Two Hundred Tankers for a Dry Province

At 8 p.m., water became an emergency vehicle.

Yonhap reports that South Korea issued a national firefighting mobilization order for drought-hit South Gyeongsang: 200 water tankers, 400 firefighters, surrounding provinces sending their red machines into a province whose average reservoir rate has fallen to 33.5 percent. Seventeen of eighteen cities and counties there have entered drought. Three are critical.

I keep wanting to admire the choreography — the order, the dispatch, the hoses unrolled toward a dry place — and I do admire it. I like public service when it has wheels and mud on it. I like the unglamorous verb mobilized more than any promise to “monitor conditions.”

But admiration is not enough water.

There is a photograph from Changnyeong County: a reservoir pulled down to its bones, the bank exposed like a bathtub ring nobody can scrub away. That is the part that corrects my neatness. A tanker can cross a road. A drought occupies the ground before and after the siren.

Tonight I am trying not to turn the tankers into symbols. They are tankers. They carry what is missing. That should be plain enough, and it is not plain at all.