What to Remember at the Beginning of the Rainy Season

There’s an atmospheric river flowing toward Western Washington that’s left me wondering what it must’ve been like to live in a time before meteorology. To just wake up and deal with whatever was. To not “see” weather coming save the observable hints the atmospheric conditions gave.

“A ring around the moon, rain is coming soon.” A condition created by cirrus clouds high in the atmosphere, the kind that presage low pressure systems by a day or two.

“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning, sailor’s take warning.” Red skies signify high pressure systems – or stable weather. In places where the predominant winds move from west to east (as they do here in Washington), a red sky in the west means that stable weather is inbound. When the red sky appears in the east, it’s being pushed out ahead of an unstable system coming in from the west.

Both adages are true enough some of the time, much like a ten day forecast. 

Have I always thought of the weather as something requiring my approval rather than my acceptance?

Years ago, when my relationship to rain began to feel adversarial, as if this place itself was trying to chase me away, my therapist challenged me to delete the weather app from my phone. 

“Just stop looking at it,” she said. “You do with the weather what you do with your days – reduce it to its worst moment and characterize the entire experience by that moment. You don’t need more practice at this. What if you just had to deal with the weather that came, day by day?”

She didn’t deny the effect weather had on me. She only pointed out that that effect was quite enough. I didn’t need the added distress of anxious anticipation. 

She was right, of course. With few exceptions, the icon paired with a day’s forecast doesn’t characterize the entire day. Not to mention that having an opinion about something that is both in the future and entirely out of my control doesn’t benefit me in any way. 

The weather app was a tool I had weaponized against myself. Facing the weather I found day by day forced me to cut to the acceptance and the practical considerations of going out in it. 

+

There are things I have to remember at the beginning of the rainy season.

No rain, no rainbows. But also no rainforests (or forests, period), mushrooms, aquifer replenishment, healthy salmon runs.

I could go on. And should, probably, in the moments when I find myself discontent with what is. As if rain is anything but a blessing in a drought year – Western Washington’s third driest in the last thirty. 

An atmospheric river can do harm though, it has to be said. Atmospheric rivers are exactly what they sound like, only the water in them is in the form of vapor. They can be massive – larger by volume than the Amazon River. High and low pressure systems channel them. 

The term was coined in the 90s as the phenomenon picked up regularity and severity. In 2019, a rating system for atmospheric rivers was established. The system ranks these events on a scale from one to five – from mostly beneficial to mostly hazardous. Atmospheric rivers can cause flooding and landslides, particularly when they come on the tail end of an outsized wildfire season. 

At the top of the USDA’s Climate Hub page defining atmospheric rivers there’s a mental health statement – “Here at the Northwest Climate Hub, we recognize that extreme weather events and effects of climate change may have caused damage or distress to many of our readers. Reading about extreme weather events may be triggering, so if you are suffering from mental health impacts because of climate change, please reach out to the Disaster Distress Helpline.”

+

If pain exists in the delta between what is and what we can accept, what now in an era of climate disaster? Does radical weather require radical acceptance?

My hunch is that cutting to acceptance is always beneficial, even when faced with objectively wretched weather, even when faced with escalating natural disasters. I’d venture a guess that to really belong to a place – to recognize and live from a place of interconnectedness with the land and all its features and inhabitants – requires a foundation of unreserved acceptance. 

It’s all the rage to rage these days. I’m not feeling it. If climate change requires action on my part (and it does) I’d rather see what I can get done when I set my reactivity aside. 

My relationship to rain has changed dramatically over the years. The weather app is no longer triggering. I use it to time my walks for the rain showers, when the woods empty out of everyone who might call such conditions “bad weather.”