The Boy Child

I feel like we've finally shaken off the holidays, at long last. We've negotiated all the financial obligations of gifting, slalomed through many lifetimes of silent resentments and ancient, calcified, razor-sharp stalagmite grudges that are our family gatherings and eaten all the things we swore we'd stop eating the last time we had a Holidays when we made our New Year resolution 12 months before.

Now we're all sitting here together, metaphorically of course, in America's sitting rooms and receiving parlors, splayed out on divans and settees, almost dozing as we digest and digest and digest. There's no football on to save us from the scourge of barely-qualifying-as-social smalltalk, so let's do the only other safe thing we can do that won't involve accidentally bringing up Donald Trump: let's talk about the weather!

El Niño is here! It's the guest you've known was en route for months and months, but you were deeply ambivalent about his/her arrival, like the peripatetic aunt who insists on traveling with her four unfriendly bichon frises so overdue for a grooming, they're all technically rastafarian, but she insists on paying for lunch and dinner out every day she's there.

I mean yes, El Niño means lots of rain for us in this, the thirstiest of all American climes, but it also means most of the rain that falls is going to end up in normally dry creek beds, on slide-prone hillsides and in some of our living rooms. Sure, it will carry some of our cars and other sundry household necessaries and yes, maybe a few of our loved ones, but it's going to be worth it come summer when we're allowed again--finally!--to hear that sweet, soothing hiss of the sprinklers resurrecting our abilities to maintain grass lawns in a desert climate. Without the shaming! Or the fines!

Both the most and least interested in weather and its effects? Skiers. I would say "...and snowboarders," but in my experience, they tend to be more low-maintenance types. Less easily perturbed by the previous years' scant scatterings of fresh powder than skiers are (your typical skier can be very put out by subpar conditions because after all, my god, do you know how much we paid for this excursion?), your average snowboarder is. Your snowboarders, you know, they'd be up there on the mountain either way. They didn't check the conditions before they left the house with their roommates that morning (they always have roommates). They just run, like grunion with a high tide, driven up and up by the most primal and reflex instinct but not to mate;* more to celebrate being able to cobble together enough singles and spare change for gas money to make it there.

The rest of us can talk about drought or global warming or flooding or landslides. The skiers just want to know the base depth. And not as a measurement of available potable, life-giving water, but because a nice pile of powder is more fun to get through than some dirty, hard-packed ice and slush. I'd make fun of them for their tunnel-vision-akin-to-blindness, but they know that a ski season is finite. Every day without sufficient snow is a lost opportunity, and what is a more precious commodity than time? That's right: nothing. Nobody is more attuned to the finitude of mortality and the fleeting, fickle impermanence of one of too-few seasonal cycles than a disappointed skier. It's not privilege, it's enlightenment.

I've never been on skis, so my concerns are more prosaic. We get a lot of press in El Niño years out her in SoCal because of all the effects, rain and flooding is easier to put on film than unseasonable mildness as happens on the East Coast. I'm grateful for the water, I really am. But this is happening just as my oldest boy child is starting his lifelong adventure as an independent driver of automobiles. My fret comes with the "lifelong" part of it: I'd like that to be as long and non-fiery as possible. Trained as he is, there's no getting around the root fact that he only ever can be, by hardwired definition, a California Driver. It's a cliche, but we've killed more people this year in one state than ebola did in all of Guinea last year. So he's learning how to be one of those in a year where there will be more water in his way than any year since he was born. It's five more years until all my kids are driving. It seems selfish, but until then, I'm asking for more drought.

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*Hey, though, if it happens, cool...