Letter from Texas #3

I ought to have had more sense. We were coming down from a motorcycle tour through New Mexico and Colorado, and temperatures were climbing. Up near the divide, we wore extra layers under our protective gear, but when we hit the South Plains on the trip home, the air warmed, considerably. By the time we left Abilene the next morning, the heat radiating off the blacktop registered at 110 degrees as we went toward Austin.

I almost always wear heavy, protective gear on the motorcycle. Jackets with armor and thick nylon mesh offer protection if you get separated from the bike. The other protocol I have always followed while riding in the Texas summer is to never go more than one hundred miles without hydration. I mix water and an electrolyte drink, and consume at least a quart at each stop.

The road into Lampasas was being resurfaced and was pure blacktop, which magnified the radiated heat. My mesh jacket felt cool, though, because I was sweating and the evaporative effect left me comfortable even in the Texas sun. I was not, however, properly hydrated, even with the regular drink stops, and was sweating more than I realized. At 75 miles per hour, my horizon began to flutter and tilt, and even flipped upside down. I let go of the throttle and moved to the breakdown lane wondering if I was having a stroke.

“What’s wrong?” My wife’s voice on the intercom was clearly concerned. “Are you okay.”

“No. No, I’m not. Have to pull off.”

“What is it?’

“Don’t know.”

A county road appeared as my horizon kept see-sawing, to and fro, but I managed to stop and get the kickstand down. I told her I had to get off the bike for a second because I was feeling dizzy, but the situation was much worse than I realized. I took one step and fell to the caliche surface.

“Oh, no, are you okay? I’ll help you.”

“I don’t think I am.”

She climbed off the passenger seat and helped me to my feet and tried to steady my balance and I asked her to release me to see if I could walk. I took four steps sideways and fell into a ditch. A utility worker stopped his pickup and offered assistance. He lifted me up and I leaned on him to reach the passenger seat in the cool air conditioning. While I drank his ice cold Gatorade, my vision of the world was as if I were standing on the bow of a ship plowing into fifteen foot seas. Nothing changed in thirty minutes and he dialed 911.

In the ambulance with an IV, I was still dizzy and my nausea increased every minute. The doctors ran every test the hospital had on its list of services, and found nothing. The IV bag was constantly replaced, and I drained a half dozen before I fell asleep. In the morning, I was back to normal with a caution from the overnight attending doctor that I was dangerously close to permanent harm from heat and hydration. I thought I was doing everything required to stay safe, and I was wrong.

I was riding, and we are living, in a different environment than not too many years in the past. When I came to Central Texas in the seventies, temperatures in the dead of July and August rarely hit the mid-90s, though maybe that’s just my memory. In 1976, I ran in the Bicentennial Marathon in McAllen down on the Rio Grande on the Fourth of July. Were the race organizers crazy or was I for my participation? I ran my fastest time to that date and almost won, though I recall a bit of tunnel vision on the homestretch to the courthouse.

Things are worse now, including my power of endurance. Rain falls in scattered showers, and in a state with virtually no natural, glaciated lakes, every reservoir is under stress and losing water to evaporation and consumption at a rate that cannot be sustained. Lake Travis, a kind of recreational crown jewel of the Hill Country, is presently only 44 percent full. Recharge has historically come from May rains, but those did not happen with any abundance this spring. It is lacking 619,000 plus acre feet of water, and Lake Buchanan, upstream on the Colorado, only has slightly more water in reserve at 62 percent of its capacity. These are the drinking water supplies for one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country. What the Lower Colorado River Authority describes as “in flows” for lakes Travis and Buchanan were only 22 percent of their historic average for May.

Used to Be Lake Travis, Now More of a River Delta

Since Texans tend toward the optimistic, we are assuming, as science fiction writer Ray Bradbury once said, “There will come soft rains.” We don’t know, though, and the science says we are only getting hotter, not wetter. The history of this state has shown, however, we don’t do moderate anything; we are about bombast. Our rains become Biblical floods rather than persistent gentle waterings of the good earth, and our droughts are epic, singeing all living things and making rocks too hot to touch. No dry spells allowed, but the outlanders keep coming and sticking their straws, figurative and literal, into the lakes and aquifers.

Lake Travis, just one example of many, is 32 feet below its historic average for the month of June, and not much more than 20 feet above the all time low in 1951, and triple digit temperatures are not going to raise the water level. The low elevation can probably be attributed to little rain in April and May, and June temperatures that feel like the Mojave has expanded eastward. You can still, though, get on your bicycle or in your car and ride around a nice neighborhood near you and see the morning sprinklers tossing up their rainbows of moisture to keep the St. Augustine grasses green to impress the tourists, or somebody. Newcomers from the Midwest, Northeast, and California, and too many Texans, want that rolling green lawn to give their homes curb appeal. It will make a hell of a funny story for archaeologists when thousands of years from now they discover our entire civilization died of thirst because we wanted splats of green grass leading to our doorsteps.

Cypress Creek Arm of Lake Travis

You may accuse me of overstating the matter, but the picture above makes my point more dramatically than my halting prose. You’re looking at the Cypress Creek Arm of Lake Travis. When the reservoir of the lake is full, everything in that photo is beneath at least twenty feet of water. In good years, the little ditch there is filled with people smiling and happy after just launching their motorboats to go run past Hippie Hollow and watch the nekkid sunbathers. I usually drive by the Cypress Creek Park a few times a week and it has been several years since I can recall water reaching that far out from the main basin, (previously described, accurately, as a river delta), to fill Cypress Creek. Before the summer is out, there may not even be enough water in the lake’s lower basin to attract those bare-naked hippies to their hollow.

Too much heat, too little rain, all across the Lone Star State. Even in places where temperatures are high as hell in the Texas summer, records are being broken, along with families. A father and his two stepsons were afflicted during a hike in Big Bend National Park this weekend in temperatures estimated at 119 degrees on the Marufo Vega Trail. There is no shade or drinking water along that track, and the 14-year-old lost consciousness as his stepfather returned to seek help. The 21-year-old brother carried his stricken teenaged sibling back toward the trailhead but park medical emergency technicians were unable to revive the boy. The father, who made it to his car, drove off a cliff near Boquillas Overlook and was killed.

No way to tell if the dad was crazy with the heat, but that trail is marked with danger warnings for summer time heat and hiking. What used to be dangerous is now dependably deadly, especially for the ill prepared. I have been to the bottom of the Grand Canyon a dozen times in the summer heat and every trip there is a story posted of someone who succumbed to the temperature and poor hydration. The last victim I recall was a 22-year-old female marathon champion, a death that is almost unaccountable when the fact is considered the park has put in water fountains every four miles along Bright Angel Trail.

My theory of the future waterscape of the American Southwest is that growth will stop because of water supply. Housing permits will have to be halted, and people and businesses will migrate to the north where lakes and rivers are almost always full with snow melt and predictable rains. Manufacturing always needs water, more water, and we don’t really have it to spare. Save up your pennies for some long underwear and a place on one of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes or the Au Sable River crossing through Michigan with its crystalline waters. Climate change is already making the winters more tolerable, and the politics are immediate improvements over the legislative meanness of Texas.

Who can last in a state where the governor ends mandatory water breaks for outdoor workers during an endless and deadly heatwave? Greg Abbott signed a law ending local ordinances in Dallas and Austin that required businesses to provide ten minute hydration breaks every four hours. Abbott’s measure prevents any city from writing such an ordinance in the future, too. Won’t be long before he ratifies legislation preventing meteorologists from forecasting hundred degree temperatures, claiming they are repeating “fake” science.

I didn’t even get to what’s happening with the Oglala Aquifer up in the Panhandle and South Plains, but just a clue for when I write about it in the near future, not good news.