Raining like never before...
  • CM
  • Raining like never before...

One of the reasons I settled in Seattle is because the city has very little weather. Chicago is a great example of a city that suffers from too much weather in the winter and the summer. This fact was the main source of the surprise I felt upon learning that the heads of Boeing decided to relocate there. The reasons why it's called the Windy City are drawn directly from reality. The weather matters in Chicago. But our city is almost never too windy, never too cold, never too hot. Rain and clouds as they are are not the stuff of weather, which is always something that you can feel, that gets in the way of your daily doings, that prevents you from sleeping at night, and so on. But this Wednesday (October 21), the rain actually became weather—meaning, I became aware of it. As I was crossing the street on Pine and 11th, heading to Vermillion bar, the rain came down like never before. In mere seconds, I was like a man who had walked in and out of a lake. My coat was all water, as well as my pants, socks, and shirt. This rain was the weather. This is not how it's supposed to happen in Seattle. Everything here is mild. Wednesday broke some record for rain that had been held since 1985.

Let's leave our city and enter a jungle in Rwanda. Here, the rain falls heavily at around the same time in the afternoon. Gorillas are some of the more notable (or even noble) inhabitants of this leaf-thriving place. The animal that is one of the four members of our close family of primates is also one that only eats life in the form of plants. It spends a good part of the day sending bushes and trees into a frenzy of turning and bending as it seeks and eats this and that kind of leaf. But suddenly it pours. It's that time of the day again. And the Rwandan gorilla just hates it when it rains; hates it because all he/she can do about the interruption, which is dense and heavy, is wait for it to pass, wait and get so fucking fur-soaked. Though this has been going on for thousands (maybe even millions) of years, the poor ape (one of our cousins, genetically speaking) has not figured out how to "step in, step out of the rain"—to use the words of a mostly forgotten tune by Simple Minds. It's always been this way: The rain begins, and the gorilla stops eating or whatever he/she is doing and takes it with a face that shows a level of frustration that's unknown to human beings.