Rain

A Story by pj

Remembering stories of a young boy growing up

Rain

On a recent drive home while listening to NPR news, I heard the factoid that San Francisco had no measurable rain in the month of January for the first time in 165 years. If you believe in man's influence on our environment and I do its a sad comment. I know that records are meant to be broken but our recent weather records are not exactly worthy of Olympic gold.

But thinking about rain or the lack of it reminds me of the El Niño winter of 1997-98. Here in California it rained and rained and, you get the picture. It didn't snow, it didn't freeze, it just rained. The weather reports called it the pineapple express coming in off the Pacific. Here we had so much mud our horses in their corrals could barely walk around and there wasn't much we couldn't do about it. We fed alfalfa cubes (alfalfa pressed into little bricks) rather than hay from bales. I would pull a trailer about 80 miles to a ranch and load up with two tons of the stuff at a time. It usually lasted for about a month. That winter I couldn't even get the cube trailer out of the mud let alone get a pickup down to it. I hauled in 80# sacks of feed whenever the weather gave me a day or two break.

And thinking about this reminded me of Dad. When we were little, all the land around us was mostly just empty, sometimes farmed, sometimes with horses but mostly just empty. As little kids we watched the city grow swallow it up. Our land, our 2-1/2 acres, used to seem small but as the open areas disappeared, it seemed to grow larger. When developers bought the land on our east side we were a land-locked island of farmland. I can't remember how many one way discussions Dad had with me about trying to force the developer to assure that our property would drain properly. The developer never did anything and our property never flooded.

But it could have. When we were little I remember a winter it rained and rained. With a normal winter if it rained enough we were used to having a small pond (overgrown puddle) between the house and the old barn. Well this time it wasn't a puddle. That soil was notorious for having a high clay content and not percolating well. This time the puddle grew and grew and we little kids watched it. There was no way we could get to our old barn. This was before we had horses. There was the back yard with a small lawn, the silver maple tree Dad planted and then open field to the barn at the back of the lot. A sliding glass door let us out of the house onto the lawn. In front of the house in the winter we had a mud driveway. As it kept raining that winter we looked out and watched the water get closer and closer to our sliding glass door. It really looked like water might come right into the living room but it stopped about 20' away.

Mud in the winter and rock hard soil in the summer. Remember when it snowed. We ran in the back yard and tried to scrap the 1/4” of ice into snowballs. It was fun but no snowballs. One time when we were little we talked Dad and Mom into driving us up to play in the snow. We'd never seen it before. Dad and Mom stayed on the side of the road by the car. We climbed a hill and like little maniacs slid down on the snow. Who slid into the car and ended our trip?

In the winter it didn't take much rain for our old septic tank to back up. When the city finally arrived, connecting to the sewer was a blessing. In the winter we could always tell when that septic tank was backing up because it would flood Dad's bathroom first. It didn't smell particularly good, that gray water just sitting in the bottom of the shower stall. Until the pumping truck arrived there were no baths or showers. I don't remember how many times as a kid I watched the truck pumping out our tank. That old tank is still there like a bit of abandoned buried treasure. Dad never redid the leach lines. He only pumped the tank each winter. Mom's joke was 'the grass grows greenest over the septic tank'.

I remember once as a small kid watching this big guy working with his pumping truck. He was squatting down next to the open septic tank watching his hose jump around and I asked him, 'You ever fall in?'

He said 'Yep'.

And I said, 'What did you do?'

He said, 'Swim'.

Hey, I was just a little kid and it seemed like a reasonable question.