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Land of Little Rain

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Is This Where We’re Headed?

Is This Where We’re Headed?

The title for this post is the same as a that of a classic book by Mary Austin about her life in the Owens Valley. While there is little doubt that deserts can be starkly beautiful—as for instance Death Valley or the National Parks of Southern Utah—it can be frustrating to have forecast rain turn into little more than a dirty drizzle.

I call it a dirty drizzle because there’s only enough rain to smear my windshield when I run my wipers. As my windshield wiper reservoir is leaking and its replacement costs a small fortune for my twenty-year-old Nissan Pathfinder, I spend a good part of .L.A.’s so-called rainy season driving around looking through a coating of dirt.

I have no faith in weather forecasters. Why? Because they are only intent on selling advertising. Therefore, they tend to wildly exaggerate any rain forecast. Even if there’s so much as a 10% chance of showers, newsmen will spend hours telling us to look for the forecast in the next fifteen minutes, er…, half hour, er… hour. What usually happens, the mountains to the north of us get the rain, or the deserts beyond the mountains. What we get, at most, is a pittance.

People in the Northeast must be looking at us with ill-suppressed envy, as they struggle with snow and cold and “polar vortexes,” whatever those are. In the meantime, we continue to dry out. Our state’s agriculture, once the envy of the nation, is looking at a potential dust bowl.

Monsoon Monday

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Mexican Monsoon Clouds Over Arizona

Mexican Monsoon Clouds Over Arizona

Generally speaking, it doesn’t rain in Southern California between March and December. The only exception is when we catch the northern edge of a Mexican monsoon, as we did yesterday and today. When we stepped out of the Albertson’s Supermarket yesterday around 2 pm, Martine and I were surprised to see the ground was wet and our car was covered with droplets. “Oh great!” I thought. “This’ll be another dirty drizzle that craps up my car windshield.”

It was more however. In nearby Venice, a young man died when he was struck by lightning, and ten people were hauled off to the hospital. While waiting for our friends Bill and Kathy to arrive, we heard thunder. Then, this morning, one of my co-workers from Redondo Beach said that she had lost her power three times during the night and that there was frequent lightning. Neither Martine nor I experienced anything like that in West Los Angeles,  only about twelve miles north of her.

One would think that the rain—such as it was—would at least ameliorate our dire drought conditions. No such luck! The rain evaporated within minutes, leaving behind only a sticky and uncomfortable humidity.

It reminds me of Florida. My mother moved to a senior condo in Hollywood several years after my father died in 1985. I would visit her from time to time, but I could never find a comfortable season. Every time I stepped off a plane in Florida, I felt as if I were being hit in the face with a big wet towel; and that feeling would persist the whole time of my visit.

I could never be comfortable in a humid climate. The summers in Cleveland were, I thought, dreadful. When a Peruvian acquaintance suggested I visit the jungle area around Iquitos, I begged off quickly. The humidity is bad enough, but the mosquitoes and tropical diseases were more than I could stand. Don’t forget, I like to take vacations in places like Iceland, Patagonia, and the Andes.

This Bud’s for You

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Camellia Buds at Descanso Gardens

Camellia Buds at Descanso Gardens

Today, in the dead of winter, Martine and I visited Descanso Gardens in La Cañada-Flintridge. There wasn’t much to see, except perhaps a foretaste of things to come. Usually by this time the camellias are in full bloom, but this has been the driest rainy season on record thus far, with less than an inch of rain over the last six months. The number of camellia blossoms was way below normal, but there were a few nice blossoms, and quite a few buds (such as the above) waiting for better conditions.

Sometimes I wonder what the global climate change has in store for Southern California. Will we become like the Atacama Desert of Chile and Peru, where the annual rainfall is measured in millimeters? And this while the Eastern, Southern, and Midwestern parts of the country are suffering from record precipitation!

The Rose Garden was surrounded by a fence to protect the bushes from hungry mule deer that find their way into the gardens and devour up to twenty pounds of plants a day. There didn’t seem to be many, if any, roses; so any damage the deer might do would be mostly to future plants.

Even in a dry season, Descanso was beautiful. It contains the largest camellia forest in North America, shaded by some of the most spectacular oaks on the West Coast. We watched the koi form patterns, as if they were ink strokes in God’s own pictographic language. What He was communicating, I don’t know, but it looked nice.

Koi at Descanso

Koi at Descanso

Turtles and Rain

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The Navajo Indians Think that Turtles Bring Rain

The Navajo Indians Think that Turtles Bring Rain

As Southern California is currently engulfed in several mammoth wind-driven brush fires, I think of how the Navajo and other Indian tribes believe that turtles are instrumental in bringing rain. They draw the outline of a turtle in the sand. The stick that is used to draw the figure is then driven into the ground through the back of the turtle. This supposedly brings rain, some say immediately, some say within a few days.

It is supposed to rain a little tomorrow, but given the time of year, I think it will be what a call a “dirty drizzle”—good for nothing but spotting the windshield of my car.

I have a small collection of turtle figurines I’ve purchased in years past driving through the Navajo Reservation in Arizona and New Mexico. Since we get an average of 15 inches of rainfall a year (this year we have only a third the amount), we need all the help we can get. I’m counting on my turtles to open the floodgates of the heavens.

The picture above was taken at Mulberry Pond at Descanso Gardens last week.