Dust Bunnies

In much of Tidewater the drought is bad but it is worse at my horse lots than anywhere else that I know of. The water table has plummeted. My well at home and the well at the little house go dry each time they are used for watering. For many square miles around my horse lot there is not even a mud hole with water in it. Deer can go where they want to to get water and have access to several farm ponds in the area. Rabbits are more limited in there ability to seek out water. The protective cover of vegetation that allowed them to slipped by unseen by hawks is gone. They risk their lives each time they go to find water. This spring we had an enormous rabbit population. That is not so now. They are as rare as a rain cloud.

Last week sand and dust filled the air as it used to when wind swept across peanut fields as the ground was broken to harvest what was once our cash crop. This time it was different. Instead of lifting dust from plowed, bare fields, it lifted dust from what would normally be grass covered pastures. The grass is not only brown. It is not only dead. It is gone, leaving a deep bed of sand, so soft that walking through it is tiring.

Watering the horses now takes my father and I about six hours each day. With all of the natural water holes dry, water must be driven to the pastures in barrels with water drawn from nearly dry wells.

My riders are city kids. They do not understand the concept of a well going dry and having to give it 24 hours to re charge. They do not under stand that a running toilet or a dripping hose dries out the well and makes it possible for the pump to burn up unless someone discovers the mistake in time.

It makes for other complications also. I am at home waiting for my well to recharge and we are going to be without water this morning. My wife, an otherwise sane and reasonable person, was a city person. When we loose water, even for just a few hours, she looses her mind--calls me "uncivilized."

It also creates certain ironies. I am about to go to court to prosecute criminals whose level of personal hygiene will exceed mine.

But, as difficult as things can be I know how to keep them in proper perspective.

At least I am not a rabbit.