The Sky Is Falling
It's raining in Sydney. This might not seem like an earth-shattering announcement to some of my foreign readers, but after 5 solid years of drought it has come as quite a shock to us. It started yesterday evening and has continued all night.
For most of the night the fat, heavy drops thrummed against the roof tiles and the already sodden ground outside my bedroom window. A film of water covers the road and trickles down the gentle slope outside my front door.
My hard, dry, brown front lawn doesn't know what to do with the onslaught. The water pools in thick, murky, useless puddles while the roots of the grass struggle stupidly to awaken. There's so much water lying on the ground that I can't even smell wet earth. Every minute or so the thunder rolls over my head and rumbles off into the distance. I can hear the occasional car go by, its tyres hissing through the water. These are long forgotten sounds - the sounds of a wet, grey day in perpetually sunny Sydney.
I was awake most of the night, disturbed by the now unfamiliar voice of the storm, and by the damp, almost tropical heat. The sounds of the storm were brought closer by the dense blanket of water, cloud and humidity. Frequent, sporadic bursts of vivid blue/white lighting lit the room like an irregular strobe light, giving frozen motion glimpses into the moist darkness of imagination. I could have closed up the house, turned on the air conditioning and slept peacefully, but I wanted to be part of the strange tropical downpour. I didn't want to miss a moment of its rhythmic, oppressive drama. So I threw back the covers and lay on the sheet, covered with a faint sheen of perspiration and the condensation of a million percent humidity.
I remembered my time in South East Asia ... Thailand and Papua New Guinea. The memories mingled with this sudden monsoon and I could imagine myself in far off lands. I could almost catch the faint, exotic smells of spice and sandstone and dense green foliage. I could almost hear the thousand sounds of a jungle teeming with life in a way that will never come again to this suburban block in a country where it almost never rains.
6 comments:
Coincidences abound. Fresno is in the centre of a valley bounded by mountains that reach into the stratosphere on all sides (for the Australian contingent there are multiple peaks within 100 kilometres of here that make Mount Kosciuszko pale into insignificance - theres a viewing point in Yosemite thats you can drive to that equals Kosciuszko's 7,300 feet and it's only there so you can look up at the high mountains). The purpose of the geography lesson? To show that this valley is as protected from the rain by those peaks as Sydney is by a dry continent and prevailing winds.
And it's raining in Fresno too.
Could it be that it is raining everywhere simultaneously?
Not unless you count the 7 feet of snow that has fallen on one of my staff (the way he puts it has the snow falling on HIM but I question that) in the NE corner of the USA over the last week as rain.
Sounds all wonderful and poetic.
But you didn't have to go out and feed horses in the rain, fix a fence during a downpour, and then tramp through miles of mud to have a shower before getting wet again on the way to work.
And because this stupid water falling from the sky continued, mainly due to it being part of the election commitments from two pathetic contenders for government, I had to go and get each horse and put it in the stables to keep them warm.
Why couldn;t we have a law whereby it rains only at night time (while I am asleep), or while I am at work in an office?
I am pretty sure I object to all suggestions that Mt Kosciuszko is not a glorious and majestic mountain or that it deserves to be mocked as the runt of the Seven Summits. Just because my parents once drove up it in a mini minor (in the olden days when they let you drive to the top), just because I (being the elite athlete type that I am, hahah) once managed to make a winter ascent on snowshoes, and just because the last time I was up there I was overtaken on the final stretch to the summit by a gaggle of 12 year olds on a school excursion does not lessen its grandeur at all.
Incidentally, it's raining in Switzerland too.
My goodness, it is (or was - it's stopped here) raining everywhere simultaneously).
Robyn, Far be it from me to cast aspersions on the bump in the ground Australia claims as it's second loftiest peak!
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