A seven-foot tide last night at quarter to ten, and the creek’s tidal reach still absurdly high an hour later, just lapping at the base of the bridges across it. As I walked toward the creek the rain started.
Rain in July is not completely unheard of in the Bay Area, though when it falls it tends not to penetrate this far east, and even in the wet hills across the Bay the average July rainfall is approximately zero. And this was no mere fog drip, no saturated cloud hung low on the landscape, its mist welcome, near-insensible cool needles against skin. These were fat drops to mark the pavement, and the pavement smelled of rain after fifteen minutes of it. I felt the first drop on bare right forearm as I passed the bright-lit ball field, waited thirty seconds, and then the cry went up from the bleachers. “It’s raining!”
At the creek the chorus frogs were shouting, the same words as near as I could tell.
At the creekmouth it was raining and the creek near overlapped its banks. The two were unrelated, that rainfall insufficient to move the July total to one hundredth of an inch. My mind connected them nonetheless, raised the hairs on the back of my neck, my head filled with tidal sediment and drowned cordgrass stems.
And then it stopped, the flagstones dry by the time I got home, pulled Becky out back to see the rain.
At three or so it started again. We woke up long enough to say “it’s raining,” to listen for a moment to the drops hard hitting the screens in the open windows.
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Tomorrow I leave for Mono Lake. I’m staying overnight, alone. I should be back by Friday evening, one hopes with photos in hand.
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Unrelated management detail: If one of you happened to buy me “On Methuselah’s Trail: Living Fossils and the Great Extinctions” by Peter Douglas Ward from my wishlist, get in touch. Amazon owes you a refund as I never got the book, and they’re being ludicrously unhelpful to me as I try to resolve the matter. Like arguing with a brick wall that has been outsourced to Mumbai.
oh, *you* guys got the rain. I am envious.
Down here in the mid-peninsula/Woodside area, we just got teased: that lovely water-heavy scent in the air, and a bit of a breeze stirring up the sky.
Still the weather was enough to send me out to trim a couple hundred pounds off of the landlord’s poor persimmon tree, which is way overloaded and couldn’t possibly deal with water weight on top of its ridiculous productivity. I really worry it’s going to wind up with a split trunk. In fact it’s already lost one high branch, covered with maybe a hundred green persimmons. These fruits are going to double again in size, too; I’ll be out clipping again no doubt. Some trees just have no common sense.
Is there anything productive one can do with green persimmons?
chris, we didn’t get the evening rain, but the 3:00 a.m. burst woke me up. i couldn’t figure out what that sound was—thought at first maybe a cat was locked in a room, scratching to get out.
hope you have a great trip to mono lake! i’m interested in the photos, and the story of your trip.
orange—we feel lucky, in the northern part of the state. there’s been hardly any rain the past year in southern california. all of us are in for a bad fire season.
Rain - Good. Dry Lightning - Bad? Don’t know. Started some big-ass forest fires, so now I get overtime for the next week or so evaluating watershed response and emergency measures to protect life, property and maybe some downstream values at risk. It’s ususaly fun to walk around in the aftermath and observe the effects of nature’s cleansing.
Dig Mono Lake for me, willya? It’s definitely a power spot for me, one I pilgrimage to regularly. I’m headed to Mt. Eddy and Oregon when I get back from the fire.
2 inches an hour in spots up and down the east coast this evening - not so much as that in MA and VT, but enough to make the highways an adventure in hydroplaning. Would share the benevolent aspects of all the wet if I could.
The frogs here are shouting the same thing; you’d think they’d be over it by now, but it’s a big party every time.