Crazy Floods

The silvery surface reflecting lines of trees extends without horizon, merging with the sky, as if the whole world was underwater. Invisible from the causeway road are the farmhouses raised on stilts where Thai families huddle over the rising lake or the patches of high ground where their pale brahmin cattle nip at tree branches for fodder. Closer by, menfolk sit on folding chairs to keep watch over their trucks and tractors parked on highway shoulder.

It’s flood season in Thailand, and this is one of the worst ever. Against the power of nature in these valleys ringed by cloud-shrouded mountains, it’s hard to pin blame on anything as puny as humans. Yet the Bangkok news media still rails against the flood-control officers and criticize the prime minister, perhaps because the columnists have so little else to do, penned in as they are between watery roads and overfilled rice paddies.

Assigning the responsibility is harder than pinning a tail on a paper donkey when one’s eyes are blindfolded. In the recent past when I worked on an eco-project to help a poor family restore their longan orchard from jungle encroachment, an Irrigation Department team arrived to clear a drainage ditch – actually an ill-kempt stream – and shoring up the dirt road on an embankment. The job was done quickly, a bit sloppily, but then one cannot except a countryside ditch to be groomed like a golf course when these hard-working men still had hundreds of kilometers to go.

As the irrigation men pushed on, my small group of local farmers kept digging slowly at deepening a small klong (canal) that would hold excess rainwater. In the dry season, the tropical soil .called laterite is as hard as concrete, but in the monsoon season, it turns to soup. When trying to walk in the mud, the muck pulls off one’s rubber boots, making further progress impossible.