The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

The ranchers out around Hays, Kans., who, like 40 million other Americans, watched the television epic Lonesome Dove, figured that the great Texas- Montana cattle drive came right over their broad land. If that fantasy were turned into fact, then in all probability the tough old trail bosses Augustus McCrae and Woodrow Call drove their herd across the Smoky Hill and Saline rivers and pushed north to beat the merciless winters they knew were in store for them.

The western Kansas ranchers claim a certain kinship with those fictional adventurers because they too have been brutalized by the great weathers of the plains. After the record drought of 1988, they are weakened and vulnerable to a huge, leering sky that still will not yield moisture.

The weather experts point out that there are no records of back-to-back nationwide droughts. In Ohio and Indiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana, and the snowpacks of the Rockies, the grim dryness seems at last to have been broken. But in the Missouri River basin and the Pacific Northwest and along parts of the East Coast, the debilitating moisture deficits remain.

When he talked to the nation a fortnight ago, President George Bush did not even hint at the problem. Budgets and inside-the-Beltway bickering over appointees have blocked out real life. Meanwhile, Les Brown of Worldwatch Institute quietly sent out copies of his State of the World report, which will reach 250,000 leaders in 150 nations. The report has become something of a bible on the precariousness of our food supply. Brown's warning: if the drought continues, food security could be a bigger problem by fall than military security.

Last year, points out Brown, the U.S. became a "food deficit" nation, producing 196 million tons of grain and consuming 206 million. The 100 or so nations that purchase food from us are being supplied out of our dwindling reserves, now down to one-third of our stocks of just two years ago. The world's carry-over supplies have been reduced from 101 days of food consumption to 54 days, which is just about enough to keep the global food pipeline filled. "If the drought goes on," says Brown, "we could see a frantic scramble for supplies that would shake up the world economy."

Donald Gilman, the National Weather Service's long-range forecaster, is cautiously hoping that the tropical Pacific's El Nino and the North American jet stream will keep behaving, so that eventually rainstorms will be lured up from the Gulf to drench the croplands. Kentucky and Tennessee last week got a bit of that action. But many more downpours are needed. Iowa's rich loam has only a third of the usual subsoil moisture. Hydrologists have warned New York that if reservoirs do not fill soon, the city could have water shortages this summer. With California reservoirs at 42% capacity, farmers are being told to expect only 60% of their water needs, and even less if rains don't come.

"It is a winter of unease," says Brown. "The natural world is struggling against man's abuses. People are nervous." Rancher Gilbert Schmeidler, in Ellis County, Kans., is one of them. Day and night he looks for damp, heavy clouds. Mostly he sees bright moon and sun. "It is the dryest I can remember," he says. He has been there 58 years. Then there are the ominous, almost eerie, changes in the weather. One night three weeks ago, he was in shirt-sleeves, tending his Herefords. Within 60 hours the temperature fell from 86 degrees F to -13 degrees F, an unheard of plunge of 99 degrees. Schmeidler coped. Two calves were born in the middle of a freezing night. He got them into a draw, pulled some dead grass over their small, steaming bodies and saved them. But last week he looked out over his bare, parched winter- wheat fields and worried. "If we don't get some moisture soon, the March winds will start blowing away some real estate."