august in texas

The drive down Highway 71 is one of my favorite things in Texas. It's beautiful country, gently rolling through fields and farms and trees and tiny towns including Ellinger where you can find the best kolaches made anywhere by descendents of Czech immigrants. (I got there at 8:45am this morning and had to wait in a line twenty people long to get to the counter for my fix of poppy seed kolache.) It is a drive I have made dozens of times over my life and I can say I have never seen it like this. It pained me to look at the bleached, burned and cracked land full of dying trees and gaunt cattle. The rivers barely move, low and sluggish and there are scars from fires everywhere. Some of the roadside signs are funny: "Think snow!" past La Grange and some are somber "Thank you to the volunteer firefighters who saved our home" in Lost Pines to angry "Vote out all those self serving bastards in Washington 2012" near Columbus to haunting "Pray for our fallen Navy Seal hero Mark Mills and his family" on the sign of a storage facility in the middle of nowhere Fayette county.

This is the single worst one year drought on record. It is one of the hottest years in recorded weather history here. In just three days we'll be at a record breaking seventy days of 100+ heat for the year and there's talk that might go on like this until October. It just hurts to think about it.