Ploua, ploua, ploua...

Driving along the banks of the Milcov, we could not believe our eyes. It was as dry as Arizona (see photo left). What had once been a playful, healthy river a decade ago is a stretch of dry earth today, barren rocks, a lunar landscape. Indeed, water still flows at the Cascada Putnei, but a third of what used to crash and thunder across the rocks now makes its way lazily to its destination. And the Putna river is empty, too.

Vrancea has had two months of unforgiving sun without a drop of rain. The municipalities have cut off the water supplies in the mornings to preserve what little there is, and turn it back on again in the evenings. If you have a well that hasn't dried up or an outside tap connected to a spring, then you'd be considered very, very lucky.

On both sides of the roads and clearly seen from the train, sunflowers and corn fields are burned to a frazzle and lie dead.

There is something dreadful about dead sunflowers. Yes, about any field that has been 'killed' by sun, scorched beyond recognition of course. But sunflowers are another matter, at least to me. They are the most joyous of flowers, with faces held up to the sun in exultation. To see them annihilated by the very thing they worship along with lack of water makes my heart bleed... Their fields have become graveyards, their sunny heads, now brown and bald without their yellow-petalled bonnets droop helplessly, begging for water and respite.

There is an image that will remain with me until, I think, the day I die: As we neared a village on the Milcov, an elderly man, leaning on his stick, gazed into the empty river-bed in utter despair. His shoulders seemed to have given way. Even the bottles of water we had with us could not have helped him. His well was surely empty, his water supply (if he had one in the house) cut off by the municipality for much of the day. How would he feed his animals? He had survived communism and all that went with it. Today, in twilight years, his livelihood is threatened by drought. Where is the fairness in that?

Later in the day, as we took an afternoon nap exhausted from our long drive around Vrancea, it began to rain. The dog in the garden began to bark as if to say "Hey!! Wake up! Plouuuuuaaaaaa!!!!" First, I heard the pitter-patter on the roof, then the more insistent spatter of drops on the steps and then down came the deluge. Huge drops of much-needed, prayed-for rain. How it poured. It poured and poured and poured. And I couldn't help but cry. I cried for the old man by the river whose image I could not chase away from my mind's eye, for the hopelessly betrayed sunflowers, for the dead corn, the scorched fields and for these people of Moldova who have already fought and survived so much throughout their turbulently rich history. To fill the rivers and the wells, it would have to rain non-stop for months.

In 2012 here in Europe (and elsewhere besides), elderly people still stand by empty river-beds in utter desolation, praying for rain and muttering 'God will provide'...

Comments

[adrian]

Efectul unirii din 1859 ...

"Vin' la Milcov cu grabire sa-l secam dintr-o sorbire ..."