Water in Plain Sight by Judith D. Schwartz

Author:Judith D. Schwartz [Schwartz, Judith D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-25T18:30:00+00:00

Six

Dew and the Desert

What Goes Up Must Come Down

Up there is another ocean—

—“Clouds,” in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson

All water is a part of other water . . .

Cloud talks to lake . . .

dew takes elevator into cloud.

—Tony Hoagland, “The Social Life of Water”

Katherine and Markus Ottmers live and work in the dry steppes of far west Texas. Since rains can be few and far between, they’ve designed the main building at Casa de Mañana—their fifty-by-fifty-foot “rain barn,” the off-grid headquarters and enterprise launch pad for Ottmers Agricultural Technologies—to collect both rainwater and condensation. But they had no idea of just how much water they harvested solely from dew until one morning in winter 2012 when the valve burst on one of the water tanks.

Markus was doing ironwork outside when he noticed water gushing from the tank. “Hey, Brad!” he called to his coworker. “Go see how much water is in there. It can’t be full. We haven’t had any rain in four months.” Not only were they rainless; they’d been providing for a herd of some fifty goats, and between six and eight people were regularly taking light showers at their place. Conscious of every bit of water used, Markus knew it was in the neighborhood of fifty to seventy gallons a day.

Brad checked, and the tank was completely full. The Ottmerses continued to monitor the tank, and rose at four thirty the next morning to check its status. Sunrise was yet hours away and stars saturated the sky. This sparsely populated area puts on a night sky as clear as you can find stateside—not just the bright starry dots, but the smudgy sweep of distant galaxies in between. And here, at the edge of the Big Bend, in the midst of Texas’s multiyear drought, a bleary-eyed Markus discovered that water was streaming into the tank at a rate that amounted to about sixty gallons a day, enough to cover nearly all of their water needs.

“I was wondering who the water fairy was,” Markus recalls. He walks over to the tank and shows us the gauge that told the story. A tall, restless Texan, he possesses an impatient turn of mind that flits toward puzzles and plans that most would dismiss as quixotic if not impossible. It’s a quality common to many who work in the loosely defined realm of permaculture, a model for agriculture that emphasizes functional design and draws upon principles observed in natural systems. Among his other areas of expertise—precision earthworks, glass blowing, welding, straw bale and geodome home construction, mycology, and beehive removal and rescue—Markus is a certified permaculture trainer. Katherine and Markus, both from the Texas Hill Country, met in 2008 when she took his permaculture course in Kerrville, dubbed “Kerrmaculture.” Katherine, too, is a master of many trades. She’s long worked as a landscape designer and has since become a certified Holistic Management educator.

Markus’s instinctive mode of action is improvisational, a tendency that’s revealed throughout the operation.

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