Whether weather
When it comes to the weather, Los Angelenos are profoundly schizophrenic. Most of us, it seems, come from elsewhere, a situation that undergirds our viewpoint, giving rise to four recurring comments:
- “There’s no weather here.” (Said proudly over the phone to people elsewhere suffering snow and ice.) There are many variations of this — the most popular being “Really?” It’s 72 here.”
- “There’s no weather here.” (Said sadly as one rhapsodizes over romanticized snowbound adventures like snow days off school, building snowmen, coming up from subway stations to discover your neighborhood blanketed with snow, and so forth.)
- “I wish it would rain. We need the rain.” (Said semiannually, when the hillsides are on fire.)
- “Oh, God. It’s raining.” (Said every time it rains — like last night.)
Yes, it rained last night. Actually, it started the night before and rained almost continually for 24 hours. Typically, Angelenos greeted the news that there was water falling from the sky like it was the apocalypse. Surely we’d already had the rain of frogs and just hadn’t noticed. I grew up in plenty of rain, and that was rain that at times of the year actually froze and clustered around trees like a deadly exoskeleton snapping branches, splitting trunks, and felling power lines, so the LA version holds little terror for me. Around here it seems different.
Yesterday morning at 8:59 when I was trying to regain some lost hours of sleep from the night before, my cellphone rang. I let it go to voicemail, but when I checked it later found it was an esteemed friend and colleague I’d planned to have dinner with that night in Seal Beach, 35 miles away. His message: “It’s raining. I’m not sure you can make it.” I looked out the window: While I didn’t see the rainy version of, say, “The Day After Tomorrow,” I could see that it was indeed raining. Two hours later he called again to say that it was still raining, although more lightly. Again, this was inarguable. Still no plague of locusts, though. I watched the weather, too, and after consulting with my business partner decided to call my friend back and reschedule. Not precisely because of the rain, but because of what that rain would do psychologically to everyone on the 5 freeway southbound. I envisioned miles and miles of cars crawling along in fear. The 45-minute drive would surely take two hours.
Before I left the house in the morning, my wife confided that she was worried about our son driving in the rain. It’s natural for a mother to worry — in fact, beware of mothers who don’t worry, even secretly — and her worry created in me one that hadn’t been there just one moment before, but then I thought about his solidly made car with four new tires and the unlikelihood of a truly terrible collision and decided that this wasn’t rational worry. So I put it out of mind.
Whenever I was in the car yesterday the radio stations were filled with panic about the rain. What is this massive precipitation in the sky that is falling on us? What have we done to deserve this? “Wherever you are, you should stay there!” a local public radio host said breathlessly. I wondered if this was radioactive rain sent by the Soviets of 20 years ago.
When it’s too hot, we implore the heavens for rain; when it rains we are the people of Pompeii desperately seeking shelter. Lord knows what would happen if we ever had snow. The effect of all this freefloating anxiety is predictable. Angelenos, who skew toward the neurotic already, fret about the weather even when there isn’t any.