The roof of my house in Tucson used
to leak whenever the rain was driven hard by the wind.
The house where I grew up in Laguna
also leaked if the rain was hard and steady.
The leaks used to appear at the edges
where the walls joined the ceilings.
That's what used to happen to the old time Pueblo roofs.
The alternate layers of clay and sand
were nearly impermeable except at the edges.
The adobe mud that leaked down the walls of our house
was the color and consistency of melted chocolate ice cream.
There is an old story about a terrible winter,
which followed eight years of drought and poor harvests.
Heavy rain and snow saturated the roofs.
Storehouse and granary roofs collapsed.
The meager rations from their scant harvests
and even the seeds they had saved for the spring planting
were lost.
The people starved and they refer to that winter
as "the winter we had to eat our dead children in order
to survive."
I first saw household water systems
which use rainwater collected off roofs in Ketchikan, Alaska
where the annual rainfall exceeds 160 inches.
Due to the proximity of saltwater,
drilling wells for freshwater is an unsatisfactory
so rural home sites depend on big wooden storage tanks which
collect rainwater from tank tops and from gutter systems
off the roof of the house.
If more than 10 days pass without rain
in southeastern Alaska, households
begin to run out of water.
If more than 14 days pass without rain,
the level of the big lake north of Ketchikan
falls below the level of the intake valves
to the municipal water pumps and the pumps shut off.
Without all the rain, the lush foliage and thick underbrush
dry out And the great Tongass forest
faces imminent danger of wildfire.
My old ranch house in the Tucson mountains
has a similar rainwater catchment system
which routes all the rainwater from the roof
into a big concrete pool.
Runoff from a gravel covered slope
is also harvested and stored in the pool.
Water in the Tucson mountains has never been abundant.
Wells must tap into deposits of fossil water,
underground pools and lakes formed by steam
trapped in molten lava.
The two ranch wells produce only meager amounts of water.
When I first came to this old ranch house,
rainwater was the primary water source for household uses.
Tucson sits on an aquifer which has receded
so far that the 200-year-old cottonwood trees, which
grow along the Tanque Verde Wash, are dying.
City wells on the south side of Tucson
are contaminated with industrial chemicals
and are no longer pumped.
Hundreds and hundreds of miles of concrete canals,
which cost billions of tax dollars,
carry salty Colorado River water to Phoenix
and most years to Tucson.
But the river must be shared with other western states
and with Mexico.
In the driest years, when the level of the Colorado River
falls, there will not be enough water to go around
and the canals to Tucson will be dry.
In Tucson and Phoenix, more young children
die from drowning than from traffic accidents.
Backyard swimming pools are numerous--
the clear still water, the colorful tiles, pool steps
and pool ladders are all designed to be attractive
and inviting.
A safety gate is left unlatched.
The parents always insist they only looked away for a moment.
The warm Japanese current brings Ketchikan, Alaska
more than 160 inches of rain every year.
Leaky roofs are inevitable.
The jade green moss thrives on roofs,
forming thick velvety slabs, which
grow until the weight of the moss
finally collapses the roof.
All this rain is necessary.
Otherwise, the water levels of the rivers and lakes
decline so much that the spawning salmon
and steelhead trout can't make their way up river.
Dry summers cause the berries to be scarce
and the black bears get hungry and come out of the forest
to eat garbage and small pet dogs.
Tribal clans acknowledge the kinship between human beings
and other beings.
Most of the clans in southeastern Alaska
are linked to the sea, coho salmon, king salmon, humpback
salmon, halibut, dogfish, killer whale, and sea lion
all have human clans people in the villages.
Freshwater clans include beaver, otter, and frog.
There are clans of grizzly bear, wolf, raven, and eagle who all
owe their existence to the sea.
The tribal people of the Alaska coast
built great ocean going boats of yellow cedar
and sailed the coastal perimeter of the Americas.
Yet the clan totem poles frequently
include the wan face of the drowned man
used to fill space between other totem figures.
Great sailors, though they were still the mighty North Pacific,
often became so lonely for her human children
that she brought them back home to her.