It’s late afternoon summertime circa 1989 in the Valley of the Sun, southeast of Phoenix proper and I am swimming with one of my brothers in the pool. Off in the eastern sky a tinge of light brown begins to develop. Ten minutes later the entire world east of our yard is dark brown and we know that at any moment the dust storm will hit with full force. It’s time to get out of the pool.
The dust will blow for awhile and then most often follow up with some cool rain. I’m convinced the Arizona desert loves nothing more than the cool monsoon rains that punctuate the searing summer sun. There may be a lightning show and even a power outage if we are lucky and the family gathers on the patio to watch the sky.
Then in 1997 I moved to San Diego. Storms are rare and at least 90% of the time they are uneventful and boring. No lightning, little wind. The big news is when the waves are large and they crash over the piers, but that doesn’t really affect anyone except the old men who fish on the piers and the surfers. A couple of years there, the El Nino effect did come in and shake us up with some real tropical rainstorms and a bit of flooding. (San Diego is built without good drainage since it doesn’t rain a whole lot and people don’t think about bad weather there. For a long time all of the rainwater went into the ocean untreated and washed all of the motor oil off the streets and onto the beaches.)
Now El Nino is my next door neighbor. Welcome to the tropics. This is about as far as you can get ecologically from the Arizona Sonoran Desert. It rains here just about anytime it wants to. There is no Winter, Summer, Spring, Fall. It’s only the rainy season and the dry season. The dry season is shorter the closer you are to the equator. I’m a little south of it here in Kinshasa and the dry season is only about 3 or 4 months starting in May. I remember lessons in earth science about the Coriolis Effect. As the earth rotates, weather is set spinning and it throws more weather toward the warm tropics and toward the equator. In Kisangani, I will be living virtually on the equator.
Last night we had some sprinkles throughout the evening. Then in the middle of the night the heavens opened and dumped insane amounts of water for a good while. It’s hard to understand the level of difficulty that the poor face living in shanties in the tropics. A Tsunami is devastating, but two storms a week with heavy rains on a feeble tin roof over a mud floor, and trying to keep children dry, that’s a lifetime of difficulty.
In Arizona a river is anything that flows (or trickles) year round. We use up most of the rivers before they meet the sea. We put signs on bridges over streams and creeks that don’t really flow. The Congo River is the second largest river in the world. Only the Amazon carries more water. There are countless large tributaries that feed it and the entire Congo basin is on of the world’s largest watersheds. Weather shapes our daily lives and the patterns we create for ourselves. It nourishes and it devastates.
Just like my childhood, when those really good storms could knock out the electric power. That happens here often. The electricity has been going out a couple of times a week lately. Sometimes it seems weather related, other times it’s just out. It was out for 24 hours this weekend. The current also varies considerably in strength. It’s ok, a little annoying at times, but not a big problem. It is quite a paradigm shift away from the world of consistent 110v power.
I can’t complain. But if you think of it, say a brief prayer of thanksgiving next time you plug something in and it works. I will.
That was a good read, Brian. Rain is fascinating, a true Catch 22, especially in the Congo it seems. Can we love it for its beauty and freshness and the spell it casts over everyone, or should we resent it for pounding shanties and drenching our friends on the streets? When I lived in Mexico it came down with reckless abandon, mid-afternoon, once the sky couldn’t bear the weight of the humidity anymore, and the entire entryway of our house flooded. We just rolled up our jeans and swept it out and left the door open to gawk.
Us people from the West Coast are so spoiled aren’t we? I’m living up in San Jose now and they are having the wettest Spring in anyone memory. Everyone is up in arms because its not sunny enough! But it reminds me so much of the rainy season in Ethiopia–which would just go on and on and on for months.
Your weather stories bring back good memories like–amazing thunder storms where the thunder would go on non-stop for minutes at a time. And bad memories like–the mud! It was everywhere! Never being able to keep your shoes and pants clean no matter how careful you are. Or not being able to hear yourself think because the rain hitting your corregated iron roof is soooo loud!
Anyway…hope you are learning lots about life and finding yourself useful there. Peace and blessings….