Rain
June, 2005
Standing in a sheltered doorway outside the Holiday Inn in Midwest City, I watch a thunderstorm building. Almost continual lightning, first from the north, then the south, the west, the north again, the south again, the east finally and then a bright burst directly overhead, making the car alarms chirp. Every third or fourth lightning flash is bright enough to blot out the street lights. A real prairie storm. It blusters and threatens for almost half an hour, trying to rain, but without success. Then comes a tentative drop, another and another and now it rains as if to make up for lost time.
I miss thunderstorms.
Unlike the San Francisco Bay Area, where it pretty much rains from mid-fall to mid-spring and pretty much doesn’t the rest of the year, on the plains it rains intermittently all year long. Usually not this much, I’m told: they got seven inches just last weekend, and the wheat harvest has been delayed until further notice. The cutters should be in Kansas by now, but they haven’t even been able to start in Oklahoma. The wheat is too wet to cut and that red clay is unforgiving when it’s soaked. Their giant combines would bog down in no time.
In the Bay Area, we sometimes get a soaker of a rain, but it’s more usually day after day of drizzling. In Oklahoma they get “gully washers,” or, as Carl Deen, who owned the quarterhorse I raced as a teenager, once commented, “It’s rainin’ like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock!”
Every ten years or so, the Bay Area might get a thunderstorm. Scares the hell out of the natives. The storms are so rare that they’re not a comfort to Californians, but a threat. How, I ask my family and friends, can you be afraid of a thunderstorm when the lightning and thunder only come every two or three minutes?
You should see what a real thunderstorm is like.
*
In the last fifty years or so, Oklahoma farmers have adapted to irrigation, particularly for cotton – if water is available locally, that is. If it isn’t, they still practice dry farming, which works pretty well in wet years and not so well in the dry ones. When you fly across middle America and see the square farm plots, each with a perfect circle of green inside the square, that’s irrigation.
(There are also the aluminum pipes on giant wheels that can be rolled across a field and the light-weight, three-inch, snap-together pipes in twenty-foot sections that have to be hand-carried from row to row. These make green squares rather than circles, using the land more efficiently, but requiring more labor.)
The old-time farmers didn’t believe in irrigation.
Rain makes the crops grow, and we get plenty of rain in Oklahoma.
In a good year.
If we’re lucky.
Mr. Dailey, a farmer’s son and retired butcher, who lived across the street from me during my last stay in Midwest City, grew tomatoes in his back yard, but wouldn’t water them from a garden hose. “Tomatoes don’t like city water,” he explained. “Makes ‘em taste funny.” In a dry spell, he had no tomatoes, the same as his father before him.
*
This week in Oklahoma has been full of thunderstorms, but on average, few Oklahoma rainstorms are thunderstorms. Mostly they’re just rain.
My second favorite type is the lazy summer rain, coming from (I believe) a single cloud, with the personality and all the energy of Eeyore: “I’m sooo tired.” The drops are huge and widely spaced, as if breaking up into regular-sized raindrops would be too much effort. This is a storm in no particular hurry, producing not all that much water before it mopes on along.
My brother and I once ran laughing down Grandma Collins’ street in Guthrie just ahead of one of these lazy rains. It was raining only half a block behind us, and moving in our direction, but not fast enough to catch us until we stopped and let it.
Despite myself and all my efforts to forget, some things I do miss, after all.