TheBanyanTree: Harvest Moon

[Dale M. Parish]

I'm starting my sixty-third winter now, and today was a reminder of  
six more months of weather cooler than I enjoy.  Friday, I stepped out  
of the Driver's License office and they were loading hay in the same  
hay field from which I used to haul 45 years ago, and I remembered the  
warm weather and being slathered with hay sticking to our sweat-soaked  
bodies.  I wonder if I lived in a more temperate climate, if I'd miss  
cool weather.  I think not.

I think of the equator-- is that an extreme?  Maybe.  Couldn't say  
until I'd tried a year or two there, but real estate on the equator  
outside of Brazil doesn't appeal to me.  Costa Rica!  I remember  
reading recently that Costa Rica abolished its army in 1949 and  
diverted the money into education and social services, and now has one  
of the highest literacy rates in the world.  That appeals to me.  I  
don't speak Spanish, but I think I'm not too old to learn, although  
language doesn't come easy to me.  Johnson O'Connor rated me at the  
sixteenth percentile in language ability.  But to get out of cold  
weather, I think I could learn Spanish.

How high is the retirement age emmigration from this country.  Two  
friends of mine left here and moved to northern Thailand, and are  
still trying to talk me into joining them when I retire.  They make it  
sound encouraging most of the times, but then they talk about having  
to leave the country every month and go to Cambodia to cross the  
border and return to keep their visas current.  Not sure how that  
might work if one of them were to become hospitalized or incapacitated  
to the extent that they could not make that trip.  Hope not.  For  
their sake.

I've been thinking for twenty years that I'd like to retire to central  
Texas, in the hill country.  But I know nothing about living on that  
land-- I'm concerned about water rights.  Texas is about to become  
divided politically over water rights-- while east Texas has enough  
water, the Dallas/Fort Worth area has long since grown beyond its  
means to provide water for growth, and a dirty fight will be fought in  
the court rooms of the state trying to decide the fate of the water  
from the Neches River soon.  T. Boone Pickens wants to water-mine and  
destroy the Ogalalla aquifer and pipe it all to Dallas, and would if  
he could.  The largest aquifer on the planet-- formed over 200 million  
years-- would be gone.  It seems to me a shame to allow that to  
happen, but the white man's laws seem to permit destruction of such  
things with little or no recourse for the future.

Texas has some strange laws regarding water.  The state owns it all--  
surface and subsurface-- but if you own the water rights, you're  
allowed to take it from the guy downstream of you.  In some cases you  
can use it but must put it back when you've used it-- in others, you  
can use it all and return none to the stream from whence it came.  But  
water is not a mineral-- you can own mineral rights that give you the  
right to pump the oil or mine the minerals from under your land, but  
you don't have to own water rights to pump sub-surface water.  Yet.   
If you don't live in a MUD-- Municipal Utility District.  If you do,  
then you can be forced to buy water from the MUD's well or treatment  
plant.  Strange.

So where do I go that I feel like I can get enough water to  
subsistance farm the rest of my days out?  Land's getting expensive in  
the hill country, and water already is hard to come by there.  Guess  
it's getting tough all over.

Hugs,
Dale
--
Dale M. Parish
628 Parish Rd
Orange TX 77632