The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle

Author:Jake Bittle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX Why Should This a Desert Be?

DROUGHT, AGRICULTURE, AND THE ERA OF EXPANSION

Pinal County, Arizona

I. When the Cows Didn’t Come Home

The summer of 2021 was long and dry, and Karen Felkins’s cows were running away.

Karen and her husband, Bob, managed Diamond B Livestock, a cattle ranch in central Arizona. For more than fifteen years the couple had raised sport steers for rodeo shows: they bought a few dozen cows at a time from a cattle auction, raised them until they were old enough to perform, and leased them out for a few weeks at a time to rodeo owners across the state. The steers ran around the stadiums in thunderous stampedes, bucked off death-defying cowboys, wowed their audiences, and then came back home to the ranch for some well-deserved rest.

Their ranch was just outside the saloon town of Florence, about an hour southeast of Phoenix. The town sat close to the bends of the trickling Gila River, and from atop a long mountain ridge it overlooked a wide stretch of desert scrub, land untouched by anything except tire tracks and hoofprints. The Felkinses owned more than five hundred acres and leased tens of thousands more, which gave their cattle plenty of room to graze—a grown steer consumes as much as thirty pounds of grass per day, and the herd needed to be at full health to keep up with the demands of the rodeo stage. As the cows roamed out to the east, they could munch on the shrubs and tough weeds that grew up in the desert silt; when they got thirsty, they could wander down to the banks of the Gila and drink all the water they needed.

Things had begun to change that year. The heavy winter rains that were supposed to feed the desert grass had never arrived, and the early summer rains had not arrived, either, which left the landscape in an almost lunar state of desiccation. The state of Arizona, along with the rest of the West, had entered the twenty-first year of an interminable drought, an event that scientists believe has no real precedent in the last twelve hundred years. The endless succession of dry years had begun to scar the natural landscape in ways that brief rainstorms could not fix. The Gila River dried up, deprived of melting snow from the nearby mountains, and the scant shrubbery that dappled the desert shriveled up and died. Karen’s cows trampled back and forth across their territory looking for something to eat and drink, but they found nothing but silt, whipped up into swirling dust clouds by intermittent gusts of wind. Karen had noticed them start to look slower and more emaciated, skinny enough that you could see their rib cages through their hides.

Before long, the cows went rogue. They rammed up against the wire fences that delimited Felkins’s property, busting through the barriers one at a time in search of sustenance. Roving across the outskirts of Florence, they found their way into a field

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