Making a deal for the worms over the gate

I have been easy with trees
Too long. Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
Suddenly
This rain.”
― Jack Gilbert

Rain was a welcome change, from the sunny days

By Rob Carrigan, robcarrigan1@gmail.com

When it rained in the Dolores valley, it was possible for a young 'feller' to make a little spending money. Mrs. Hyde would pay a penny for each worm collected, two cents for night-crawlers. All you had to do was walk the gravel and dirt streets with a milk carton collecting the squirrelly buggers, toss 'em in the carton, and take them down to 10th Street on the main road. And you could make the deal across her wire gate, any day after a good rain storm. 

Maybe she sold them to fishermen for more, maybe they helped compost her garden. We didn't ask questions about what she was going to do with them, as I remember.

But she always had an exceptional garden. Now, they will sell you worm castings for a few bucks, for a small bag. Earthworms are the children of the soil.

Rain, of course had other benefits. But was not to be taken for granted.

For some years, an afternoon rain storm in summer was as regular as clock work. Monsoon come, traditionally a seasonal reversing wind accompanied by corresponding changes in precipitation. Usually, the term monsoon is used to refer to the rainy phase of a seasonally changing pattern, although technically there is also a dry phase. The term is also sometimes used to describe locally heavy but short-term rains.

Hell, I'm no weatherman. I'm not consistently wrong that much. But I remember some storms.

What about the time? After the building of the new 10-foot cement box storm drains all over town – and few months later – they were tested by the mother storm?

I remember we built rubber rafts and floated down 8th and Hillside in people's back yards, and front yards,  and side yards, and in few cases, inside their house. But that was an extra-ordinary event, when the river jumped the banks, and made the sandbags necessary.

I loved the rain though, My friends and I always welcomed it.

Not until later, after Platte River swells in the 1960s, and Big Thompson in 1976, did I ever respect the idea that it could kill you. But even those were a ways away. 

Sure, you could drown under a snag in river, or get trapped under the Big Rock, or the other Big Rock,  or drive into the Drink upriver, and not be able to get out of the car.  But we don't like think of those sorts of misfortune.

Counting on it NOT raining, was almost as bad as counting on a storm, however.

I holed up in barn downstream for days from Mount Wilson and Wilson Peak waiting for a shower to end as a bunch of boy scouts and cub scouts holed-up and waited out a storm. We never did make it out of that barn, until it was time to go home.

Colorado has warmed 2°F on average in the last 30 years, according to climate records.
Colorado relies heavily on the snowpack it receives during the winter months. When it comes to the economy skiing/riding is the second largest in the state, but when it comes to water we receive 70% from the snowpack. Unfortunately Colorado has seen a decrease in the average snowpack in the past couple of decades exacerbating existing problems of drought and water scarcity.

What about this seems familiar? Ancient Puebloan's can't produce enough in the 1200s to hang around? Ruins remind us no civilization lasts forever, and if we do not take the lack of rain seriously, we watch our own food supply collapse and will be forced to leave our own communities behind, just as those cats on the Mesas did hundreds of years ago.

And then there is the worm business. May it recover and flourish.