Liza Field

Liza Field's column appears twice a month in Extra.

Recent columns

• Recalling the start of a movement on the retail front lines
• Don't lose sight of the unseen 'big picture'
• Remember: There's more to life than what we see

This hot, crunch-grass summer, sloshing toward my new trees with old plaster buckets of laundry water, spigot and creek water, I keep seeing Molly Pitcher in some childhood library book, toting water to parched soldiers.

Which war, I wonder, dumping a bucketful onto the cracked ground? Which side? Does it even matter?

Historians figure Molly Pitcher may be a couple of women, a legend or even a general nickname for females who carried water -- not just for dry throats, but also for the swabbing of cannons -- in the Revolutionary War.

I prefer the childhood story of a gal determined to alleviate thirst. It symbolizes our human connection to anyone thirsty -- animal, plant or person. After all, we too are made of water.

When plants dry up, rhododendron leaves curl and the animals go parched, something inside us cringes shut like a fist, leaving us feeling helpless. Aside from keeping a few plants alive, we can do nothing to balm the dry world. Or can we?

The water crisis

"It's all this development, every place you look," a visitor from Smyth County told me on a Wytheville parking lot this summer. He'd come to town for a business seminar, but had grown up in a farm family and was keenly aware of weather and soil.

The asphalt was radiating heat upward like a griddle, where we stood scoping the arid viewshed. All around the visible interstate crossroads of Wytheville, farms and woods were giving way to development -- hundreds of acres of permeable fields, trees and hedgerows leveled to bare dirt, on their way to replacement by buildings and asphalt.

Every acre of asphalt meant another "lid" that could not absorb rain. Storm water would run in a whoosh down drains, creeks and the New River, instead of sinking back into the aquifer.

"So when it does rain an inch, we get flash floods," I said.

"When I was a kid, it could rain for days and not flood," he recalled.

I mentally dug back through the dry crust of recent years, trying to excavate childhood summers when rains fell for more than one hour -- when it seemed a mere camp out could attract whole rain-fronts like a magnet. Dark, clustered days of rain, thrilling and cool! Drumming, tin-roof-rattling downpours that stirred up their own wet wind and soaked the humus like tea leaves, potent with good-smelling aliveness.

What happened to these rains? What happened to the creeks and rivers that ran between them, full and cold?

Fifteen years ago, Joe Kelley, a wise and well-known farmer in Wythe County, told me that water would become our most critical issue in karst-based Southwest Virginia, if not the entire United States. We were not treating the land right. We're deforesting out west and at home, and we're giving little thought to soil and water conservation.

Many old-timers here have told me of waters that dried up when trees came down. One couple I met at Wyrick Springs told me of a neighbor whose sons had removed three old maples from around her spring. The spring soon went dry.

Eddie Hoge of Giles County told me of some relatives who decided to get money from their mountainside trees. "They had three bold springs on that land," Hoge said. "They timbered, and those springs dried right up. Had to dig a well." The well cost twice what the timber sale brought in.

'The suburban desert'

J.W. Midkiff of Wytheville, who knows weather firsthand from a long career with the Virginia Department of Transportation, notes that trees influence any weather system. They not only absorb rainfall, but also help attract it.

"Where there's forest, it's more likely to rain," Midkiff said. "In a desert, there's nothing to create that moisture."

Nothing in asphalt parking plazas can absorb or generate moisture, either. And the phenomenon naturalists called "the suburban desert," which has turned vast swatches of our continent into lawn, doesn't help.

"We've got too much land dedicated to just being pretty," Midkiff said. "We don't need all these lawns cut to an inch, requiring all these chemicals. This is not natural. And I'm not knocking golf, but a lot of courses pollute the streams."

Everything we do on "dry" land is connected to water -- and even weather. But this is not bad news.

I'll dive into help-water tactics next month. Meanwhile, you can temporarily aid a few saplings, birds and wildlife around your neighborhood. If you planted trees, water them, not the lawn. And just a plastic trough or pan could relieve wildlife in a landscape devoid of open water. (Add a rock so the bees don't drown.)

If it seems futile, remember Molly Pitcher. This land of the free, after all, needs her patriots of water and wildlife, too.

Liza Field's column runs every other Saturday in Extra.