The Good Life
Lush Pastures is failing to live up to its name as the rain goes on a summer break.
Here’s a new definition for an optimist: someone who buys a rain gauge in Wairarapa in January. It could well be the new meaning for dumbo, too, but I’ll live with that.
After weeks without significant rain, our gardens have been gasping between waterings, and our once lush, green paddocks have become brown and dusty and depressing. Born-again optimist that I am, I hoped buying an instrument for measuring a thing that, for all intents and purposes, has ceased to exist, was just the sort of stupid gesture the weather gods might appreciate, and that they might then see their way to filling the thing. So far, they haven’t. And if they don’t, sod them.
This, though I can hardly believe it, is our third summer in the country, and I’ve still to acclimatise to a climate where summer means sunshine, lots and lots and lots of sunshine. I’m not confident that I will ever get used to it. I lived in Auckland for more than 30 years and never got the hang of its often crappy summers. Up there, this time of year usually involved rain at inopportune times and unpleasant humidity all the time, which did nothing for my still wonderfully thick, dark and lustrous hair (so I’m told!), and less still for my state of mind when sitting on a badly air-conditioned bus next to a bloke with BO on my way home from another day at a dying newspaper.
Down here, rain arriving at inopportune or any other times would sate the garden, revive the patchy brown lawn, cool my head of lustrous hair and provide Xanthe, Elizabeth Jane and the rest of Miles the sheep farmer’s flock of pretty, gentle ewes with more fresh, green grass to eat, instead of supplementary feed. We’ve been handfeeding them lashings of plums, which keeps them happy, but not full.
For weeks now, Miles has been arriving each morning with a trailer load of what farmers call baleage, we call “stinkage” and the ewes call breakfast.
For the uninitiated – which used to be us – baleage is grass cut into hay, then collected by an enormous and rather frightening bailing machine, which shrink wraps the hay in plastic to keep oxygen out and moisture in. This was done in spring, with the Big Dry in mind. Stinkage is very high in food value and keeps the ewes going now the pastures are brown.
Though, of course, not all pastures are brown. Some farms in the district have commercial irrigation systems drawing water from bores. The contrast between the water haves and the water have-nots is stark. On one side of a road there will be green fields, on the other, paddocks that look like ours, which, I began thinking recently, don’t look entirely dissimilar to Australia’s drought-stricken farms.
As I’m a bit thick, it dawned on me only after we moved that, living on the east coast of the North Island, we are in one of the driest areas of the country, so all that summer brown is what normal looks like. Perhaps, I started to think, I shouldn’t worry too much. But even I’m not that thick. Climate change is only going to make the Wairarapa and Lush Places drier.
Just before Christmas, a Niwa report commissioned by the Greater Wellington Regional Council contained predictions of more and longer droughts ahead, and of 10 or more consecutive – note, the “or more” and “consecutive” – days a year of greater than 30ºC heat. So the troubles of Australia’s east coast – years-long drought, empty rivers, extreme heat and wild fires – may well become ours, too. Which only made it more chilling that, the week I bought the rain gauge, we woke up to find a sun made the colour of a blood orange by smoke from Australia’s distressing and disastrous bush fires.
Red sky in the morning used to be a folksy prediction for shepherds about the day ahead. Now, it feels like a daunting omen, even to a born-again optimist.
The troubles of Australia’s east coast – yearslong drought, empty rivers, wild fires – may become ours, too.