In Tashkent, at the summer peak when temperatures spiked at 110, Tashkent housewives watered their driveways. It kept the dust down and the water would visibly evaporate from the pavement and run into the blacktop. The water came from a tributary of the Syr Darya (the Jaxartes for you classicists). At the time it struck me as a stupid and wasteful thing to do. But water was virtually free, a legacy of the old Soviet government that simply gave water away to cities and factories and farmers.
And why not, the Syr Darya was there, it flowed from the Tian Shen and emptied into the vast Aral Sea and the water was free and cool and kept the dust down. Tamerlane could have told you that, or Alexander the Great had he made it that far.
Then I traveled West to Karakalpakstan, where the desert reminded me of Midland and Odessa except every shrub was coated in choking, crusty, white dust. The dust blew in, salty and poisonous, from what used to be a sea but is now just more shrubs and poisonous salty dust. And there is a giant empty factory there, that used to pack tins full of fish, and the soldiers of the Red Army ate the fish from those tins as they marched across Russia, across Ukraine, across Poland into Germany. There is a memorial to the fishermen that canned those fish. The gravestones in the cemetery in the seaside town that doesn’t exist are marked with anchors.
Not far from the factory there is a fleet of hulking, rusted out ships coated in that poisonous white dust. They used to sail across the sea, for the fish, all the way to Kazakhstan where what is left of the sea is a slimy mud hole a man can usually walk across. That is what is left of the sea that fed the Red Army. The water that fed the sea is diverted via leaky and crumbling canals to grow cotton. And some of it, to water driveways in Tashkent in July.
I think about those ships when I remember that Texans in 2023 are watering machines to solve computer Sudoku they can then pretend is money. We’d be better off watering driveways.