Texas Drought

There is not much, if anything, that I hold sacred, but the closest things are books and trees.  I know why I hold books sacred, they are founts of wisdom and entertainment.  They are a friend, a piece of humanity that will never reject you, solace in loneliness.  I don't know why I hold trees sacred.  Perhaps it is growing up in a place in which humanity has carved out its place in a giant forest.  Perhaps it is that they are the oldest living things that one encounters.  Perhaps it is because they are usually the tallest thing around us.  It doesn't really matter, but a living tree is a wonder, a dying tree is a sadness, and the killing of a tree is sacrilege.  By the two houses I have owned I have planted a tree, a magnolia and a mexican lemon tree, and I will plant a tree by every house I own until I die.

When most people think of the landscape of Texas they think of bleached grass, scrub, a sparsely populated vastness.  There is a hell of a lot of that.  Texas is slightly bigger than France, the largest country in western Europe, and that landscape does predominate.  However, I was surprised to find that Houston is in a (normally) very green area.  It gets more rain per year than Portland, OR or the UK, places famous for their rain, but mostly in thunderstorms or the remains of tropical storms.  Houston has trees, in my area the most common is the loblolly pine.  Tall trees that are presently dumping vast amounts of pollen.

Last year, as I am sure most of you know, there was a major drought throughout Texas.  It was actually the worst single season of drought in Texas since rainfall measurements started to be taken.  In 2011 Houston had under 15 inches of rain in contrast to the average 54 inches.  All around us we saw the death of the natural world.  All around were dead and dying trees.  Lawns browned and died.  Streams dried up.  Dust swirled in parks.  As I would walk my dog in the autumn I would here the crash of falling trees, every day.  The result?  In the first picture every single one of those tall, straight pines is dead.

 Here is the pile of dead trees from just my local park.  A sad, sad sight.  To give a sense of scale, in the bottom picture, to the right you can see my eighty pound dog halfway along the pile.  The two pictures are two different sides to a square.