Chilling Echoes in the Dark: The Horrors of Nightfall

I didn't know a damn thing about rice when I inherited a four hundred and forty acre farm in Central California.

It belonged to my husband's family.

But then there was a boating accident on Clear Lake.

His parents died suddenly, and the land went to Dylan and me.

I told him we should sell it, but he was checked out.

Never really recovered from what happened.

Not that I blame him.

This past February, he took the old twelve gauge to the shed.

Left a mess I'm still cleaning up one way or another.

Now it's just me and our chocolate lab, Fudge, out here in the middle of nowhere.

We were getting by, barely, but enough, until the drought hit.

I don't know if this is the right place to post this.

I'm scared and desperate and hoping somebody out there can help, or at least tell me if you've seen anything like this before It's hard to explain exactly.

Actually, let me backtrack to May.

That's when it really started.

If you know anything about rice, you know they need water, lots of it.

Around here, family farmers grow nearly all of California's crop, but this drought's been taking a serious toll.

So many fields going fallow.

Like many folks out here, I've got no surface water thanks to the cutbacks.

That means I have to pump expensive groundwater just to keep my paddy from drying out.

For months, this was my routine.

I'd wake up early, and Fudge and I would walk the land.

We'd check the pumps, adjust the dams, make sure flood levels were right.

I tried to keep the water about four and a half inches deep, enough to cover the mud and keep the weeds down.

Without getting too deep into it, the Sacramento Valley's got an old system for distributing water from the mountains to the coast.