A Tropical Rain's absence
When it never rains, people go mad. That's what's happened to me. Maybe it's what's happened to everyone round these parts. But don't take me as an authority on people round these parts (or anywhere else), since though I've been here a good many years (what is it now? Twelve? Thirteen?) I still haven't quite given up on the original working plan I had when I came here, which was as in Procol Harum's Rum Tale: to "hide from the natives" and "live only on rum" (the reason being as stated clearly in the song). You can see me doing this between classes. Not the rum part, since I have to drive home later on, but the hiding part. I sneak round the back of the building and inhale dry woodland. That makes me less of an expert on people than someone who might, say, have conversations and stuff like that.
I was never very good at having conversations. I listen to other people when they really let rip (generally at work dos in some commandeered restaurant, though I try to avoid those where possible) and wonder how many deserts and frozen wastes I would have to cross to get to that place where you can actually say what you think, spontaneously and freely and even wittily, without the ghosts of a thousand inner censors aiming their Kalashnikovs threateningly at you. Even when I stick to the level of anodyne pleasantry it often comes out wrong. I'm conversationally tetraplegic. It doesn't matter. Conversation is a relatively unimportant accomplishment. I can't play the zither either.
Rain. Without it, you sort of dry up, as I have, and everything in you goes yellowish-brown and brittle. You turn into a dry person and the worst of it is you don't even realize it most of the time, because we are not tuned to detect levels of spiritual moisture in ourselves or others.
The coastal region of Ecuador has a "rainy season", supposedly, but it's absurdly hyped in the literature. Last winter I think I only got wet once, and that was very briefly. There was one glorious drenching torrent I can remember, but it fizzled out after just a few hours. When the season was officially pronounced over, I felt cheated. I felt like complaining to the manufacturers. There have been better, rainier winters in the last decade-plus, but not that many, and they don't hold a candle to English ones. Climatically speaking, the Tropics are just shite.
Instead of rain, what this place specializes in, during the winter, is overcast. It's a kind of overcast you don't get in Europe. There, the clouds hanging over the landscape seem interested, like they're paying attention and have plans. If you asked a European raincloud whether it supported Brexit or not you would get an informed opinion. Here, they crawl Parnassianly across the heavens, utterly indifferent, utterly uninterested, utterly Leconte de Lisle. Even the word "cloud" seems wrong. It's just a formless, drifting, incorruptible, uniform greyness that installs itself for a few months, does nothing, and then bogomils off elsewhere. It looks like a huge German army on its way through your country to the Russian front. Its contempt for the parched earth below is such that it wouldn't even rain on you. It has more important things on its mind.
As I say, there are the occasional exceptions to the rule. The solid, featureless mass of grey deigns to separate into darker and lighter bits. The darker bits drift closer, wait until you're just getting ready to go somewhere, then let loose. Suddenly there are inches of water in all the roads, and visibility is low, and there is the fleeting beauty of traffic chaos. But I have to go back several years to identify a winter when it was possible to sit in the parked car and just give myself to the sensual pleasure of hearing the hammerings of brutal precipitation on the car roof, and seeing the windscreen become a Seurat. Last winter we were supposed to get El Niño, but did we eck as like. Apparently some people managed to get flooded out of their homes (they always do) but the defining characteristics of such "homes" seem to get vaguer every year. One woman on the TV was complaining she had lost all her kid's schoolbooks in the flood. I don't know if a "home" consisting of a collection of dog-eared exercise books and possibly some sort of display case made of gossamer materials really counts. Maybe this is callous of me. I would be really pissed off to lose my son's schoolbooks in any climatic event.
So yeah, from what I see Europe and maybe North America know how to do rain, and LatAm and possibly the rest of the Southern hemisphere not so much.
So I have to frequent the Rain-Porn sites just to get my fix of the secretive whispering loquaciousness of nature. To see the drops bounce in the air from cowering kerbs next to swarming desagues. To hear the water drumming on landscaped corrugations like the sound of a row of checkouts in a subterranean supermarket. To attune my ears to the spacious, breathy country distances suggested by the shearing of wheels in vaguely bruited encroachments of off-road soddenness, counterpointed by low murmurs and rumours of celestial disappointment. To imagine the glorious drip, drip, drip of the water squeezing through a hole in your bedroom ceiling into a saucepan placed reverently in the centre of your bed. To see in my mind's eye the immoderate antialiasing of the outlines of trees on a partially erased horizon. To witness umbrellas springing up like a forest of toadstools below a row of Edwardian facades. To burn my cupped palm on the turned-in glow of a surviving cigarette.
I was never very good at having conversations. I listen to other people when they really let rip (generally at work dos in some commandeered restaurant, though I try to avoid those where possible) and wonder how many deserts and frozen wastes I would have to cross to get to that place where you can actually say what you think, spontaneously and freely and even wittily, without the ghosts of a thousand inner censors aiming their Kalashnikovs threateningly at you. Even when I stick to the level of anodyne pleasantry it often comes out wrong. I'm conversationally tetraplegic. It doesn't matter. Conversation is a relatively unimportant accomplishment. I can't play the zither either.
Rain. Without it, you sort of dry up, as I have, and everything in you goes yellowish-brown and brittle. You turn into a dry person and the worst of it is you don't even realize it most of the time, because we are not tuned to detect levels of spiritual moisture in ourselves or others.
The coastal region of Ecuador has a "rainy season", supposedly, but it's absurdly hyped in the literature. Last winter I think I only got wet once, and that was very briefly. There was one glorious drenching torrent I can remember, but it fizzled out after just a few hours. When the season was officially pronounced over, I felt cheated. I felt like complaining to the manufacturers. There have been better, rainier winters in the last decade-plus, but not that many, and they don't hold a candle to English ones. Climatically speaking, the Tropics are just shite.
Instead of rain, what this place specializes in, during the winter, is overcast. It's a kind of overcast you don't get in Europe. There, the clouds hanging over the landscape seem interested, like they're paying attention and have plans. If you asked a European raincloud whether it supported Brexit or not you would get an informed opinion. Here, they crawl Parnassianly across the heavens, utterly indifferent, utterly uninterested, utterly Leconte de Lisle. Even the word "cloud" seems wrong. It's just a formless, drifting, incorruptible, uniform greyness that installs itself for a few months, does nothing, and then bogomils off elsewhere. It looks like a huge German army on its way through your country to the Russian front. Its contempt for the parched earth below is such that it wouldn't even rain on you. It has more important things on its mind.
As I say, there are the occasional exceptions to the rule. The solid, featureless mass of grey deigns to separate into darker and lighter bits. The darker bits drift closer, wait until you're just getting ready to go somewhere, then let loose. Suddenly there are inches of water in all the roads, and visibility is low, and there is the fleeting beauty of traffic chaos. But I have to go back several years to identify a winter when it was possible to sit in the parked car and just give myself to the sensual pleasure of hearing the hammerings of brutal precipitation on the car roof, and seeing the windscreen become a Seurat. Last winter we were supposed to get El Niño, but did we eck as like. Apparently some people managed to get flooded out of their homes (they always do) but the defining characteristics of such "homes" seem to get vaguer every year. One woman on the TV was complaining she had lost all her kid's schoolbooks in the flood. I don't know if a "home" consisting of a collection of dog-eared exercise books and possibly some sort of display case made of gossamer materials really counts. Maybe this is callous of me. I would be really pissed off to lose my son's schoolbooks in any climatic event.
So yeah, from what I see Europe and maybe North America know how to do rain, and LatAm and possibly the rest of the Southern hemisphere not so much.
So I have to frequent the Rain-Porn sites just to get my fix of the secretive whispering loquaciousness of nature. To see the drops bounce in the air from cowering kerbs next to swarming desagues. To hear the water drumming on landscaped corrugations like the sound of a row of checkouts in a subterranean supermarket. To attune my ears to the spacious, breathy country distances suggested by the shearing of wheels in vaguely bruited encroachments of off-road soddenness, counterpointed by low murmurs and rumours of celestial disappointment. To imagine the glorious drip, drip, drip of the water squeezing through a hole in your bedroom ceiling into a saucepan placed reverently in the centre of your bed. To see in my mind's eye the immoderate antialiasing of the outlines of trees on a partially erased horizon. To witness umbrellas springing up like a forest of toadstools below a row of Edwardian facades. To burn my cupped palm on the turned-in glow of a surviving cigarette.
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