THE WEATHER

Everyman’s Favorite Whippingboy

July-September 1995 Weather We had lots of weather these last few months. Seems like we had some almost every single day. It rained a lot. Then again, sometimes it didn’t rain and it was real pretty. Folks said that it rained cats and dogs, buckets, bullfrogs, sheets and cows urinating on flat rocks. This could be true but I didn’t go outside to check. It was too wet. All in all, whatever kind of weather a person liked, he was bound to get it for at least a day or two. Now people around here talk a lot about the weather. They have some mighty interesting ideas about it too. Some people think that they can make it rain if they plan to cut their hay...or if they just did. Some people allow as how they can accomplish the same thing by washing their car. A plumber I talked to says he can bring a real downpour by digging a septic system and a couple of the carpenters in these parts claim they can bring on a rain by taking off your roof. If these things are true, the plumbers, carpenters, mowers and car washes must be doing a bang up business in Seattle. These notions sound strange yet people still believe in them. Some folks also believe in astrology, politician’s promises, fortune cookies and trickle down economics. Even crazier, some loonies out there actually believe weathermen can predict the weather. September - December 1995 Weather It seems like this weather never ends. Every day we have more of it. Hot, cold, wet, dry, windy, icy, humid, cloudy, clear, hail, lightning, thunder, tornados and hurricanes. Every time you think you’ve got some kind of idea what’s going to happen outside, it changes. It’s enough to drive you to distraction. On the other hand, things would get kind of boring without it. If everyday the weather was just the same, what would we gripe about. I’m sure we could find other complaints but we’d be hard pressed to find ones so convenient. The weather is just so available...and, it can be counted on to be inconsistent. Few things in life offer us such good opportunity to feel misused. Perhaps our problems with weather are just a matter of perspective. Perhaps if we could find a new viewpoint, things would seem different. After all, to the astronauts on the space shuttle, the weather on earth always looks partly cloudy. Where they are, it never rains, it’s never too humid. Still, I suspect that when one of those folks crawls back in the hatch after a "skywalk", he or she probably turns to her shipmates and says something like"“Whew, the weather out there is murder. My front side was a few hundred degrees over freezing and hotter than a holiday in Hell and my backside was near absolute zero and colder than a well digger’s..." Well, you get the idea. It’s just built into the species, complaining about the weather. I wonder what Neanderthal genius first came up with the idea. It was a brilliant move. After all, comment about the weather does not inspire fights for dominance, even though rain gauge discussion comes near it. It’s seldom seen as a sexual come on. In most ways, griping about the weather is harmless and non-threatening. Perhaps this fact caused Neanderthal weather-gripers to survive while their less clever brethren fought over sexual partners and dominance. Perhaps being meteorologically inclined is a powerful survival mechanism. Maybe if they talked about the weather a little more in Bosnia...or maybe not. In any case, it's a nice night out...wonder if it’s going to rain? Supposed to be a front coming in from the west... January - March 1996 Weather The wind’s blowing outside. When it blows hard like this, it sounds like the ocean. Waves crashing...the slow building of the surf. Of course, that’s because it really is an ocean . Gases operate for the most part by the same physical laws that liquids do. The atmosphere is really a big ocean that covers our planet with all the attendant currents and tides and such various behaviors that we normally attribute only to bodies of water. The reason we don’t think of it as being an ocean is that we aren’t happy seeing ourselves as bottom dwellers. In the water ocean, the upper class fish get to swim around the way birds do in our ocean of air. They aren’t stuck to the bottom like the crabs, the starfish, the mudcats...and us. Why some of them can even defy gravity for short periods and like the space shuttle, sparkle for a while in the sun before falling back to earth. Perhaps this is why we are so captivated by flying fish and dolphins, creatures of the deep blue sea who by supreme effort can break the bonds of their element and taste true freedom. Glued as we are to the fundament by cursed gravity, we sometimes feel jealous of these simple creatures to whom, like birds in the sky, God gave the gift of flight. Perhaps that is why a fisherman so enjoys hooking a fish and watching it spin on its tail. It’s all about mastery. When that marlin leaps from the water, intent upon flight, the fisherman holds the line...he is in control. “No, you will not leave this earth” is his subtle demand. “If I am trapped here, so shall you be.” It works much the same with a kite. Underneath, perhaps we all think that things that fly should be on a string...just as gravity attaches each of us to the ground by an invisible cord. But this attitude is a compromise. In truth, we would give it all up for flight. We feel a great sense of loss when the kite flutters to the ground. If we could swim in the ocean of air, we would forget our world of control and dominance. We would set the kite and the bass and the tarpon and the swordfish free and fly like the lark and the scissortail, playing in the wind. However, such is not the case. The maker gave us the wings of the intellect only. We must build mechanical beasts in order to fly and only a few of us get the chance to hold the line that controls the mechanical beast. Not all of us can be pilots. Some of us must be fishermen. The wind is gusting outside. Surf’s up. I think I’ll get my rod out and try my luck. April - June 1996 Weather It woke me up at 5AM this morning...not the howling wind...not the pounding of rain on my tin roof...not the crash of thunder and the flash of lightning. No, these sounds would be too relaxing. This horrible, cacophonous sound was worse...much worse. It was the crackling buzz of the NOAA broadcaster on the AM radio. My wife was trying to find out if the weather powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, had seen fit to give her a day off. It’s the Great Weather Lottery. The weather gods turn the crank on that big grab basket of possible weather situations in the sky and out comes...who knows what...but from time to time, the lucky weather number comes up and Hallelujah! School’s out and lots of people get to stay home from work. It’s a random weather holiday! Praise God and the weather he rode in on. Now I have nothing against the occasional extreme weather situation. Since I work for myself and my work can only be done in reasonable weather, I have developed a bit of a negative attitude about inclement conditions; but all in all, if it’s occasional instead of steady, I can live with it. No, my problem is with the system... It’s that NOAA announcer’s voice. Why does he sound like that much maligned broken speaker in a fast food drive-through? Is another weatherman frying eggs in the background? No matter where I have lived, the official weather guys all sound the same so it can’t be radio reception. No, I think those guys just crackle when they talk. I hate the way everyone is obsessed with the bad weather. It’s like Desert Storm every time a hard freeze comes along. The nation glues its ear to the weather radio with the same intensity that we watched CNN while those Navy boys bombed the Iraqis out of Kuwait...perhaps even more intensely as our own freedom is at stake. We wait...listening to the crackling...longing sleepily for our emancipation. Then, if we win the weather lottery...the weather is too dismal to do anything but sit at home and vegetate. This is not practical. What’s the point of having a special unannounced holiday on a day when the weather is so bad that everyone is stuck indoors? I have a much better plan. Several times a year when the weather turns nice, NOAA could declare an "Official Good Weather Watch." We could all hunker over our radios and wait. Then, one morning when the temperature is just right, the air is crisp and clear, the sky is crystal blue and the sun has a smile on its face, we would all to an wake up to an "Extraordinarily Good Weather Warning." and joyfully hear the weatherman declare it too nice a day to go to school or work. We could call our bosses and say "You don’t expect me to come in when the weather is like this do you?" Then we could get some real benefit out of the Great Weather Lottery. Then it would be worth it to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning to the irritating crackle of the NOAA weatherman’s voice. July-September 1996 Weather Poetic Aftercast It rained, It rained It rained, it rained just look at the drops there’s mud in the driveway and water for crops It rained, it’s wet there are pools in the lawn it cleaned out the gutters as it gurgled along It ran through the ditches and filled up the cracks that lay on the ground like huge chicken tracks like great big dry roosters had fractured the land nothing could stop them nothing could stand ‘till it rained, it rained from heaven to ground and softened the landscape and made it more round and filled in the valleys and sealed up the holes and watered the corn that needed it so It rained, it rained like a big ol’ freight train it barreled down gullies and back up again it chugged up the banks screamed ‘round the curves beer cans and gum wraps were tossed in the surf Like everything else we long for so much it ran through our fingers and turned into dust we struggle to hold it cup our hands as it falls we drink it and dam it and pipe it through walls but it sinks and it rises into ground, into air and we cannot predict when it joins with la mer we cannot contain it ‘s rise from the sea as it turns into fog on the firth of Dundee or wafts through the ferns in the Pacific northwest or spills on the front of a parched poet’s vest or falls from the sky like jewels in light and calls the living once more back to life At the edge of the storm where the sunlight remains the last drops of gold hang from the grain You stand in the field with arms to the sky You reach for the heavens as the clouds hurtle by shouting over and over and over again... “It rained, it rained, it rained, it rained, it rained, it rained, it rained.” Spring 1997 - Weather Weathering Relationships Weather has a powerful impact on many aspects of our lives but it is nowhere more powerfully felt than in our relationships. In the last thirty years, social scientists expanding on the theories of Charles Darwin have come to believe that many of our actions are genetically driven. They say that our behavior is a result of the environment that our species shared during the million years or so that we were hunter-gatherers. They say that our behavior is deeply programmed not by our current environment but rather the environment of our grunting forebears and therefore much of how we see and react to the world today is out of step with current reality. In other words, we may live in a George Jetson world but we still act in ways that Alley Oop would consider appropriate. Now what does this have to do with the weather? I have come to see that weather is a more pervasive force in our lives than we admit. If what these scientists are saying is true, then there is one part of Mr. Oop's environment that is guaranteed to have inserted itself into the genetic makeup of the modern man...the weather. To Alley and his cronies, who had only limited shelter to protect themselves from the elements, weather was a dominating force. Therefore it makes sense that it had major impact on our genes. I can see this in my wife. Her behavior is much like that of the weather. Some days she's hot and some days she's cold. One day she'll be bright and sunny then all of a sudden I'll feel the pressure start rising and I'll know a storm is on the horizon. You can see the impact of genetic weather imprinting on everyone around you. We all like to think that we can predict the behavior of our friends and relatives much the same way we hope TV weathermen can predict the weather. Somehow both sets of predictions tend to fall short. The truth is that people are not predictable. Consider these examples of weather-like behavior. People with sunny dispositions become frosty when offended. Women are given to sudden precipitation and men to ill winds. We "weather" difficult times and "acclimate" ourselves to new environments. Our homes must have the right "atmosphere." During elections, politicians wear fronts and flood us with snows jobs that lead to landslides. Then, our new leaders take us into depressions, and Desert Storms. It's all in the genes. My wife agrees with this theory. She says my arguments are like a hot wind off the desert. Summer 1997 - Weather Like most of the extended campaigns I have entered into with my wife, I lost the battle over having a television downstairs. I put up a good fight. I kept the demon thing out of my space for almost three years. I am one of those sick individuals who can't walk off from a television when it calls my name. This is sad because there is very little on the box that I find worth my time. Nonetheless, now that the foul thing has crept into my living room, I watch...and squirm. Perhaps you would like to know what this has to do with the weather. Why, nothing. It has to do with weather television. Like all programming on television, weather TV has little to do with the real world. The weather on the six o'clock news is all about ratings. The weathermen are practically begging for a catastrophe so they can support their station manager'ís demands for better ratings and therefore higher advertising revenues. It's sad to see those poor men and women put under such pressure to make the weather entertaining because, let's face it, most of the time the weather is not all that exciting. Sometimes however, as I have learned in my latest stint as a television junkie, the weather is a regular three-ring circus. This is especially true if you have great footage from insane tornado chasers or bozos who stay in coastal towns when hurricanes rage through or people who, when the Mississippi drowns their home, save their video cameras. These weather situations are very exciting and I would never have had the chance to see them over and over and over and over and over again if I had not spent a good deal of time watching television. "Whoa, lookit the funnel on that thing...not much left of that town...hey, buddy, no way that dike is gonna hold... yawn... volcano... more lava... 'nother earthquake... London bridge is fallin' down...'nother hurricane...snore." Copyright 1996 Christopher K. Travis

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