Drought and Disease

Okay - so I'll admit the title of this post is pretty depressing. Unfortunately, it also describes the times we're living through in Northern California (and much of the rest of the world). I'm writing this from the desk in my kitchen where I currently spend most of my work week (now that the University of California has mandated that most of us work from home due to the coronavirus pandemic). And as I write, most of the northern two-thirds of California remain in moderate drought, according to the National Drought Monitor. Indeed, we're currently on track (off track?) to have the driest year since we've lived in Auburn - drier, even, than 2013-2014. Drought and disease are our reality.

I'm amazed by how much has changed in California and the U.S. in the last five-and-a-half weeks. I returned from a conference in Denver on February 19 with a dry cough and a fever - symptoms that lasted about four days. COVID-19 was just starting to make news here - I wondered about my symptoms but wasn't too worried about it. We measured just 0.03" of rain last month - the driest February on record. Just three weeks after I returned from Denver, I was agonizing over my decision to inform all of the 4-H clubs in Placer and Nevada County that we shouldn't hold any meetings until April. This afternoon, we learned that the President has indicated that we need to maintain social distancing through at least the end of April.

This pandemic is something with which almost nobody alive today has any experience. My grandmother survived the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic as a child (an experience which, thankfully, she shared with me). Uncertainty and fear cause anxiety; anxiety, for some, causes irrational behavior. And this irrational behavior creates stress for others - at least it does for me. Whether this crisis ends in April or not, all of us will be different when we reach the other side of it.

I see similarities in the drought we're experiencing. From a forage perspective, we seem to be tracking at or above average in terms of grass growth (mostly due to the warm temperatures and false spring we experienced in February). This fact gives some a false sense of security - we'll be fine because we have more grass on April 1 than we normally do! When I look more closely, however, I see that the rangeland we grazed in February and early March has not regrown like expected. When I dig into the root zone on our annual rangelands, I find that soil moisture remains depleted - which explains why the seasonal creeks aren't flowing. And when I look at the forage we do have, I find that it is maturing 30-40 days earlier than normal. In other words, our drought is more than simply a lack of rainfall. We are seeing warm temperatures and dry days much earlier than normal. I worry about what our feed conditions will be next fall.

In many ways, drought and disease are similar conditions. Unlike other "disasters" - fire, hurricanes, floods, etc. - we don't know when these crises will end. And we don't know how bad they'll get. For me, these times have forced me to focus on what I need to do one day at a time. What can I control in my life today? What do I need to do tomorrow? This lack of control, I suspect, is one of the biggest challenges for most of us. We are so used to being able to control our own lives - our work, our social interactions, and our future. Drought and disease remind us that we're not in control - and that's incredibly uncomfortable for most of us.

Yesterday, I needed to visit a hardware store here in Auburn to buy some storage containers so I could clean up an alternative office space at home. The store was only allowing people to enter as others exited - an effort to facilitate social distancing. I thanked the store employee and security guard - which they obviously appreciated. They said they'd been told by some customers that they were overreacting. But isn't that the point?! Don't we all wish that our "overreactions" (staying at home, washing our hands - easy stuff, really) mean that our parents and grandparents (and our children and grandchildren) don't get sick? Don't we really wish that it won't be necessary to sell sheep (maybe this only concerns shepherds!)? We won't know if our actions will be sufficient until all of this is over. For me, that waiting might be the most difficult part.