What’s A Party Without A Little Weather Talk?

I spent some time at various family gatherings and wedding receptions this week, and I was pleased to see that, in this hurly-burly world of ours, one ancient tradition has survived: Weather is still the No. 1 topic of conversation on the planet.

In the course of one short week, my small-talk partners and I covered an amazing amount of ground, or should I say, sky. Here are a few of the topics we analyzed, and the general consensus reached:

Was this summer hotter than normal or what? (Absolutely. Summers are always hotter than normal.)

Was this summer drier than normal or what? (Yes, summers are always drier than normal, unless they’re wetter than normal.)

Hot days sure do make for pleasant evenings ‘round these parts. (Oh, you bet.)

Is that a touch of autumn in the air or is it just my imagination? (It’s your imagination - it’s 95 degrees, for heaven’s sake.)

Aren’t these wasps worse than usual this year? (Hey. That topic is not strictly weather. You’ll be penalized for that.)

Three inches of rainfall fell in my uncle’s rain gauge in Denver in one hour! (Wow! That’s a lot of rain.)

Yet his neighbor three blocks away had only two inches in his rain gauge. (This means either thunderstorms are very localized, or, most chilling possibility of all, somebody is tampering with rain gauges in Denver.)

Have you ever heard the term “partly smoky” in a weather broadcast? (Not until this week).

Didn’t the sky look “weird” here in town on Monday and Tuesday? (Oh, you bet.)

And finally, the most popular conversation starter of all time: Looks like rain. (Maybe so. Or maybe not. Hard to tell).

Weather small-talk is so universal, it must be in our genes. I’ll bet the first word ever uttered by a primitive hominid was “humidity.” After millennia of pointing up mutely to the sky, or holding out a hand to check for rain, the human species finally developed syntax and vocabulary strictly in order to sit around a campfire, look up appraisingly and say, “You know how sometimes it just feels like rain? Well, I’m telling you. It feels like rain.”

Back in ancient Greece, Socrates and Plato probably spent many an hour debating this philosophical puzzle: Is it the heat or is it the humidity?

People in the medieval world passed the hours on the Crusades by saying, “Sure, the sunshine is nice, but I prefer a four-season climate.”

Napoleon hung around with his generals outside of Moscow saying, “What are you, nuts? It’s too early for snow.”

And today, people stand around at barbecues, with their pork ‘n’ beans dripping off of their paper plates and strike up conversations by saying, “So, can you believe this weather?”

The story of human progress has been the story of getting the heck out of the weather. We went from caves to huts to adobes to castles to shopping malls, culminating in the ultimate human accomplishment, the domed football stadium.

Yet we still seem to be obsessed with weather. If gun-toting Islamic Jihad fanatics attacked a suburban barbecue party and held everyone hostage, one hostage would still turn to another and say, “So what do you think? This heat wave gonna hold?”

I find this comforting. Despite all our work to insulate ourselves from nature’s highs and lows, we still know deep down inside the weather is our master. It rules our lives in ways we can’t control. We’re all domed and umbrellaed and Gore-Texed and fleeced and hard-topped, and yet whenever we gather together in groups of two or more, our collective intelligence is pooled together on this question: Gonna sprinkle?

If we ever stop talking about the weather, we’ll know that something has gone badly wrong. We will have become removed, irrevocably, from nature. Even worse, we’ll be forced to make constant small-talk about sports.

, DataTimes MEMO: To leave a message on Jim Kershner’s voice-mail, call 459-5493. Or send e-mail to jimk@spokesman.com, or regular mail to Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Kershner The Spokesman-Review