The Big Dry

By Hugh Sidey

Leon Malard sat at his small kitchen table, covered with a blue plastic cloth, and with strong, thick fingers stroked the stubble on his chin. His black hair was cropped to its roots, his glasses coated at the edges with the grit from a morning of tilling in his stunted cornfield, which hugs a bluff above the Missouri River between Bismarck and Cannon Ball, N. Dak.

The 93 degrees F wind scoured the boards of his tiny home, gusting and swirling up to 30 m.p.h., drying, loosening, lofting, trying again to blow him away. The big prairie sun, without a wisp of cloud to soften it, hammered the land as far as a squinted eye could see, which is a long way out there.

Malard is dead center in the biggest and most cantankerous drought North America has had in 50 years, stretching from California to Georgia, from the Canadian prairies to the Texas plains, withering, parching and shrinking land, crops, rivers, lakes, animals and people. Federal emergencies have been declared in 30 states. Grain farmers in the upper Midwest may lose nearly three-quarters of their crops. There is more trouble to come if the rains don't. On Friday dark storm clouds scudded across the skies over parts of Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, but the squalls soon gave way to the familiar empty, mocking skies.

The forecast is devastating for farmers who were just recovering from a decade of low prices and high interest rates. Silos full of surplus grain from past harvests will protect grocery shoppers from noticing much more than a modest increase in most food prices. With thousands of undernourished cattle and hogs being driven to the slaughterhouse, meat prices may even go down. But trading in the commodity pits of Chicago has been frantic, a new pot of gold for plungers who bet on feast or famine. This cursed drought has brought them a bonanza. Soybeans, for instance, are now selling at about $10 per bu., nearly double the price of just six months ago. God must be a Democrat, somebody muttered near the White House. He surely is showing Ronald Reagan and George Bush, as he did all those who went before them, that the only workable farm policy ever devised was left in the Garden of Eden along with some other innocence.

Nobody knows for certain how much this is costing the nation. Economist Arlen Leholm of North Dakota State University ventures that his state alone will lose $2.7 billion in crops, lower federal farm subsidies and reduced farm spending. The U.S. Soil Conservation Service's William Fecke estimates that in Montana, Wyoming and the Dakotas the precious topsoil of 750,000 acres of farm and grazing land has been blown away by the angry wind, an additional 7 million acres is damaged and 12 million more threatened. "If the wind keeps up," Fecke says, "we may see chunks of the Northern Plains blowing to New England."

In the mountain states and along the West Coast, record temperatures have brought the fire season in two months early. Montana has suffered through more than a dozen significant forest and range fires this month, including a 23,000-acre burn on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Brush and desert fires have blackened more than 8,000 acres in California, Idaho, Washington and Utah. Forest fires may be the most immediate of California's water problems, but the long-range crisis of a huge, thirsty population competing for limited supplies of water dramatically raises fundamental questions about life and land in the Golden State.

The lower Mississippi River, which is supposed to run full and fat with spring water, is wan and puny, coughing up sandbars that have blocked as many as 130 towboats and 3,000 giant river barges filled with paper, grain and chemicals headed for market. Around Greenville and Vicksburg, Miss., the Army engineers have had to dredge an emergency channel in the shrinking river to & unclog the bizarre traffic jam. At Memphis low water levels broke all the records that had been put down on the books going back to 1872. But where somebody is losing a buck, there is always an American hustler trying to make one. The Illinois Central Railroad has put on additional cars to carry grain that can't go by water. Where the barges wait and wallow, small "midstreamers" dart here and there, peddling groceries and supplies to the stalled rivermen.

Mark Twain never saw anything like this. When he piloted on the river more than a century ago, he wrote mostly about storms and floods and the excess water curving and shifting over banks and through new channels. He knew, though, the majesty of the great valley. "The basin of the Mississippi is the body of the nation," is the description that starts his classic river chronicle. That remains true today and is reason for the profound concern now.

The big drought is actually three droughts, according to Donald Gilman, a long-range forecaster with the National Weather Service. There have been shortages of moisture in the Southeast for years and in the West for several seasons. The winter and spring rains failed to fill reservoirs around the Tennessee Valley. The winter snowpack in the Rockies has been as much as 60% below normal. "Then the drought began in the Missouri-Mississippi watershed all the way to the Gulf," said Gilman. That was caused by a split in the jet stream, which usually carries storms across California into the Midwest, sucking moisture up from the Gulf. But this year its larger current swung north to Hudson Bay, its lesser branch south to Mexico, leaving the midlands arid and hot. Now, after nearly three months of deprivation, the great Missouri-Mississippi watershed has fused into a giant arc of aching thirst. The heartland bower of James Whitcomb Riley and Edgar Lee Masters, of Indiana and Illinois, has received less than half the normal spring rainfall. The soft night lawns are brown crackling grist. The old swimming holes have evaporated.

Leon Malard at his kitchen table smiled a good open smile when he talked about Sioux Indians being called to Ohio to do a rain dance, priests shaking holy water on farm fields and prayer gatherings in sale barns. Show business. The forces out there are so huge and incomprehensible, you don't waste energy trying to stop them in their tracks. You hunker down, you survive. Malard has for 60 years, and his dad before him, and before that his grandfather, who homesteaded on the Missouri River in 1905.

"The barley and the oats are gone," said Malard. "If we have rain soon, we can get some corn. But even some of that is shot." He watches the fields particularly in the evening, when the light is softer. "The corn is beginning to turn white," he said. "The leaves are curling. If there is no rain, if the wind keeps blowing like this, if it stays so hot, all the corn will be lost."

Malard's mind, tuned to seasons and years, is already calculating 1989. He got one scraggly hay crop this spring and has some carry-over bales from last year for his 75 Herefords and Black Angus cattle. With careful planning, that can get him into next year. But then without new hay and grain his future looks bleak.

Yet Malard might stare even that specter down for a little while longer. He did as a boy in the 1930s. "The country around here is not as bad off as it was then, not yet anyway," Malard said. His dad planted seeds that never sprouted. The dust blew so much it covered a hog house on his grandfather's farm. Malard walked right over the top of it. About the only thing that dimmed the sun during the big dry of those years was the clouds of swarming grasshoppers.

Malard has a fan-cooled house, and his big White tractor has an air- conditioned cab. The shelter belts of Chinese elms and Russian olive trees that he planted between fields have endured, and retard the dust and wind over the 1,200 acres he and his son farm. Malard's hunch is that the improved farming practices, the big dams and reservoirs on the main stem of the Missouri, farm ponds and all the other modern techniques will prevent the terrible devastation and suffering of the 1930s.

Yet there is the faint question that comes with the endless wind. How long before this drought tumbles the old records? Then what? Malard shrugs. The last good rain he felt on his face was in August 1987. In March of this year a 10-in. blizzard roared in and hit his area. He waited it out in his house, daring to hope that this was a break in the dryness and that a normal spring of rain would follow. It did not. Instead came the heat and the wind. Malard gets up every morning by 6 and checks the sky and looks at the thermometer outside his window. He tunes in radio station KFYR in Bismarck for the weather reports. Day after monotonous day the news is the same. Clear skies, or thin empty clouds, temperatures already in the 70s or above and not a trace of dew on the land. When a slight shower came a few days ago, the baked land and superheated air seemed to cause the droplets to vanish as fast as they fell. A ferocious drought feeds itself.

From the air, a dry spell of even this magnitude is hard to see with the naked eye. Some fields are parched out, and crops are plainly scraggly. But the patchwork of greens and golds still reels by under jet wings heading west. The great shoulders of the Rockies have some snow on them still. It takes a closer inspection and a conditioned eye for full understanding. The trees of Minneapolis hide devastated home lawns and gardens. Out West, dry-weather weeds have sprung up in the draws of prairie pastures, adding deceptive color. All through the Midwest are fields of wheat, corn and soybeans that took root much earlier on slight rains, then simply stopped developing. They hover now between life and death, still handsome to the casual observer. A delegation of Senators and Congressmen whirled across the area in helicopters, minced around in their city shoes looking at the drought wreckage, but sometimes were not impressed. When one of them spied a wheat field he thought looked pretty good, the farmers pulled up the plants to show the withering roots, the stunted buds.

Farmer Malard walked his acres last week and understood how others might not sense the stress. Behind him the low hills along the Missouri were beige, fringed with the green of buckbush and cottonwoods, durable species. "This time of year it should all be beautiful green," he said with a sweep of his muscled arm. The land is muted, it is leached, some of the soul sucked out and blown away. A farmer sees and knows about those things.

In another age, in a simpler society, a drought of these dimensions was mostly a farm calamity. What could make this drought more menacing than anything yet seen should the rains not come is the interwoven nature of the environment, economy and people. Crop failures, farm bankruptcies, high food costs, transportation disruption, municipal water shortages -- bad as all these are, they are familiar difficulties. Now there is the threat of other, more subtle damage. In California's Silicon Valley, a plan to cut pure reservoir supplies sent a shock through the semiconductor industry. Ionizing mineral-laden well water to the proper purity would send the water-treatment bills for just six firms from $2.1 million to $4.9 million, threatening their competitive positions and jobs. The San Francisco water authorities were successfully lobbied to hold off for this year.

Lowered lakes and rivers mean more danger of sewage, industrial wastes and agricultural chemicals tainting drinking water and recreation areas. Pollutants are diluted and flushed away by surface water in normal times. The drought has also sent water-hungry users to deep wells, and some of these show disturbing concentrations of nitrates and herbicides.

The trade balance is involved in the complex equation that deals with the drying of America. After dismal years of crop surpluses, falling prices and sagging overseas markets, the federal program to sell foodstocks abroad and take millions of acres out of production was at last paying off. Wheat surpluses had dwindled by 35% in the past two years, and exports were up 75%. So far, Clayton Yeutter, the U.S. trade representative, is resisting the cries to stop selling grain overseas and preserve it for American markets. But if grain sales abroad must be halted, the frustrated overseas customers may be doubly hard to woo back when the granaries again bulge with surpluses -- as they will. When that day comes, farmers will complain and taxpayers will moan. And that is why farm policy is never settled.

Driving south along Highway 1804 above Cannon Ball, Leon Malard looked right and left reading the land and assessing the scorched crops, feeling the wind and watching for neighbors' activity. One was cutting hay in a narrow field. "Without last year's leftover it wouldn't be worth it," Malard said. "I was hoping to get some weeds, so I might have something to cut out of my fields. But not even the weeds came." He points at a patch of his land. "I couldn't even get the plow in that ground, it was baked so hard. The plow just rode up on top of it."

Battle after battle Malard fights with this capricious force called Nature. Right now, it seems, he is losing more than he is winning, but he is a man of almost endless patience. Nature, he knows, will sooner or later grow weary of its tantrum. When it does, he will still be around.