No matches, two tubs
ARKTOPIA COUNTY — The state took the drought alert off the nail on September 1. The creeks did not attend the ceremony.
Scoop has a rule about weather stories: print the named water. Tony Hancock at the Department of Agriculture told Brownfield this week that southern Missouri was getting serious, pretty fast. Springs thinning. Little creeks with names only the mailbox line would recognize running as if they had somewhere else to be. Hay coming down off the stack in September, which is a sentence that used to belong to January.
Joplin heard the same wind in the cattle market. Bred cows and pairs quoted hundreds of dollars softer than last month, not because a cow forgot how to be a cow, but because nobody wants to buy a mouth they cannot water. About a quarter of the state is wearing some official shade of drought. The rest of us are wearing the unofficial kind, which is a pasture that sounds like paper when you walk it.
Then the fire districts spoke. Ozark. Nixa. Howell. Oregon. Polk. Jasper. Bolivar. The Mark Twain forest called the danger moderate and closed a trail for repairs, which is a bureaucratic way of saying the woods are tired. Arkansas, never shy, put every county under a burn ban. If your plan for Wednesday was a brush pile and a good intention, sit down. The front that was supposed to drag rain across the Ozarks late Wednesday into Thursday is the only match this page will bless.
Scoop’s mid-September checklist, posted where even a buck can see it if he would only look up:
- Water in more than one place. A single tub is still a rumor. Two tubs are still a plan.
- Shade that is actual shade at 2 p.m. The Expo’s cloth went home. Yours has to stay.
- No midday hauling unless the veterinarian is already on the way.
- No brush fires, no “just the ditch,” no clever exception for a pile that has been waiting since June.
- Watch the old ones, the dark-coated ones, the kids still on the bottle, and the stubborn ones who will stand in the sun on principle.
- If a spring you have trusted since you could spell it goes quiet, you are no longer in a homesteading essay. You are in a truck with a tank.
Heat is a barn with the door shut.
Drought is the same barn after somebody hid the well bucket.
Open the door. Find the bucket. Leave the matches where they are.
Professor Gruff’s margin: “Do not make the drought a personality. Make the water closer. That is still the whole sermon. Add: do not set the sermon on fire.”