BONE DRY

By Paul Gray

Most natural disasters strike hard and fast. Tornado, hurricane, earthquake, flash fire and flood all do the worst of their worst in violent bursts and spasms. Droughts are different. They have no discernible beginning; no one wakes up of a morning, looks out a window and says, "Uh-oh, here comes a long dry spell." Droughts seem deceptively serene, no more threatening than an endless expanse of blue, cloudless sky. They unfold in slow motion, a tempo ill suited to daily headlines and TV-news reports. Covering one is like sitting around watching the grass not grow. In The Grapes of Wrath, his 1939 novel about the Depression-era Dust Bowl, John Steinbeck captured the idling, hallucinatory rhythm of drought: "The brown lines on the corn leaves widened and moved in on the central ribs. The weeds frayed and edged back toward their roots. The air was thin and the sky more pale; and every day the earth paled."

That lethargic scene has been playing itself out for months now across broad swaths of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. City dwellers in those states, out for a Sunday afternoon drive in the country, may not recognize the creeping devastation sweeping past their car windows. Irrigated fields are still green, overshadowing the brown, crisping lands between and around them. Thanks to lessons learned in the 1930s, farm acreage has long been tilled and cultivated with an eye to soil conservation, to making fields less likely to blow away; the contemporary Dust Bowl is not as dusty as its famous predecessor.

That does not make it any less dangerous or severe. "The drought is one of the worst on record," says U.S. Department of Agriculture meteorologist Ray Motha. Comparisons to the dry disasters of the 1930s strike most observers as inadequate. "We've looked at the stats back to 100 years ago," says Erik Ness, director of communications at the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau, "and there was more rain during the Dust Bowl than they are getting in Roosevelt County [on the state's eastern plains]."

The most visible sign so far of the hot, parched conditions has been an outburst of earlier-than-usual fires in Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. The latter two states have been especially ravaged, with New Mexico losing some 80,000 acres to flames and Arizona nearly 88,000. The conflagration that raced through northern New Mexico's Carson National Forest in early May particularly startled and unnerved experts. Says Mary Zabinski, fire-information officer with the U.S. Forest Service's southwestern region: "We have kiddingly called the Carson the asbestos forest because it is always so wet and at such a high elevation that it never burns. With the Carson burning, and so early, that told us this was going to be a rough summer."

Farmers and ranchers across the blistered Southwest and Lower Plains have already experienced a rough spring, with no relief on the horizon. They have watched winter-wheat crops wither and die. Kansas normally produces 360 million to 420 million bushels of wheat annually; the estimate for this year is 185 million bushels. "Personally, I think those estimates are a bit high," says Mike Brown, president of the Kansas Association of Wheat Growers. "I hope they're on the low side, but I wouldn't be surprised if [the crop] was below 150 million."

The time to plant cotton and corn has come and, in most places, gone, while farmers hunker down in their fields and crumble handfuls of soil into plumes of fine dust. Texas is the nation's leading cotton-growing state, but agronomists there predict that 50% of this year's crop could be lost, along with more than $200 million profit to farmers and producers. Prospects for the corn crop are just as barren. "Corn should be 8 ft. high by now," says Mark Miller, an agricultural economist at Texas A&M University, "but even in the best fields, it is only 4 ft. high." And that scrawny crop could be imperiled. According to Joe Pena, also of Texas A&M, corn grown in drought-stressed conditions can develop aflatoxin, a condition that makes the ears essentially poisonous. Some of the reduced crop may have to be destroyed because it is toxic.

The first and most poignant casualties of the 1996 drought have been the cattle, grazing on blighted fields of stubble. Feed prices have, in some instances, tripled, while prices for cattle have been plummeting. Trying to stave off the inevitable, ranchers south of San Antonio have been hiring day laborers to "burn pear," Texas lingo for applying a butane torch to the cactus and searing off the spines so that cattle can munch on what remains. But many ranchers across the affected regions have given up, offering at auction the creatures they can no longer afford to feed.

Dan Jarosek, 71, belongs to the third generation of a Czech-American family to farm in the Taylor area, near Austin. In February he sold some of his small herd of cattle, which consisted of "45 mamas," as he puts it, for 65 [cents] a pound. A few weeks ago, he sold more for 29 [cents] a pound and then another few for 20'. He has 20 "mama cows" and little money left to buy feed. "This may be my last year," he says.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s prompted Congress to enact protections for afflicted farmers. Ironically, some safeguards began being phased out this year, as the 1996 drought was building. The new Freedom to Farm Act represents an attempt to wean farmers from price supports and occasional expensive supplemental federal disaster-relief bills with a system of fixed cash subsidies and low-cost, $50-per-crop insurance. Given these benefits, the reasoning went, farmers would be able to tide themselves over rough times without requiring ad hoc handouts. Almost no one thought this theory would be subjected to such a stern test so soon after the bill's passage.

So far, supporters of the new law say it is working just fine. Gary Mitchell, chief of staff of the House Agriculture Committee, notes that most wheat acreage in the drought-affected areas is insured--specifically, 91% in Colorado, 86% in Kansas, 85% in Oklahoma and 79% in Texas. Fears of widespread farm defaults and bankruptcies have not yet materialized. Larry Cervenka, a banker in Taylor, believes "96% to 97%" of local farmers will stay afloat, at least in the immediate future, because they raise both crops and cattle. But the fears and anxieties run high. "I wish," Cervenka adds, "Americans could know the full impact of this, of what it has done to people's lives." Failing crops also have an ominous effect well beyond the circle of embattled farmers. One in five Texans has a job related to agribusiness.

The economic pain now seeping through the drought areas will eventually register at check-out counters across the U.S. Low beef prices will rise after depleted herds come to market; items from bread to Doritos will cost more. But price fluctuations provide only a transitory measure of the impact of the drought of 1996. In Texas an ambitious reforestation program has been blighted by dry weather; in 20 years there could be 40% fewer mature pine trees than planters have hoped. In New Mexico, Rick Klein surveys the aftermath of the fire in the Carson National Forest: "I think the forest will come back," he says, "and it will be an incredible chance to watch Mother Nature at work and to help her out. But it won't be on a human time scale. It will never be the same, with the huge trees." This drought will be much longer in the leaving than it was in its beginning. --Reported by Nancy Harbert/Albuquerque, Hilary Hylton/Taylor and Nina Planck/Washington

With reporting by NANCY HARBERT/ALBUQUERQUE, HILARY HYLTON/ TAYLOR AND NINA PLANCK/WASHINGTON