Week by week and foot by foot, the rippling lake alongside Hugh Ryan’s Lee’s Summit home has been shrinking beneath a searing Midwest drought.
Its shore has become a mudflat. Long-submerged trash, bottles and cans jut from the exposed shoreline.In southern Illinois, farmer Jim Unverfehrt steered his pickup beside a corn crop already lost, then hopped out to search for the soybeans he planted six weeks earlier.
He paced in disbelief. “I know they’re here somewhere,” he said, before finally finding a few withered sprouts, fragile as cobwebs.TALLGRASS PRAIRIE NATIONAL PRESERVE, CHASE COUNTY, KAN. | Our yards right now should look like this. Before white people paddled up the Missouri River and into the Kaw, the landscape was covered with tall natural grasses equipped to survive the worst of droughts. The roots (read more)
NO MAN’S LAND MUSEUM, GOODWELL, OKLA. | It’s eerie to Sue Weissinger, how similar this weather seems to the Dust Bowl era. Consecutive summers of drought. A warm, dry winter. Storm fronts and pressure clashes without rains. Heat – lots of heat. “The only condition not with us today is the soil,” says Weissinger, curator of this (read more)
KANSAS 27 BRIDGE OVER ARKANSAS RIVER, SYRACUSE, KAN. | Motorists unfamiliar with southwestern Kansas are in for a shock this summer when encountering the vista of sand and weeds that pass for the Arkansas River. Here, 15 miles east of the Colorado border, the current diminishes to a trickle. Another 20 miles (read more)
