The Pear Tree Withers:

On the gentle hillside south of the range house there is the old pear tree. When my Dad was young, and indeed when Grandad ran the farm, the pear tree was magnificent, large and always bearing massive quantities of fruit. Dad as a child would love to climb to the top of the tree, getting a great view of the northern part of the ranch, which was relatively flat. Perched in the tree like the birds that would ultimately come and eat most of the fruit if it was not picked early, he would devour pears until he felt a little ill, watching out from the top of the tree, king of all he could see.

That is something I would have liked to have done as well, but now the pear tree is dead. Not from old age, but because the soil of the hillside has radically dried out over the last few years, and rapidly during the American south-west drought. Dad tried carrying water up to the tree, but there was only so much he could do, as he had injured his knee quite severely in a tractor accident, and could only do so much manual labor. Certainly, climbing a hillside with buckets of water was out of his capabilities, so the tree got less water, and eventually died.

That was four years ago, when I started high school. Today the termites are eating the tree away, and bits and pieces of it are breaking off. It is only a matter of time before it collapses to dust.

Dad as a child would also climb the southern hill getting mushrooms. He got so many that Grandad would go into the local town and Dad would sell bags of mushrooms in the bar. Apparently, a blind eye was turned to an under-age kid going around selling mushrooms to drunk people! At times he made up to $200 and that was in the mid-1960s. But by about 1970 the mushrooms ceased to grow, as the rainfall to the ranch area began to decrease. The soil thus started to become drier. Today, the soil crumbles in one’s hand.

I was sitting on the back porch of the ranch house looking at the pear tree and thinking about all of this. It was a sweltering, blistering hot summer day. The power had gone out a few hours ago, so no AC. I used my MacBook until the charge was gone, then my iPhone, until it died too. Then I came out here to simply sit and think, something I don’t do enough of, being into social media, chatting with my girlfriends from school.

Why had the ground dried out so badly over the last few years? Well, from what I know doing a science project at school, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, since about mid-way through 2012, over half of the US land mass has faced moderate to severe drought conditions. While some wetter parts of the US have got more rainfall, and faced the danger of floods, we down here in a usually dry state, have got drier, due to climate change. In fact, climate scientists are calling the drought here a “meg-drought,” and on the ground today I really understand what they mean. Droughts come and go, but because of rising greenhouse gases the intensity of present-day droughts will be greater than in the past.

The ranch has been hard hit. Dad farmed beef, but the lack of water from the stream that used to pass through the property led to cows dying, so before the entire herd perished, he sold them up, just like many small US farmers have done. Dad and Mom have tried to sell the ranch, but so far have not got a buyer, since the place is becoming a dust bowl. What could anyone do with it? And, they are in debt, a debt which was not covered by the sale of the livestock. Mom works in the town as a science teacher, and Dad has a job as a cleaner.

The home that I knew for all my life has been burnt as surely as if a towering inferno of wild fire had ravaged it, and that literally could still occur. Still, we will hang out here for as long as we can.

I stared at the withered pear tree for a long time. Then I burst out into tears, and cried until my eyes were sore. The ranch, my home, is as dead as the old pear tree.