Anyone Got an Ark?

It’s June 20th, Summer Solstice and here on California’s north coast the winter rains are still nearly incessant. Granted that it’s a temperate rain forest, but honestly, the deal is supposed to be that we suffer through 8 months of unending rain (I’m not exaggerating. Well, not by much) and then get to revel in about 4 months of bright, clear sunshine punctuated with days bound up in fog. It’s no good for growing tomatoes, really — even if you get a summer clear of fog, there’s always the haze from the wild fires inland — but it’s spectacular for growing redwoods and rhododendrons.

This year, someone seems to have rewritten our weather contract without notice, and I’m wondering what idiot contracted out our weather to MBNA.

A last minute change of plans salvaged my husband’s annual “birthday-river trip-skinny dipping-barbeque” into a quiet indoor party with the woodstove lit to hold off the damp chill. No one here is really happy about the lingering rains. No one.

Northern Californians are hardy folk. They’ve had to be — until very recently, this part of the coast was inaccessible for months during these winter rains. The 101 would close due to mudslides. The air fields even closed due to heavy rains and fog. The ports are closed during winter storms here — I’ve seen the entrance to Humboldt Bay when the tide is breaking over the bar, and wondered why more boats weren’t lost. The natives here have learned to be self-sufficient, canning vegetables and smoking meats during the gorgeous late summer/early autumn for the weeks on end when there would be no shipments (including postal mail) into or out of this rather scenic corner of the world. Life as most people know it would simply shut down here, as folks hunkered down to wait out the storms and found ways not to kill each other wholesale.

So, on this sleepy, cloudy, cool Monday, when the Senate is gearing up for another go at Bolton, when the administration is doing its best to triangulate around the Downing Street Minutes/Memo and the ever more insistent torture tales coming out of Gitmo; on a day when the US congress is deciding the future of my beloved PBS and oil may well break the $60/barrel mark, I can’t seem to muster the energy to care. It’s all I can do to keep from crawling back into bed and pulling the covers over my head, to sleep, perhaps to dream a bit about sunnier shores.

Maybe that’s why the Bush administration pooh-poohs climate change. Once we’re all chronically depressed perpetual cloud cover, they’ll be able to continue the rape, plunder and pillage without all that pesky interference from the governed…

Quote of the Day:
Rain, rain, go away
come again some other day…
–Anonymous
Metaphors For Life’s website