When the Rain Comes

Memory and the water cycle in the Carolina Piedmont

May 22, 2026

Rain is one of my favorite Beatles songs (and an incredible drumming performance by Ringo). Such a classic, but also on my mind today here in Spartanburg as we welcome some much-needed rain after a long and punishing dry spell that has put us in severe drought status (and also shifted local high school graduations to Wednesday night, causing some consternation about our water cycle).

The first rain after a dry spell can feel like forgiveness. The leaves darken, and the pavement releases the ozone smell that the human nose has evolved to detect with great intensity. The gutters begin their small metallic music of their own on our home. In a neighborhood like Duncan Park, where old trees, roofs, lawns, storm drains, clay soil, and backyard gardens all receive the same weather differently, rain feels immediate and local, and as sound before it becomes thought.

But rain is not the same thing as recovery. That may be one of the hardest lessons of a drought. We are quick to perceive weather and slower to perceive water. Weather happens to us in the present tense. It gathers on the radar, interrupts the afternoon, changes the feel of the air, and makes us look up from whatever we were doing. Water moves through longer memories. Soil moisture, streamflow, reservoirs, roots, seepage, evaporation, treatment plants, pipes, fields, bills, and habits all keep time differently than a thunderstorm. A few wet days can interrupt dryness without ending the drought. They can make the world look relieved before the watershed has actually recovered.

That dynamic is important and timely this week in Spartanburg. As rain returns to the forecast, Spartanburg Water has asked customers to follow voluntary water restrictions, noting that all South Carolina counties, including Spartanburg, have been upgraded to severe drought status. The utility also notes that the current rainfall deficit began in August 2025 and is not expected to dissipate in the coming weeks, as rain is forecast over the next few days. Drought.gov’s Spartanburg County page makes a similar point that all of Spartanburg County’s population is affected by drought, and January through April 2026 ranks as the second-driest year-to-date period in 132 years for the county.

That is the kind of fact that ought to slow down our attention. It means we should learn to see the rain within a longer cycle.

Most of us first learn the water cycle as a diagram (at least that’s how I taught it for years as a middle school life science teacher). There’s a cloud with an arrow pointing down. There’s a nondescript river with another arrow pointing up. Evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and runoff. It is one of those school images that become so familiar they almost disappear. But the diagram is not wrong because it is simple. It is wrong only when we treat it as something that happens somewhere else. The U.S. Geological Survey’s description of the water cycle reminds us that water moves between the atmosphere, land, rivers, groundwater, plants, and human systems through evaporation, evapotranspiration, precipitation, runoff, streamflow, infiltration, and recharge. The cycle is meteorological, but also vegetal, geological, municipal, agricultural, and bodily (to invoke Maurice Merleau-Ponty).

In the Upstate, that cycle has a unique shape. The far northwestern mountains of South Carolina receive some of the state's highest rainfall totals. The South Carolina State Climate Summary notes that annual average precipitation ranges from around 80 inches near Lake Jocassee to less than 39 inches in parts of the Midlands, with most of the Upstate averaging roughly 45 to 55 inches. Moist air is forced upward by the Appalachian (Team -Latch with how I pronounce that, in case you were wondering) Mountains, then released as rain. That rain enters streams that become creeks, rivers, reservoirs, and eventually human drinking water. It also enters the red clay, slowly or poorly depending on where it falls, what has been paved, what has been compacted, and what has been rooted deeply enough to hold it.

That is why drought in the Piedmont is never the absence of rain. It is the thinning of relations. The creeks drop in volume, and the soil tightens. The hay fields struggle, and our reservoirs record a deficit. The tree closes its pores in its bark while water treatment plants become part of the story. The suburban lawn becomes part of this story. The dishwasher, the shower, the leaking toilet, the glass of water placed on a restaurant table before anyone asks for it... all of these suddenly belong to one field of consequence.

This is where the water cycle becomes a matter of perception. Not because perception replaces policy, infrastructure, or hydrology, but because, without perception, we misread the conditions of our own life. We see rain and assume abundance (or a missed recess at school). We see a reservoir and assume it is permanent and that the “lake” has been there forever. We see a faucet and assume distance from the creek. We see a green lawn on the 16th hole of our favorite country club golf course and forget the watershed that made it possible.

Spartanburg’s own history is a history of learning, forgetting, managing, and being humbled by water.

Long before municipal reservoirs or textile mills, the waterways of this region were part of Indigenous life and movement. The earliest archaeological records do not map neatly onto the later tribal names that appear in colonial documents. Still, places like the Pacolet Soapstone Quarries remind us that the Pacolet River area carries traces of human attention going back thousands of years. Soapstone was quarried and shaped into vessels and tools. Waterways weren’t scenery for recreation. Instead, they were orientation, material access, seasonal movement, food, memory, and relation.

Maps are often problematic, colonialist, and propagandist (President Jed Bartlet was right about the Mercator Projection), but this one is interesting as well.

Later historical records identify the larger Indigenous worlds of the Catawba and Cherokee in and around this broader Piedmont and mountain region. The Catawba Nation describes its people as yeh is-WAH h’reh, “people of the river”, a phrase that should make any modern watershed conversation reflect and take a moment to ponder. The river isn’t a resource in that naming or vocabulary. It is identity, continuity, and belonging. Likewise, the Cherokee Nation’s history names South Carolina as part of the broader Cherokee territorial world at European contact, and the Cherokee Path linked Charleston with Cherokee communities across South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. These paths often followed rivers, fords, ridges, and crossings. The landscape was already known, traveled, storied, and contested long before European settlers translated it into deeds, mills, roads, and county lines. We still find a good number of arrowheads and Indigenous tools as well as use many of the same well-traveled paths for our highways to this day.

I obviously don’t want to use Indigenous presence as a decorative preface to the later history of the Upstate’s hydrology. That is one of the subtle habits of colonial memory in that we mention Indigenous people at the beginning, then let them disappear as “real history” begins. A better approach is to admit that the water cycle of this place has always been entangled with questions of belonging, displacement, use, and responsibility. The streams were never empty, and the rivers were never just waiting to become power in the hands of Europeans.

European settlement and industrialization actually changed the visible form of that relationship. In the nineteenth century, the Piedmont’s rivers and creeks became engines. The South Carolina Encyclopedia’s entry on industrialization notes that textile manufacturing became the most significant early industry in the Upcountry and Piedmont, with factories taking root along backcountry rivers after 1814. Spartanburg County’s waterways were especially suited to this transformation. Falling water could be made to turn wheels, power machinery, and gather labor into mill villages.

You can still feel that history at Glendale. Glendale Shoals Preserve, along Lawson’s Fork Creek, is now a beloved public space with trails, birds, plant life, ruins, a waterfall, and the old mill site. But in the nineteenth century, the area was known as Bivingsville and was home to the Glendale Cotton Mill and a mill village. The creek was not incidental to the place. It was the condition of the place. It gave the community that grew around it power, shape, risk, and identity.

From Pacolet Memories: http://pacoletmemories.com/flood.html

The Pacolet River tells the same story with a more devastating event. In the late nineteenth century, Pacolet became one of the major textile centers of Spartanburg County. The South Carolina Encyclopedia notes that by 1895, the three mills at Pacolet formed the largest textile manufacturing complex in the county. Then, on June 6, 1903, the Pacolet River flooded. Mills 1 and 2 were destroyed, Mill 3 was severely damaged, and total losses at Pacolet and Clifton Mills were estimated at $3.5 million. The South Carolina State Climatology Office describes the Great Pacolet Flood as the greatest loss of life from river flooding in South Carolina during the twentieth century, with sixty-five people drowned and water rising so rapidly that land near the river was covered by forty feet of water within one hour.

Drought and flood aren’t necessarily opposites in a moral sense. They are both part of the same cycle in which land, atmosphere, development, and human expectations meet. The same river that powered the mill could destroy it. The same rain that brings relief can arrive too quickly for dry ground to receive. The same community that fears scarcity can also be vulnerable to excess.

This is one of the reasons I find the language and vocabulary of “water management” both necessary and incredibly insufficient. Of course, water has to be managed in a human context. A city cannot live on poetic attention alone (though maybe we should give it a shot). Spartanburg’s drinking water system is itself a history of management. Spartanburg Water’s reservoir system begins with Municipal Reservoir #1 in 1926, then Lake Bowen in 1960, and Lake Blalock in 1983. Together, those reservoirs help provide more than 26 million gallons of drinking water each day to more than 200,000 customers. That is an extraordinary civic achievement. It is also an extraordinary form of dependence.

A reservoir is a part of the water cycle, albeit artificially created. It is one of the ways we enter it more deliberately. We dam, store, treat, pipe, meter, and bill water, but we do not make water. We receive, redirect, and depend on water’s return. The reservoir can make water feel stable, and most days that stability is a mercy. But drought reminds us that storage is not creation. A full glass of water is never only a private possession. It is a momentary arrangement of rain, rock, pipe, public trust, ancient molecules, and restraint.

That is why voluntary water restrictions deserve more than annoyance or passive compliance. They are not just bureaucratic language, but are a form of civic perception. Spartanburg Water asks customers to water lawns and vegetation only between 8 p.m. and 6 a.m. to reduce evaporation, to follow assigned watering days, to repair leaking toilets and faucets, to take shorter showers, to run dishwashers and washing machines only with full loads, and to stop washing down driveways, gutters, sidewalks, buildings, and other hard surfaces except where immediate fire protection requires it. These are small acts, but small acts are often where a culture’s assumptions become visible.

Turning off the faucet while brushing teeth won't end the drought. Skipping power washing the driveway won't restore a watershed. But these practices can train attention. They interrupt the illusion that water appears from nowhere and disappears into nowhere. They remind us that a private habit can have a public watershed behind it.

This is where empathy enters the water cycle for me. Not empathy as a vague feeling toward nature, and not empathy as a sentimental performance of concern, but empathy as a disciplined enlargement of perception. Edith Stein, in her work on empathy (my dissertation focus), was concerned with how we come to recognize another life as genuinely other and yet meaningfully given to us. We do not collapse the other into ourselves. We learn to perceive that the other’s experience is real, even when it is not our own.

A watershed asks for something like that. The creek does not experience drought the way I do. The sacred black walnut tree in our backyard does not experience rain the way I do. A farmer, a reservoir manager, a child running through a storm, a restaurant owner, a wastewater worker, and a fish in a warming stream do not experience the same weather in the same way. But they are not separate stories. The practice of ecological perception is learning to hold those differences together without flattening them.

Rain makes this harder, not easier. When the storm finally comes, my body wants to relax. The smell of wet soil tells me something has been restored. The trees look washed while the native grasses in our yard begin to lift. The creek sounds more like itself outside our windows. But the deeper lesson of this week is that perception moves more slowly than the weather. It has to stay with the longer accounting.

So maybe the practical question is not simply, “Did it rain?” Maybe the better question is, “Where did the rain go?”

Did it run off a roof into a gutter and into a storm drain? Did it soak into the compacted lawn? Did it reach the roots of a tree? Did it enter Lawson’s Fork, the Pacolet, the Tyger, the Enoree, the Broad? Did it recharge groundwater? Did it carry oil, fertilizer, sediment, or trash? Did it fall too quickly to be received? Did it lower demand on a reservoir for a day while leaving the long deficit in place?

That question changes how we see the place we live in. It turns a rainstorm into a local teacher and asks us to see Duncan Park not only as a neighborhood of humans but also as a watershed for Gaia. It asks us to see Glendale not only as a preserve, but as a memory of water power and industrial dependence. It asks us to see Pacolet not only as a small and lovely town but also as a river valley shaped by both human labor and hydrological forces. It asks us to see the faucet not as the beginning of water, but as one brief opening in a much older cycle.

The rain coming back is a gift. It is also a test of attention. If we treat it as permission to forget drought, then we have misunderstood the gift. If we receive it as part of a longer discipline of care, then even a thunderstorm can become a teacher.

The water cycle is not only above us in the clouds or beneath us in the soil. It is also between us, in the habits and histories that decide how a community lives with what it has been given.

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When the Rain Comes

Memory and the water cycle in the Carolina Piedmont

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