Autumn 2006

There is a day every fall when the air goes slack and my forehead throbs and I know that rain is on its way. I fret at the back door, look at the sky, and swing my arms like a batter anxious for the ball. Rain in Southern California bears little resemblance to the rain patterns I’ve lived with most of my life and the first rainstorm of the season finds me aching to be released from the long dry summer. Is it possible to have a rain soaked psyche? One so tuned to rain’s frequent appearance that to be deprived creates a longing as cavernous as missing a long dead love? The small bay town on Long Island where I grew up averages more than forty-five inches of rain a year, wetter than either Seattle or England. Rain was unpredictable, showing up every couple of weeks or so, pressing itself into my life without regard to convenience or my desires. Yet everything I knew about rain I left behind at the 100th meridian where the west begins.

I moved to Los Angeles in May 1991. I’d wake in the morning and consider the pale gray lid of cloud known locally as the marine layer. How could the sky be so close, so obviously full of water and not rain? I’d dress as if it might pour any minute only to find the air clear and sunny within a few hours. I started sky watching nearly every hour, trying to read rain as I once had, chewing over this new behavior. That fall when a downpour fractured against asphalt for two days, I relaxed into rain’s familiar sound and electric scent. Rain that winter totaled a respectable twenty-one inches, the next, twenty-seven. I planted a garden and discovered California poppies and South Africa’s daisy-like gazanias. The next season, 1993-1994, rainfall was a brutal eight inches. My poppies bloomed but died back early and the hillsides never changed from a dull gray-green.

Some people scan the headlines or the comics page first thing in the morning, I now resort to the NOAA Western US Infrared Satellite images, check the forecasts for L.A, then troll for signs of rain. It’s late October 2006 and the satellite photo shows rain pounding the Northwest as warm wet weather dubbed the “The Pineapple Express” careens across the Pacific Ocean to land on Washington State, then break its back on the Rockies. Here in Los Angeles the same weather system forces dry air from the north over the San Gabriels Mountain. Rain doesn’t come – instead a Santa Ana wind licks its hot tongue across Los Angeles causing an unseasonable spike in temperature. I already feel as arid and combustible as the hillsides so this heat, after an especially hot summer, feels like punishment. When work allows me to flee to a different clime I gratefully pack an umbrella.

I land in Burlington, Vermont to fading fall color and snow turning to slush. The sky is a silver crumple of clouds, releasing a shifting melody of sleet, mist, then pelting rain. The clouds break just long enough to change tempo then the rain begins again. I shiver in my parka and realize that living in Southern California has dulled me. In Los Angeles I tend to contemplate rain from somewhere warm and dry. When was the last time I could say I got caught in the rain? As I wait along an open road for a bus, I close my eyes and feel the ice–sheathed raindrops thrum against my shoulders and feel the beat of my own internal ocean answer back. Rain is after all, a natural phenomenon, as subject to the laws of physics as plate tectonics or a hummingbird’s flight. I pay attention to the rhythm, wondering where this rain was born, trying to imagine all the forces that brought it here.

In the simplest terms rain is “water condensed from vapor in the atmosphere and falling in drops from clouds” yet everything else about rain is complicated. The cycle that causes water to rise from the oceans or land, then travel in clouds to eventually release that water, is shaped by such chaotic forces that meteorologists still can’t reliably predict a rainstorm much more than twenty-four hours in advance. Wind-speed, ocean temperature, air temperature, volcanic ash, land shape, fires, even smog all feed into when it rains, how much and how hard. What’s not obvious is that rain is all about attraction. Rain develops when floating water vapor becomes physically drawn to a floating dust mote. When water vapor cleaves to dust, the union eventually coalesces into a cloud droplet heavy enough to fall.

Lately it’s been hard to pick up a newspaper without noticing that somewhere in the world it’s either raining more than it has in the past, or less. The bonds of attraction seem to have been perturbed in ways we can measure. On one of the five sacred mountains of China – Mount Hua ¬– both rainfall and visibility records have been kept for more than fifty years. Mount Hua pushes sharp peaks seven thousand feet above sea level. Mythology tells how the Goddess Nu Wa created Mt Hua and the other sacred mountains to repair the sky when a rip opened and waters from the heavens threatened to flood the earth and kill all life. Mount Hua is now the primary watershed for the city of Xi’an about seventy miles away, and like many cities near mountains, Xi’an gets smoggy. Daniel Rosenfeld at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jin Dai from the Meteorological Institute of Shaanxi Province in China and Zhanyu Yao of the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences have been contemplating the connection between increased dust from Xian’s pollution and decreased rain on Mt. Hua. They showed that average rain and snowfall on the mountain dropped 17% in fifty-two years. On Xi’an’s smoggiest days, precipitation drops at least 30%, sometimes as much as 50%. Too much dust it would seem, keeps water vapor and dust motes at arm’s length and cloud droplets can’t get big enough to fall.

While it’s hard to dismiss the similarities between Mont Hua and the peaks of the San Gabriel Mountains of Los Angeles, these scientists can only guess that pollution is the reason motes and vapors have become indifferent to one another in other places and their work says nothing about wetter weather patterns. I decide that perhaps scientists can’t yet read rain much better than I. When I land back in the arid Los Angeles air, rain seems all the more the provenance of gods and goddesses. A flat wash of cloud blocks the sun and I imagine them cupping rain in their hands, laughing as I stretch to pull it down.

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining; Behind the clouds the sun is shining; Thy fate is the common fate of all, Into each life some rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Winter 2007
Scientific measurements say little about how rain absorbs all our human meanings. Gloomy is used to describe both personality and weather, as is the word sunny. As a modern culture we often associate rain with either peril or sorrow. Rain is stormy, purple, or always gets people down according to Ella Fitzgerald, Prince and Karen Carpenter. Films as diverse as Snow Falling on Cedars, Good Will Hunting, Casablanca and The Sound of Music use rain to underscore love that isn’t going to work out. Rain adds danger to The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings and The Bridge Over the River Kwai as the heroes peer through falling water to see what threat might be at hand only to find they must fight on dodgy terrain. Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon reserves rain for its death scene, as does the novelist M. Scott Momoday in House of Dawn. It’s hard to imagine many British novels without a rain-soaked melancholy scene and Jane Austen made an art of mixing rain and mood. Rain and tears are so close in our minds that we often think of raindrops in the shape of tears, when in fact the smallest raindrops are merely round, the largest a slightly flatten disc that looks a bit like a dimpled bun. Yet Gene Kelly danced in the rain and though Longfellow wrote many a poem lamenting the rain, he begins one by declaiming the virtues of a summer shower.

How beautiful is the rain!
After the dust and heat,
In the broad and fiery street,
In the narrow lane,
How beautiful is the rain!

Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head, and knows not that it brings abundance to drive away the hunger.
Saint Basil

Not Yet Spring 2007
To be in Los Angeles in March is to be seduced. Even now after fifteen years I will stand in my yard, enthralled by the painted lady migration or the splayed lavender petals of a douglas iris. The sycamore unfurls tiny tumescent green leaves early in the month, the coast scrub oaks drip seed and the coral-bells wave airy blushing flower stalks. A week ago the walnut tree, naked since December, began to adorn itself anew, pert leaves pushing out from the ends of branches.

Usually this exuberance speaks to abundant winter water yet this is turning out to be an extremely dry season. What started as a potentially wet El Niño year has shifted to its opposite – La Niña. La Niña soaks the northwest and leaves the Southwest untouched. I haven’t had enough rain to slake my parched mind and the piercing blue-sky days seem more like a David Hockney abstract landscape than something I should be living in. Public memos from the National Weather service describe in detail the shift from a wet 2006 winter to a heat mired summer to an arid 2007, but says nothing of the cause or the whether this is a trend we can expect in the future. What would it mean to beat the driest year on record, and what does it mean that the record happened in 2002? Then, less than four and half inches of rain fell, barely four have fallen now. The record has to reach back to the 1960’s and 1800’s for the next driest years but two years ago the annual rainfall matched the 1883 high rainfall record of thirty seven inches and I watched the Arroyo Seco at Hahamongna Wash carry uprooted trees into its muddy churning heart. Today there is only a dark brown spot where rain might have pooled in a transient rain shower a few days ago. Rain is mercurial and exhausting yet I can’t stop smiling when it shows up. I erect a personal weather station to track its disposition.

Whether what is happening to rain here in Los Angeles is different than rain, fifty or a hundred years ago is murky. The peaks and valleys of the historical rain record looks fascinatingly erratic, like a heartbeat in distress. Despite popular myth we’ve never been perpetually sunny nor is the Los Angeles Basin really a desert, but a recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggest that we might be on the way to more desert-like springs, summers and falls, perhaps punctuated by occasional rainforest-like winters. Many people will be happy and perhaps even thrive in an increasingly hot and dry climate but I imagine reconciling the loss of rain will be difficult for some of us as unease evolves into sorrow. Whatever is coming we are all destined to become weather watchers. The NOAA satellite today shows clear skies over California and the forecast for Los Angeles is ten days of sun. I notice, however, that it’s raining in Oregon.

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About the Author:

Loretta Williams is a public radio editor and producer. When she is not up to her eyeballs in work she’s spends her time trying to understand Los Angeles, writing short stories and her working in her native plant garden.