PAGE, ARIZ. • Soulful notes from a Native American flute float over the vast valley on the backside of the Glen Canyon Dam, which interrupts the once mighty Colorado River.
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Barry Kaye
USA TODAY Network
As a historic drought ravages farms and ranches throughout the Klamath Basin on the California-Oregon border there are visible signs of the calamity everywhere. Fields lie fallow. There are dust storms in spring. Some days it seems there are as many meetings about the future as crops being planted.
But for Tricia Hill, a fourth-generation potato farmer of Czechoslovakian immigrants, there is something else: The eerie silence of the fields.
With little water filling the canals or crops in the ground also largely missing are the sounds of rural life, from tree frogs to red-winged black birds to the methodical hum of wheel line irrigation equipment. Compromised as well are the timeless rhythms of agriculture, starting with planting season and continuing past the first cut of hay.