Ten Percent At Best

Southern Californians have a weird relationship with rain, the kind of relationship that can only be forged out of need and want at the same time. We coo and marvel at a downpour, the essence of meteorological mundanity most everywhere else, because it's a stubbornly elusive promise of relief from the basic state of privation we've all elected to persist in. Nobody told us we had to live in a land of perpetual drought, or in my case, in the rain-shadow of mountains in a land of perpetual drought. But here we are anyway, in fun driving distance equidistant from the beach and a ski slope, in probably the only place you could manage both a citrus industry and a Disneyland. Well, almost the only place.

If the question is "how do you manage?" the answer is, mostly, we don't. More than anything we forget about the rolling catastrophe of overpopulating a space that was under-resourced with water before we got here. Instead we mark time in line at the Starbucks, like everyone else* and sometimes make small-talk about whether it's a drought year or not. The punchline, of course, is that if the rainy years are the exception, all the years are drought years.

Tornados happen in Oklahoma and hurricanes happen in Florida, but populations there not only linger but flourish, although in those specific cases, I suppose it depends on your definition of "flourish." Out here we're lucky as we get the three unique states of constant threat from the acute (earthquakes), the chronic (drought) and a special combination of the two (wildfire). But humans are at their most miraculous in their bottomless capacity to take any situation, however existentially perilous, and turn it into a default state of normal, with all the attendant traffic congestion and hot yoga classes to prove it.

When the rain comes, the societal derp is earned and it's real. The mid-stage of the hydrological cycle that has been ginning along just fine for billions of years, making life as it possible at all, just happens; indifferent, wringing out the clouds on their way to who-gives-a-shit-where. Maybe it's our gift that we're able to wonder at it still, to display a gratitude for the fundamental, the elemental process where everywhere else it's an afterthought. It's genuine joy when it comes, when we celebrate as we dance in it, unironically, on our green lawns.

Today my iPhone weather app is all smiling sunshines, as it has been for the almost the entirety of this calendar year, but it's coming, I know it's coming, and probably soon, the most relative of all human words. But words can be a problem. Like for instance the way that reality is mostly constructed out of a stubborn insistence on series of more comfortable fantasies.

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*Remember lines?