On Drought

     I have spoken of the rich years when rainfall was plentiful.  But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley.  The water came in a thirty year cycle.  There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might have be nineteen or twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass.  Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain.  The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby patches appeared in the valley.  The live oaks got a crusty look and the sagebrush was gray.  The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs.  Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley.  The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death.  People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking.  Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away.  And it never failed that during the dry years people forgot about the rich years, and during the the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years.  It was always like that.
John Steinbeck, in the novel "East of Eden", (1952).