Jaci Dawn

Guess what the weather is like in the Pacific Northwest.

While El Niño gave us a wonderful break for the winter, guess what El Niño does to our spring and summer?

March came in like a lamb, guess how it is going out!

I’m pretty certain you guessed right.

The streets are all little rivers flowing downhill.

Yep: a little of this and a little of that mixed in with our perennial greenery. It adds a nice contrast. Melts fast, too.

So I have a confession: while I whine and moan about the constant cloud cover we normally have in the PNW, and while I still have not grown webs between my toes like the rest of the Oregonians around, and while I embrace the days of sun as if the world was coming to an end, this fascinates me. This rain that falls in such huge amounts, that splatters and mists and gets so confused that it rains and hails at the same time. This rain that dumps out of ever-rolling black clouds, fills all the low spots and puddle, makes the sump pump in the crawl space growl at night and darkens the sky.

Rain. We didn’t get that much of it when I was growing up: an annual rainfall of about 6″ or 7″ (I found a cool comparison chart on a website for Annual Rainfall for US). Sometimes that rain came all at once and we’d have a torrential downpour, flash floods, and exciting lightning and thunder storms. then it was over, the water drained away, the sun came out and everything dried out.

Then I moved here, where the annual rainfall is nearly three feet. (37.5 inches according to Wikipedia). That isn’t as much rain as a lot of other states (I can’t imagine Alabama or Louisiana or New Jersey!), but it is a lot of rain to this Desert Rat. And when we get a torrential downpour, it can last for hours or days, depending on the cloud cover, the Pacific Ocean and the jet stream. And when we get a torrential downpour, I stand and stare at it like it is the first time I’ve ever seen rain.

It’s amazing.

Where does all that water come from? Why don’t we have a tin roof so I can listen to it rain (best place in the house: the bathroom or the laundry room: you can hear the rain on the roof vents and it sounds like a tin roof in a rain storm). Where does all that rain water go?

That’s an easy question: I noticed tonight that the Willamette River is rising. It has gone from murky grey and “hog” lines to fast moving muddy brown, foaming and pushing hidden logs, trees, and whatnot northward to the Columbia. (I could not find a good definition of a “hog” line, but if you click the link, there’s a great 1940’s photo of one. Flash forward to 2010 and it looks surprisingly the same. Only now the salmon are endangered and you wondered what these guys are “hogging’? – end of political statement. Basically, a hog line is a whole line of boats across the Willamette River, each vying for the first Coho to attempt to make the long trek upstream to spawn. The endangered Coho. Sorry, political statement just kept going there…)

Aside: We’re not close to flood stage and my heart goes out to the folks on the eastern seaboard (primarily New Jersey where they get an annual rainfall of almost 42” in a normal year). We don’t want to be close to flood stage where the Willamette pours over its banks. If it floods Clackamette Park (and it looks like it will), that’s a normal spring flood. No homes are threatened.

It’s just me and my fascination with how much water can fall from the sky.

And then it is done, the rain tapers off and only the gutters are gurgling (because they are full of pine needles and overflowing, no doubt).

The rain still clings to the pine needles as the sun fades to the west.

I’ll be sick and tired of it by the end of the week, but it’s always so novel when the storms begin to move in.