North Dakota: The Big Dry

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From the air, a dry spell of even this magnitude is hard to see with the naked eye. Some fields are parched out, and crops are plainly scraggly. But the patchwork of greens and golds still reels by under jet wings heading west. The great shoulders of the Rockies have some snow on them still. It takes a closer inspection and a conditioned eye for full understanding. The trees of Minneapolis hide devastated home lawns and gardens. Out West, dry-weather weeds have sprung up in the draws of prairie pastures, adding deceptive color. All through the Midwest are fields of wheat, corn and soybeans that took root much earlier on slight rains, then simply stopped developing. They hover now between life and death, still handsome to the casual observer. A delegation of Senators and Congressmen whirled across the area in helicopters, minced around in their city shoes looking at the drought wreckage, but sometimes were not impressed. When one of them spied a wheat field he thought looked pretty good, the farmers pulled up the plants to show the withering roots, the stunted buds.

Farmer Malard walked his acres last week and understood how others might not sense the stress. Behind him the low hills along the Missouri were beige, fringed with the green of buckbush and cottonwoods, durable species. "This time of year it should all be beautiful green," he said with a sweep of his muscled arm. The land is muted, it is leached, some of the soul sucked out and blown away. A farmer sees and knows about those things.

In another age, in a simpler society, a drought of these dimensions was mostly a farm calamity. What could make this drought more menacing than anything yet seen should the rains not come is the interwoven nature of the environment, economy and people. Crop failures, farm bankruptcies, high food costs, transportation disruption, municipal water shortages -- bad as all these are, they are familiar difficulties. Now there is the threat of other, more subtle damage. In California's Silicon Valley, a plan to cut pure reservoir supplies sent a shock through the semiconductor industry. Ionizing mineral-laden well water to the proper purity would send the water-treatment bills for just six firms from $2.1 million to $4.9 million, threatening their competitive positions and jobs. The San Francisco water authorities were successfully lobbied to hold off for this year.

Lowered lakes and rivers mean more danger of sewage, industrial wastes and agricultural chemicals tainting drinking water and recreation areas. Pollutants are diluted and flushed away by surface water in normal times. The drought has also sent water-hungry users to deep wells, and some of these show disturbing concentrations of nitrates and herbicides.