By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
“If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it.”
— Eduardo Galeano
It’s Beltane. It’s Spring. It’s snowing.
I guess you can take the girl out of California, but — well — you know the rest. Almost fifteen years into this adventure, I’ve never truly acclimatized to Midwestern weather patterns. I’m still startled by the starkness of forests bereft of leaves or an achingly-long winter landscape dressed only in black, white and shades of gray. The swelling and budding of trees, the quiet, almost instantaneous transformation of a harshly vertical world into one softened under a vivid green canopy, always come as something of a surprise, even though it’s expected.
What isn’t expected — by me or anyone else I’ve talked to lately — is to see that lush new foliage covered with clumps of wet, white snow in May. Coming on the heels of three 80+ degree days, a plummet into daytime temps in the 30s is not just a shock, it’s unprecedented. Those of us who live close to the land check weather a couple of times a day. These days, you have to. Heavy rain preceded this latest weather assault, unable to soak into ground already saturated by better-than-average rainfall earlier in the month. It doesn’t take much intellect to wake up and smell the irony that a drought-stricken section of the nation not only exceeded its need for water but is endangered by flooding.
Winter storm Achilles is breaking records in Missouri, which has had only one other May snow event in recorded history, and well to the north — in Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota, where they expect extremes — records have been broken as well. Sioux Falls hadn’t had a May snowfall since 1944, and an astonished Tulsa never had one at all. Meanwhile, the mighty Mississippi, the major waterway of the nation’s interior, has settled into a disastrous flood and drought cycle that is exacerbated by outdated planning and a tug of war between business and environmentalists. Apparently no infrastructure in this nation has been attended to since the Fifties, and we’ve been asleep at the switch since.