Friday, October 4, 2024

Rain and Water

I have, over the past several years, often looked at the garden in my front yard and thought it might be nice to have a rain barrel or two.  They'd fit in neatly, right there by the carport, and could drink from the copious runoff of the gutter that runs across the entire front of our house.  Why use municipal water to water my garden, when it falls freely from the sky?  It seems such a modest and simple thing.

Historically, I live in a great place for a rain barrel.  We have our cycles of rainfall and our cycles of drought, but things lean towards a comfortable equilibrium in our portion of the Mid-Atlantic.  Rains come on the regular. 

Or rather, they did.  This last year was dry and unusually hot for much of the summer, so much so that every gardener I know struggled with yields, with heat-stunted plants and dust-dry earth.  I was more impacted by an unusually aggressive varmint season, as squirrels and chipmunks noshed on my tomatoes and apples, and deer blitzed their way through everything else.  At the height of a month-long drought, there's not much a rain barrel can do for you besides sit there looking sad.

Again, it's not that municipal water is all that pricey here in Virginia.  It runs clean and clear from the tap, utterly potable, all year long, at fractions of a penny per gallon.  It's so abundant and so inexpensive that we don't notice the miracle of it, a miracle that for much of human history was available only to the privileged few.  For a significant proportion of humanity, getting water takes a substantial effort, a sustained and physical effort that consumes much of life.  My family lived in Nigeria for a while, and potable water wasn't a given, even in a city of 2,000,000 people.  We Americans have forgotten how hard that can be.

But we can be reminded.

And there lies a reason to have a rain barrel that goes well beyond the pleasures of gardening, one recently surfaced by the unprecedented impacts Hurricane Helene has had throughout the American South.  Water provision systems have been completely destroyed by water, in the most desperate of ironies.  Even with the best possible efforts, these systems may take a while to repair.  When crises hit, which they will, having a hundred gallons or so of emergency use water sitting right next to your house becomes a godsend, in the way that all wisdom is a godsend.

Water for toilets.  Water for washing.  Water, with a little boiling and filtering, for drinking.  It's perhaps the most basic of our human needs, and one that may be tried and tested as the weather of our little world gets more unpredictable.

Maybe I should put rainbarrels on my Christmas list.