Rain returns as welcome visitor to parched city
I taught swimming at summer camp when I was in high school and early in my college years. My responsibility was the pool. When the weather was bad and the kids weren’t swimming, occasionally I’d be called on to help out other counselors, but mostly I stayed by the pool. When it was raining, that’s when I got to swim laps.
From time to time I would swim underwater, occasionally on my back so I could look up from near the bottom of the pool and see how the rain played with the surface of the water. The splash patterns were different depending on whether it was a sprinkle or really pouring. The water just danced, and it was beautiful. It made me happy.
It’s been awfully dry around here lately, especially this summer. But over Labor Day weekend, it rained two days’ worth. Not such a heavy rain that it washed away top soil or so light that it hardly counted, but on-and-off steady rainfalls that soaked into the ground, deep-watered plants and made the trees happy, I’m sure, in their own tree-like way.
On the first day, I looked out on my deck and observed the water on the leaves of my tomato plant. I looked closely at the beads standing all upright and shimmery. The drops were beautiful and made me happy. So good to feel the moisture in the air again.
I have a college friend who lives in Tampa, and we’ve been exchanging emails through the spring and summer about all the usual things that friends talk about, but with a heavy dose of commiseration about our contrasting situations – heat, drought and fires here and record rainfalls there.
When looking at a weather extreme on one end of the spectrum, I find it useful to consider the other end, too. I use Tampa as a contrast to our Inland Northwest because I know the area and have experienced its plentiful rains and occasional lack thereof first hand. Besides, I love weather facts.
We’ve had more than 8 million acres burned and still burning this year across the West; Tampa had a record-setting 3.3 inches of rain on Aug. 1 alone. Compare that to our Labor Day weekend rainfall, delightful as it was, which was around a half inch – a pittance by Tampa standards. Spokane gets 16.5 inches of rain a year; Tampa gets 46.3 inches. And when it comes to serious rain, a total of 15.5 inches fell in Pensacola in the Florida panhandle on just one day – May 1, 2014. Florida knows rain.
And when there’s too much of it at one time, the ditches fill with 8 or more feet of water – as it did in Tampa last month – and everything is dank and damp, and mildew thrives like kudzu. And when rain becomes scarce – as it has been here – trees, grassland, forests and homes catch fire way too easily; lakes have way too much shoreline or disappear altogether; and all the things that are supposed to be green become brown way too early. Everything just looks thirsty.
But they have droughts in Florida, too. Currently South Florida is experiencing lower than average rainfall, and the year 2009 saw drought conditions through much of the state. That very winter, Spokane experienced unseasonal cold and the snowiest winter on record. Go figure.
Rain – we miss it when we don’t have enough of it and complain about it when there’s too much of it, or if it ruins a holiday weekend.
Maybe it’s just that everybody gets a turn with the feast or famine dance, and I’ll leave the climate change discussion for another time because this is simply about the joy of rain when it has been absent for so long.
Spokane seemed so dry to me when I first moved here, but I have long since acclimated and enjoy the low humidity and summertime’s temperate weather and pretty consistent sunny skies. I love the changing seasons, the fall leaves and even the snow. But when it gets too hot and dry, when it’s been like it’s been these past two years, it gets dangerous for all us living things.
And this is why the heavy dark clouds in the middle of the last holiday weekend of the season brought no complaint from me, even though the weather kept me away from days on the lake. Seeing those droplets on my tomato plant was so worth it.
Now if I just had an outdoor pool to swim in so I could look up and see the rain from the other side again – well, that would be just about perfect.