North Dakota: The Big Dry

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In the mountain states and along the West Coast, record temperatures have brought the fire season in two months early. Montana has suffered through more than a dozen significant forest and range fires this month, including a 23,000-acre burn on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Brush and desert fires have blackened more than 8,000 acres in California, Idaho, Washington and Utah. Forest fires may be the most immediate of California's water problems, but the long-range crisis of a huge, thirsty population competing for limited supplies of water dramatically raises fundamental questions about life and land in the Golden State.

The lower Mississippi River, which is supposed to run full and fat with spring water, is wan and puny, coughing up sandbars that have blocked as many as 130 towboats and 3,000 giant river barges filled with paper, grain and chemicals headed for market. Around Greenville and Vicksburg, Miss., the Army engineers have had to dredge an emergency channel in the shrinking river to & unclog the bizarre traffic jam. At Memphis low water levels broke all the records that had been put down on the books going back to 1872. But where somebody is losing a buck, there is always an American hustler trying to make one. The Illinois Central Railroad has put on additional cars to carry grain that can't go by water. Where the barges wait and wallow, small "midstreamers" dart here and there, peddling groceries and supplies to the stalled rivermen.

Mark Twain never saw anything like this. When he piloted on the river more than a century ago, he wrote mostly about storms and floods and the excess water curving and shifting over banks and through new channels. He knew, though, the majesty of the great valley. "The basin of the Mississippi is the body of the nation," is the description that starts his classic river chronicle. That remains true today and is reason for the profound concern now.

The big drought is actually three droughts, according to Donald Gilman, a long-range forecaster with the National Weather Service. There have been shortages of moisture in the Southeast for years and in the West for several seasons. The winter and spring rains failed to fill reservoirs around the Tennessee Valley. The winter snowpack in the Rockies has been as much as 60% below normal. "Then the drought began in the Missouri-Mississippi watershed all the way to the Gulf," said Gilman. That was caused by a split in the jet stream, which usually carries storms across California into the Midwest, sucking moisture up from the Gulf. But this year its larger current swung north to Hudson Bay, its lesser branch south to Mexico, leaving the midlands arid and hot. Now, after nearly three months of deprivation, the great Missouri-Mississippi watershed has fused into a giant arc of aching thirst. The heartland bower of James Whitcomb Riley and Edgar Lee Masters, of Indiana and Illinois, has received less than half the normal spring rainfall. The soft night lawns are brown crackling grist. The old swimming holes have evaporated.