Drought.

That word, that one word, makes me ill. Every time I say it, every time I hear it, I want to vomit. I want to cry. I want to find something else to do that makes me forget that word exists.

It’s 2012, and there are plenty of things I can do that make the word go away. There’s a new job, a big deliverable, more than a dozen new friends/professional contacts/I am helpless with other humans and don’t know what to call them/people to spend time with. I don’t go home to Missouri this summer. I tell myself I can’t. Work needs me. The house needs me. My spouse needs me. That’s why I can’t sleep and don’t eat and work out till I’m tired, but as a wise man once said “That ain’t the truth.”

Because when the deliverable ships, the spouse is out of town, and the house is finally ok again, I still can’t sleep. I still don’t call home, not for a while, not until I know I can’t let it go another day because there are people who want to hear from me and haven’t in months.

“The drought—it’s bad,” says my aunt’s voice on the phone.

A native Midwesterner hears the understatement. It’s in the tone of voice, or maybe the pause between the noun and the descriptors. The drought—it’s killing us. The drought–it’s beggaring us. The drought–it’s turning those rolling green hills you imagine when you think about home into a wasteland.

I still see a quiet Durham street, but I’m hearing dry corn stalks–a sound so eerie it’s in a million horror movies. I’m smelling the unique mix of dirt, heat, desert, and baking bread that I associate with drought. My stomach turns. I dump my coffee into the trash, and I sit down. I do all of it without realizing I’m doing any of it. That comes later.

It’s 1983, and I’m too young to know anything except to keep quiet and stay out of the way. The ground is so dry it’s cracking—wide, deep gaps large enough to swallow a Barbie doll. The animals need constant water, and I help with that. The crops are a loss, and no one can help with that. My mother prays, and my father drinks. It’s only now that I realize those are the same activity. They’re what you do when you can’t do anything, how you pass the time when the hand of fate hovers over you and you’re waiting to see if you’ll be flattened or spared. We sell our livestock that year because we have no corn and feed prices are too high. We sell our non-farm business that year because it’s that or the farm. That is the year we go from “mostly all right” to poor.

It’s 2012, and I’m looking up data on droughts in the Midwest. I briefly wonder if I’m remembering 1989 instead of 1983, but it can’t be. During the 1989 drought there was a series of miraculous little showers that saved our crops. We had money that year because prices were good (because of the drought) and we had something to sell. That was the year two family friends lost their farms. I empty two bottles of wine in a weekend. I tell myself I’m blowing off steam, engaging in a little well-earned insanity after a long, hard slog at work, but as a wise man once said, “That ain’t the truth.”

I’m trying to drown a memory from 1996. I am standing with my father in a heat-soaked parking lot under a hard blue sky. His friend has just gotten into his truck and driven away. They’ve been talking about the weather. Farmers talk about the weather with a seriousness that’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t depend on the weather for their livelihoods.

“Unusual year,” Dad repeats what his friend just said. “Unusual year, unusual year–for the past ten years I’ve been hearing people say that.” He looks up at the sky. “I wonder if the weather’s so messed up we’ll never get it back.” There’s something about his tone that makes me shiver in the heat, a ghost of that feeling from 1983 when the crops were baking in the fields and I amused myself by playing Earthquake Victim Barbie. I am almost 21. I have just celebrated landing my first research project (a tiny one, but still mine, and at 21). I am just starting a career in data analysis that has spanned almost 16 years. I don’t know what to say. I don’t have any data. It’s 1996, and you need access to massive computing power to process that data. But I know my father, and I know he understands weather in a way I will one day understand math and statistics and complicated systems of dynamic equations.

“They say it’s just an unusual year,” he tells me. “That ain’t the truth.”

It’s 2012, and I have massive amounts of data, and studies by people who know how to use it. I see this graph, and this one, and this one. Droughts happen. High temperatures happen, but I have 16 years of experience recognizing the difference between “events that happen” and “events that shouldn’t happen unless something is very wrong.” A leading climate change skeptic has a new graph, and a new conclusion: global warming (is) real…Humans are almost entirely the cause., and I hear dry corn stalks blown by a hot wind, and I smell baking bread, and I feel that implacable hand raised over me. I am my father’s daughter; I do not pray.

This force is impersonal, but it’s also frustrating. How do you fight billions of people making choices that are right for them individually and wrong for everyone collectively? My two degrees in economics do not prepare me to answer this question. My Ph.D. in Statistics, and my specialty in time series tells me we need to answer it soon, very soon, that it may actually be too late for the answer to do any good.

Too late. I hear my father’s voice saying that, too, and I drown it out however I can. Yes, I work in clean tech. Yes, I’m trying to turn a warship into a Prius, but writing algorithms to optimize power grids feels like playing the fiddle while Rome burns. (The drought—it’s bad.) But it’s what I can do, and so I do it, and if I’m not working fast enough—I can only work so fast.

I talk to myself like I’m a nervous customer. “We have smart people working on this.” “You think you’re alone, but you’re not.” “Data analysis is about what you leave out, and you’re not always right.” “There is something you can do—saying there’s nothing you can do is the coward’s way out, and even there is no point in doing it, there’s no point in failing to try.”

Be brave. Get up in the morning. Do the next step, and when you finish that one, do the step afterward. Sleep—take a pill if you need one but sleep. Work out. Take down time. There is a lot of other people’s money stuffed into your brain, and it would be massively unfair if you burned yourself out. If it all goes wrong, you can sit down in the middle of your father’s farm and watch everything burn and know you tried.

In the meantime, make good choices. Friends, please, let’s make good choices.

There’s no point in not trying.