of the grasslands, they'd muck it up just enough that the water would get
through the wallow and replenish the aquifers. But by killing all the buffalo,
they'd let the land get hard, and now the aquifers were running dry.
It made sense, she thought, as she cleaned off her boots,
but she had to admit, she didn't really know. Neither did the people in charge,
probably. How do you measure how much water gets back down to the aquifer? You
can't. You know when it's running dry, but that's all you know. Out in the
country, she'd heard, they had to drill their water wells deeper every year,
they used up so much water in the drought. The cotton farmers and the frackers
were using it by the millions of gallons. People were watering their lawns like
crazy. And here in the city, it would rain, and just sit in the playas and
evaporate.
At work she got some tea and settled in at a table. Outside, the sun came out and it was drying off already. Her first client, though, looked very familiar to her, and she figured it out: he was the guy in the truck. She drank a sip of unsweet. This might not be one of her better sessions.
