People complain a lot about getting other people’s weather by mistake. It doesn’t sit right. Maybe you picked your home for the climate, and to have someone else’s weather foisted upon you feels unfair. Also, of course, the whole idea of getting all the wrong weather is kind of a sign of Everything Having Gone Badly Wrong. Hundred-year floods really aren’t supposed to come every other year. It’s one of those the-call-is-coming-from-inside-the-house moments.
Our weather is weird enough anyway. We have hail that is specifically attracted to peonies. We have “sun breaks.” One day we had a torrential downpour on the west side of our house while the east side remained not only dry but sunny. It’s not that big a house.
Just the other day we had so much rain at once that there was no space between the drops. Minnows flocked by. Anyone looking up in surprise drowned. At the exact same time, a fat, unimpeded sun blasted right through it all. I ran up to the tower for the rainbow, which had to be world-class. And it was. The rainbow cracked the sky in half; the lower portion calved off and clattered onto the ground; it was a while before the atmosphere reconvened and mustered a quorum of molecules. Meanwhile, no one’s heard from anyone in the lower rainbow portion since.
People here are excitable about thunderstorms. We mostly don’t get them. As a thunderstorm fan, with lots of experience from Virginia summers, I tended to scoff at the oversized reaction to our occasional thunder. Which is petite. You can’t always tell if it’s thunder or the sinister chuckling of the blackberries as they rumble over cars and buildings in the dead of night.
More commonly we have veils of vapor that manage to make everything damp without ever actually precipitating. It’s so quiet you can make out the orgiastic sibilance of suspended, swinging slugs in love, entwined in slime, their blue penises swirling softly. Not that I’m eavesdropping.
But back to those thunderstorms. We have them like we have earthquakes. Not big and not often. We save them up. We accumulate an anticipatory tension and every three hundred years the coast is upended and we all get tipped into the ocean like so much trash. Thunderstorms, same deal. We might not get them often, but when we do, our 200-foot fir trees wave like a stand of wheat, and Zeus signs his name in lightning.
And, of course, now we get atmospheric rivers. The term has been in use for only twenty years or so but they’re really something. Basically, you’ve got the Mississippi River up there in the sky over the Pacific, only with more water. A grand celestial Proud Mary presides atop, her big wheels turning, steering for the coastline, and the mountain range beyond. And that whole sky Mississippi looks at those mountains and says You know what? This has been no end of fun, but instead of climbing over those suckers, what say we just dump the whole load right here? Cue Tina Turner. This is going to be nice and rough.
Which is aggravating if it’s your town that gets shlorped off on a mud skid, but it’s still basically on the familiar side of things. Water is our legacy and our treasure, or at least it’s supposed to be, and if every so often it overshoots the mark, and we pick up a little stray Canada out of the deal, still—the basic premise is familiar. That’s the west coast for you—you can’t count on the land beneath your feet staying put. It’s going to slide away or crack open or get covered with lava.
Photo taken in the rain 12/20/21; damage done 6/28/21.
But at least being wet feels familiar and comforting. It’s the opposite that rankles. It’s when everything around you starts looking like a casserole someone forgot in the oven and then some middle manager from Hell says All THIS casserole needs is to be popped under the broiler for a couple days to give it a nice crust. And that’s not what it needs at all. It truly isn’t.
So far anyway, Delaware seems to be in a relative sweet spot. *Knock wood!* The summers may be hot and humid, but fortunately we haven’t seen any 100 degree days. We get little to no snow accumulation in the winter. (I remember a couple feet of snow when I was a child. I have pictures!) When there’s a hurricane off the coast, it peters out for the most part before it reaches us. Or else it hits New Jersey. There ARE occasional reports of tornados, but they tend to hit the higher elevations, like “Chateau Country.” The only glitch is what I call “the rainy season.” Lately, our Springs have been incredibly wet. It will rain hard for days on end, usually when I’ve started planting tomatoes. A couple years in a row, we had to deal with blossom end rot. (On our tomatoes; our blossom ends were relatively dry.)
I remember a time (early 60s?) when there was enough in my backyard (with drifting) to dig a tunnel. And another time we got 4 inches and they closed school for 3 days. Living now in Northern Minnesota I find those experiences to be hilarious. Yesterday we had nearly ten inches with a howling wind. At least traffic slowed down a bit.
OMG, yes! I would build all kinds of snow creatures (I remember one year I made a snow cockatiel… another year a snow mermaid. Snow men? Where’s the challenge and artistry in THAT???) I tried to make an igloo once. But since we no longer have an active civic association, so we no longer are apt to get our neighborhood streets plowed, it’s probably for the best that we don’t get that kind of snow anymore. Even since Paul and I have been together (35 years now!), it has snowed deeply enough to where the neighbors all banded together to SHOVEL our neighborhood streets to where we could get out the 2 blocks into the city limits where they plowed. I doubt that sort of thing would happen today, as I know very few of my neighbors anymore.
Jono, my childhood dream was to have enough snow that when I opened the front door I’d have to tunnel out. I’d tunnel to the neighbor’s house and she’d tunnel to mine and we’d meet in the middle. I’m not sure I worked out any of the logistics. But we never had enough snow anyway.
When living on the Gunflint Trail some years ago I learned how to build a quinzhee. Just pile and pack a big heap of snow and then hollow out enough to sleep in. It often stays relatively warm inside. Often close to freezing when it is much colder (below zero) outside.
My single memory of Delaware is of little bitty trees. And maybe collecting sharks’ teeth on the Bay? And I’ll just bet everyone with enough snow has at least tried to make an igloo. It never quite works.
We have been having a wetter than usual Spring. People have been complaining. I, remembering the droughts of recent years, have not. At all.
We used to have annual droughts in the late summer. They would tell people not to wash their cars or water their lawns. Not so anymore. No more annual droughts.
People do complain about rain. I like to carefully explain that it is water. Coming right out of the SKY. It’s a dang miracle.
I moved to Portland from SoCa 40 years ago. I hate the desert, love rain. Clearly I’m in the right place.
At least historically…and it looks like our normal winter is back too!
We made snow forts, my kids made igloos.
Never did figure out how to put in the key piece. Also, we ran out of snow.
Sounds like you are experiencing a little Australian style weather, all hot and crispy. Meanwhile our summer is predicted to be wetter and windier than usual, just like last summer, which is fine with me, but in between we still get ourselves and our gardens crispified. I love thunderstorms too.
Well right now it’s raining like mad and has been for three months, which is JUST fine!
Such a delightful mix of poetry, sarcasm, humor, and… a detour to look up whether slugs really DO have blue penises. (And even crazier, it’s how they USE them!). Yes “atmospheric river” was a new phrase for me when I moved to California. And “dry line” in Oklahoma. It’s not a good line, either. Spawns tornadoes (atmospheric penises?) Not sure why you’re not nationally syndicated Murr.
“Not sure why you’re not nationally syndicated Murr.” I’ll second that!!!!
Thanks. I don’t even have that many regular readers, but I sure likes the ones I gots.
My Oregon friends who whined about the gloom never understood that its attraction to me was being survivable. There are are things I also live about being back in the Midwest, but not the half-year when everything goes monochromatic (sometimes it manages sepia, for Christmas) and it’s so cold your speech balloon snaps off and shatters as you gaze sadly from the recesses of this stupid fur hat.
Don’t forget your ass freezing off and clattering to the ground like a calved glacier.
Great post Murr! I will 3rd that national syndication bewilderment! Ask the Great Oz that question the next time you go to the Emerald City willya? The snowplow just sped by. Totally expected. Unless the Second Coming happens between now and the morning of the 25th we will definitely have a white Christmas. Our summers are now longer and hotter, winters milder and shorter. We’ve jumped up a full growing zone – for gardeners, this is a BIG deal! We were a 2b before, we’re now a 3a! In the ‘olden days’ we often got our first frost in August, even in mid-August. This year we didn’t get a hard freeze until October. But we are even more *dry*. Where’s *our* rain Murr, do you have our rain? That atmospheric river needs to wander our way and spill over its frigging banks a little. Murr can’t have all the water from the sky *and* be Grand Central Station for Slugs in Love as well. We may get snow by the foot, but it’s a dry snow, and a dry cold. (ha! ‘Dry’ snow equates to 1/10th of an inch of rain per inch and -35 is damn cold, wet or dry)
We’ll try to push that river over the mountains for you, hon. We can spare some. I sure wouldn’t have said that last summer. I’ve had it with the Republican War On Life.