Rain, Rain, What Am I Sayin'

Hey, let's talk about the weather!

Pretty crummy weather we're having, isn't it?

Yep, stupid cold winter rain.

Yeah, my street practically flooded the other day.

Hmm, well, see ya later.

Ahhh, now that we've got the small talk out of the way, we can get down to the matter at hand.....the weather.

I'm loving this cold rain because it reminds me of a simpler time in my life: when I worked on a deep-sea fishing boat, far off the shores of the rugged, mountain-lined coast of northwest Canada. We would go days without seeing land, or other boats. Just the crew, the tons of dead fish, and the cold ocean rain to keep me company. I almost died out there multiple times. Once, I fell in the ocean and had to be pulled out, stripped and covered in dead fish. If they would have put me in anything warmer than dead fish at first, it would have caused irreparable harm to my internal organs. Heat transfer stuff, you know. Some people did die. Drownings, freak net accidents. One guy was even killed when an extraordinarily large sturgeon snapped his neck with one powerful tail flick. It was a dangerous but fulfilling job, and many are the times when I look back on it with fondness, but no desire to do it again. I couldn't put my family through that now.

Anyway, the rain also reminds me of my first year living in the city. Growing up in Yakima (I've complained about it enough, I think) we never got rain. Snow, yes, sometimes, but rain? Rarely. And we thought of Seattle as "The Big City," which seems really strange to me now. From the east coast, Seattle looks like a little rustic backwater. A really cool backwater that I want to return to someday, but a backwater nonetheless. So I moved to Seattle to start college with the idea that "hey, it rains, like, every day in Seattle." And it's true. In winter at least. That winter (98-99) it rained, I think, 89 out of 91 days between November and March. The other two were overcast, just not rainy. It never snowed, it just rained, constantly, and stayed slightly above freezing. Honestly, that sucks. That much rain and cold and dreariness is hard to bear. Basically, for three straight months it looks like today in DC. Cold, dark, wet, and desolate. But believe me when I tell you that Seattle summers make up for that in spades. You probably won't believe me if you haven't been there, but Seattle summers are the best. Sunny, verdant, only moderately humid, rare is the day that breaks 85 degrees. It's really, really nice, with the smell of the ocean air blowing in from Puget Sound. Ahhhhhh.

But winter there, I could do without. Bah.