How to navigate living with less water

Being water-wise in parched lands

Friends!

This week, writer Nicole Walker is sharing a sneak peak of her new book Processed Meats with us.

Five pint-sized Mason jars sit on the windowsill of my kitchen. Two with butts of romaine hearts. One with the butt of a celery. One with a garlic clove and another with the roots of a scallion swimming in ounces of water encouraging new roots to swirl in their depths. There was a time when the only butts I worried about were the butts of cigarettes I smoked. Now, I wonder how much lettuce can I grow to feed my family. Or at least make a reasonably sized salad.

It is day fifty-three of the COVID-19 lockdown. I’ve planted peas. Their thin-as-spiderweb tendrils have begun to unfurl and reach for something even stronger than the sun to defy gravity. My son, Max, and I strung twine fifteen different ways up and around some old tomato cages because the truth is, trying to grow anything in Flagstaff, a seven-thousand-foot elevation, is a bit of a crapshoot. Still, every day, we check the dirt in the garden bed Erik built. We open the wood frame gate to crawl up and over the edges of the box. Erik built it two feet high and wrapped the upper levels with plastic fencing. The fencing is to keep out the deer. The two-foot-high box is meant, I guess, to accommodate six hundred square feet of perfect dirt. So far, we’ve filled it only halfway. Still. The dirt is perfect. Max sticks his finger an inch deep.

“Is it still wet?”

“I just watered it this morning, Mom. Of course it is.”

All babies are born teenagers these days but his smart-ass comment is truly unhelpful. The weather has become unpredictable. Sometimes, it is actually humid in this semi-arid desert climate now that the jet stream has shifted. Now that it rains more than it snows.

With the pandemic, everything has changed. What does one do with a book about fear of apocalypse and desperate cooking when the whole world is now is contending with these issues without hyperbole? In Processed Meats, the narrator (me) is batted around by life challenges, but nothing compares to this news. How does one publish a narrative about disaster without recasting those challenges in light of a global pandemic? The past still exists, and still matters, but the perspective must change. It’s going to take a lot of work to make this work not only artistic and meaningful, but culturally relevant.

My friend, the climate scientist Bruce Hungate, directs the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society. He serves the Department of Energy as part of the climate change task force. We usually meet once a month for Cobb salads to discuss his writing and my freaking out about climate change. He studies microorganisms in soil. I bug him about an essay I want to write about these pictures showing the Himalayas in Nepal and downtown LA. Is there really that much less pollution? Does a lack of visible particulates suggest fewer carbon emissions?

He answers that there are dangers in seeking silver linings. I am embarrassed to tell him that I live for silver linings. I prefer a slight bit of ignorance if I can, pea-tendril-like, fling my hopes on the warming edge of a little bit of cloud. I don’t want to be a fool but I do want to believe that the tiny changes I’ve made lately have been more than just a privileged time to grow some peas and to cook for my family six days a week instead of the usual five.

In a pandemic, cooking at home is its own kind of silver lining—at least we can eat dinner together every night. At least I’m challenged to make dinner interesting.

My family disagrees about which meal I’ve cooked is the best. Erik says it was the wedge salad, filet mignon, and baked potato. Max says the spicy curry. Zoë says the Cobb salad even though she eats it without the bacon or the blue cheese, making the Cobb salad really just a chicken and egg salad. “With avocado and tomatoes,” she corrects.

My favorite meal was lentils and soufflé. If and when I truly manage to become vegetarian, I will eat that every day. I make the lentils like I make risotto. I make soufflé like everyone makes soufflé—with more egg whites than egg yolks. But then Zora and Bear, the dogs, get the extra yolks and I get to watch the soufflé defy gravity like pea tendrils. One day, I’m going to figure this sun and heat mixture out perfectly. One day, I’m going to buy a solar stove. One day, I’m going to figure out how to make a meal that is everyone’s favorite, and everyone will include not only Erik and Max and Zoë but the students who didn’t get to finish their semester, the instructors who lost their jobs, the surviving members of the Navajo Nation, which suffered the greatest per capita deaths next to New York and New Jersey because of the pandemic. It will be a big feast. If these peas work out, a pod for everyone. It’s a big if, but uncertainty is what we’re learning to live with. 

Maybe these little changes will lead to big changes. Cooking takes a lot of water. Canning takes even more. I drive past a golf course on my way home that also uses a lot of water. But, at least here in Flag, they use gray water. Gray water has been treated but instead o being released into the rivers or aquifer, they pump that water into the sprinkler system at the range. That gives me an idea. I keep my watering cans next to the sink. When I change the cat’s water, because the cats love fresh water, I dump their half-drunk water into the watering can. The dog’s water too. I make chicken and dumpling soup from Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc recipe which requires me to par boil the celery, then chill the celery in ice water. I use the par boil to cook the dumplings made from choux paste. The celery’s chilling water goes back into the soup. It took me awhile to teach myself to turn the water off when I brush my teeth, but now, even my kids do it. I also taught my kids not to flush too often. Apparently, I taught them that a little too well. 

In September, I take the water from the giant black pot that processes jars of tomatoes to fill the outdoor watering buckets. The tanks that catch the rain that rolls off the roof are good for geraniums but for the peas, I don’t use asphalt-shingle water. Thus, the tomato processing water, once it cools, is good for the tomatoes left on the vine. A kind of circle of life that I hope keeps, lo this long drought, on cycling.

This week’s action:

Inspired by Nicole, this week, let’s start thinking about how you might use a bit less water. Clearly our climate crisis is not going to be fixed by our individual actions, but we can be water wise, especially if you live in a drought-state like Nicole and Michele. Share your ideas with us below.

xo Michele

A bit more about Nicole:

NICOLE WALKER is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster (2021) Sustainability: A Love Story (2018) and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet. (2019). She has previously published the books Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013), and This Noisy Egg (2010). She edited for Bloomsbury the essay collections Science of Story (2019) with Sean Prentiss and Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (2013) with Margot Singer. She is the co-president of NonfictioNOW and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award and a noted author in Best American Essays. Her work has been most recently published in the New York Times, Longreads, and Ploughshares, among other places.She teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.