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A man died and went to heaven. Right inside the gate, he was surprised to see someone chained to a post.
"Do you usually punish people like that in heaven?" he asked St. Peter.
"Oh, he's from Oregon," St. Peter said. "We always have to chain them up for a while; they keep trying to go back."
Oregon weather is truly heaven most of the year. But now winter is on us like a freight train, and I'm stuck on the track.
Winter means the rains -- "the rains," we say, granting them a separate identity. Sir Francis Drake, off the Oregon coast in 1578, complained that the rain was "an unnatural and congealed and frozen substance, so that we seemed to be rather in the frozen zone, than any where so neere unto the sun . . ."
Rain here is not a simple thing, nothing merely environmental -- our rains are existential, demanding. The fierce storm of early December that pounded the Coast was uncommon, but not unprecedented. Most of the time, the rains give us land of great fertility and abundance. I appreciate them, really, I do: the blessed, bountiful, horrible rains. Yet winter is my difficult season. It "comes but once a year," Ogden Nash wrote, "but it lasts for most of it."
Like Nash, I tend to exaggerate. I imagine endless weeks of rain ahead, but our winters are not the way we pretend them to be. Portland gets an average of 37 inches of precipitation a year -- less than New York, Houston, Cincinnati and Miami. More than half falls between November and February, almost all as rain, divided fairly evenly into about five inches each month. To be fair to Drake, he was off the much wetter coast. Astoria gets twice as much rain in a year as Portland; Nehalem gets about 120 inches a year, and the moribund town of Valsetz is probably Oregon's rainiest place, with more than 130 inches a year.
I grew up near the Siskiyou Mountains, with hot summers and snowy, sunny winters. The Northwest is twin climates: moist and maritime next to dry and continental. I knew rain as a summer thunderstorm, and the steady cold rains were alien to me when I first moved to Portland. So mild, and yet somehow colder than snow, they wore away at me in a way snow does not. It's not just me -- Oregon settlers came to call a steady rain a "winter."
The Willamette Valley is smack in the middle of the middle latitudes. These latitudes generally get more rain in summer than winter. The West Coast of North America is one of the few places in the world where this isn't true. Generally wet and warm go together; the polar regions are dry to the point of dehydration. The Willamette Valley is often called a Mediterranean climate, which is distinguished by wet winters and dry summers. But Mediterranean climates don't freeze, and we have a few reliably frozen weeks each year. They also tend to have summer fog and less rain than we get. Nor is ours a marine West Coast climate, tempered by rain but generally humid, with rain falling more evenly throughout the year.
James Cook wrote in 1778 that our climate was "infinitely milder than on the East coast of America under the same parallel of latitude." This providence is the result of a planetary cycle hitting a local landscape. Warm westerly middle latitude winds meet colder easterly winds from the polar regions and form atmospheric areas called traveling depressions. These are strongest in winter, and the result is a fairly predictable, regular separation of wet and dry seasons. Traveling depressions: There are January days when I can't think of a more precise scientific term.
The Coast Range adds a detail called orographic enhancement. Wet air rises over the low mountains and then cools. A lot of the atmospheric moisture is captured there, but some gets through, and most of it falls in the Willamette Valley. It was orographic enhancement that led to the recent flooding torrents on the Oregon Coast. Much of the remainder drops in the Cascades. According to Native stories, the Great Spirit created those mountains as a wall to block the rains. The people east of the mountains had complained of their need for more water, and for their ingratitude, they were punished with even less.
The Northwest has several of the world's steepest rain grades, where the amount of moisture drops dramatically in a short distance. In the Olympic Range, precipitation can range from 200 inches in the center of the mountains to about 15 inches on the eastern side. In the 20 miles between Sisters and the Santiam Pass, annual precipitation drops more than 60 inches.
When the rains begin, many people I know turn faces gratefully to the sky to drink it in. They've huddled inside all summer, daunted by the heat. My next-door neighbors moved here from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and they find our winter panic amusing. Lots of people slog through slush, shovel snow, creep through blizzards, scrape ice off the steps yet another day, disappear into snow banks and fall through pond ice. When I told a woman who grew up on the Arctic Circle in northern Norway that I was writing a book about winter, she looked at me in her confident Scandinavian way and said, "It's funny to write a book about winter when you live here."
I have become a connoisseur of the rain -- a student of the hydrological cycle. A given drop of planetary water spends about nine days every year in the air. Rain forms high in the jet streams, the storm roads. Vapor condenses on tiny particles of dust and debris called nuclei, forming tiny droplets. Droplet builds on droplet, until a drop big enough to fall forms -- an honest drop, but still a lot smaller than the drops we know. These dribs and drabs of rain bang into each other, growing heavier and falling faster until about a million tiny droplets coalesce into the raindrops we see.
Dozens of international codes exist for all parts of weather: several degrees of cloud cover, 27 types of cloud, degrees of snowfall density, seven forms of falling snow, different types of mixed rain and snow, and many degrees of rain. We have all of them here -- at least, all the kinds of rain. Drizzle is unfinished rain, very small droplets caught in weak updrafts and falling before they have time to grow bigger. Showers are intermittent rains. Settlers called a hard rain "Oregon mist." We should adopt a few Scottish terms, like mizzle -- a dank, drippy rain somewhere between drizzle and mist -- and smirr, a rain so light you can't quite decide if it's worth wearing a coat.
Then there is the rain that drives me mad, the cold and steady rain that falls for days from dark, lowering skies. A gutter slips from its catches, water cascades off the roof, drips down the basement walls, washes away the soil. Suddenly murderous, I break an appointment and refuse to answer the phone. The house feels as damp as the wet street outside my wet window, my wet shoes and my wet coat and my wet heart.
But the rain has made this land, and in the last few years, watching the shrinking glaciers on Mount Hood, enjoying a sunny day in November, I wonder what will happen if the rains shift away. No one knows what will come with climate change, but we can expect less reliable weather -- more big and damaging storms, and the possibility of drought. So for now, I practice patience, even gratitude, for the rains. What is it really like, five inches in a month? A half-inch here and there, a day of heavy rain, a day of drizzle, days without. That half-inch on the wet days is more rain than we see in all of August most years. Our rainiest days bring about an inch of rain. On Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean, more than six feet of rain fell on in a single day in 1952.
So, we have gray skies -- so does Paris. Why does it feel like so much more than it is? Because there is a certain incessant quality. Because it can and does sometimes rain for weeks. (Our record is 34 days straight.) Because I prefer the sun. Because that one inch of rain on our rainiest days -- that one is falling on me. I am ashamed, cursing at this tender weather, so much easier than many people manage all year round. Imagine the wettest spot on Earth: the lovely Mount Wai'ale'ale in Kauai, Hawaii, where it rains about 460 inches a year.
I am mostly used to it now. I love the spring and summer and fall. I love the green. And the rains have become the walls of the cave where I spend the cold months. In here there is a fire and family and light.
I spend time regularly in a cabin near Mount Hood, and more than anything this has changed the way I see the rains. Winter and rain are best shared with trees and stones. I listen to the peculiarly comforting sound of rain falling on the cones and needles and brushy bark, running in rivulets down to the river below. Thomas Merton also spent rainy winter nights alone in a cabin. There he wrote of the "enormous virginal myth" that is rain -- "a whole world of meaning, of secrecy, of silence, of rumor."
I am the accidental recipient of this great gift of the Earth -- a gift falling with no thought for me. I am trying to learn to receive it well: in this " infinitely milder" place, to take the miracles where I can find them.
Sallie Tisdale's most recent book is "Women of the Way: Discovering 2,500 Years of Buddhist Wisdom."
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