It is a short flight from one
extreme to another. My plane takes off in lush, green Portland,
Ore., and lands two hours later in Albuquerque,N.M. As the plane
comes over the Sandia mountains, another passenger, making a first
trip to New Mexico, is startled to see a panorama of browns shining
in the sunlight, broken only by very occasional splotches of color.
To me, both landscapes are beautiful — Portland, where I live
now, and New Mexico, where I was born and grew up.
Both
places are, in different ways, defined by water, especially this
year. Parts of Oregon have already received record amounts of
precipitation, while New Mexico is experiencing one of its driest
years on record. This is evident at restaurants, where water isn’t
served unless you ask for it, in hotels, where rooms have cards
with information on how to conserve water, and in the dusty,
pollen-filled drive I make north from the airport.
When
Portlanders find out I’m from New Mexico, they often ask what I
think of the Northwest’s rain. What’s hard to explain to someone
who’s never been to New Mexico is that one of the things I miss
most about New Mexico is, in fact, the rain.
In Portland,
rain is a companion, a part of everyday life, particularly in the
spring and fall. I can be working at my desk, look out the window,
and discover that it has, without any fanfare, begun to rain. The
possibility of rain is woven into the choices people make on a
daily basis — what they will wear, when they will exercise,
where they will shop — in such a way that it goes unnoticed.
In New Mexico, rain is an event. Ironically, in July and
August, when Portland is counting how many days it has gone without
rain, northern New Mexico experiences some of its wettest days of
the year. Everyone calls it the monsoon season.
A storm
begins early in the day. You wake up to bright, hot sunshine, but
as you look toward the mountains, a few gray clouds hover in an
otherwise clear sky. As the day goes on, the clouds increase,
becoming a mass of darkness that begins to creep over the
mountains. You watch the approaching virga, those wispy streams of
rain that evaporate before hitting the ground. An hour or so before
the rain begins to fall, you will smell it, your nose catching the
scent of water.
Even though you have seen all the signs,
the afternoon storm still takes you by surprise. It begins with the
bang of thunder and the unleashing of rain. There is no gradual
buildup from sprinkle to downpour. When the rain hits the hard
ground, it releases the earth, setting free the pent-up scent of
dirt and plants. Wherever you are, you take cover.
As a
child, my friends and I were sometimes caught at the school
playground, and we’d huddle in an alcove. At the pool, everyone was
ordered out to wait under awnings or in dressing rooms. If you were
in a store or your car, you stayed put. If you were in an arroyo,
you got out as fast as you could.
There was the flash
flood one of my sisters and I were caught in with our grandparents.
My grandfather, thinking he could still drive down a dirt road to
the house even though the rain was hitting the windshield so hard
you couldn’t see, drove us to what he thought was home. But when
the rain cleared enough, it turned out to be the elementary school
parking lot. I still remember a YMCA campout ruined by rain,
forcing a group of unhappy campers to return to town to sleep on
the floor of the Y.
If we were at home, we’d watch the
storm from our porch. Gasping at the five-fingered lightning, we
would count one-Mississippi, two Mississippi. The lights would go
out and the phone would unexpectedly ring once or twice, and then,
the sound of thunder assured us our house had not been hit.
When the storm was over, the sun would emerge. Soon,
almost all traces of the rain would be gone, the landscape warm and
bright, giving no hint of the storm just past or the one to come
the next day.
Now, that’s what I call rain.
Margaret Foley is a contributor to Writers on the Range,
a service of High Country News in Paonia,
Colorado (hcn.org). She lives and writes in Portland,
Oregon.
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