The Hydrodynamic Duplicity of Rain

[This one is dedicated to calmkate who asked for a piece on rain.]

I’m watching the rain through my kitchen window. Not because I’m sentimental or feeling maudlin; but, because rain is not to be trusted… it has to be watched. Rain is like teenagers: It can make a lot of noise at night and sometimes, it strews debris all over your yard. Plus, since rain is constantly being recycled back into different rain, any drop could come from ANYWHERE. This means, of course, that the North Koreans might have listening devices in any one or all of them… even worse, LITTLE CAMERAS. I doubt they’d get much useful information listening to me; but, I really don’t want the North Korean Intelligence to see me bathing. Albania and Greece have seen me naked… I think that’s more than enough…

Rain is the great equalizer, falling on the rich and poor alike. If you tell that to someone forced, by poverty, to live on a flood plain, you can see just how much irony means to someone whose house and possessions are thirty miles upstream. And, some places flood EVERY YEAR. They even have a name for it: Monsoon. The monsoon rains bring lakes where there were no lakes and rivers where there were no rivers and wet monkeys where there were only dry ones before. It may seem horrible but the monsoon is a necessary component of the Asian economy. If it were to stop, umbrella and raincoat sales would plummet… Gene Kelly impersonators would stand idle…

Here in North America, we get things called “flash floods”… because in America, we want it NOW! I don’t mind the term most of the time, but when a hurricane, moving at six miles per hour, is said to bring flash floods, I think we could do without the “flash” part. Hurricanes, by the way, are just a lot rain that goes in a circle. Sometimes, when you have too much rain, it has to mingle and always clockwise. There’s also a non-rainy part called the “eye” that tricks people into rushing out and starting to rebuild before the other half of the storm roars in and kills them. This is scientific proof that nature is a million laughs.

But, a hurricane is better than the alternative: No rain at all. Imagine living in the Atacama Desert which gets one millimeter of rain per year. Now imagine that same desert in its underwear… a little public speaking trick, which may or may not apply here. Besides Antarctica, the Atacama Desert is the driest place on Earth. What is the wettest place on Earth? The bottom of the ocean, of course…

And, without rain, most of our favorite plants wouldn’t grow… or, in my case, my food’s favorite plants. Because even carnivores indirectly need rain. Cows need grass and corn to live. I need cows to live. If we could only get cows to eat each other, we’d have no need for rain; but instead, scientists insist on trying to cure cancer or invent a chewing gum that prevents adenoids.

The people who hate rain the most are baseball teams and children. Children even have a chant: Rain, rain, go away. Come again some other day. Japanese children have a similar chant that begins Teru teru bouzu… but, Japanese children make a creepy doll to go along with it. It has the appearance of a ghost executed on a gallows. You hang it by your window to keep rain away. It just goes to show you that the Japanese are just like the rest of us only a lot weirder…

But, it’s a weird world… Endless cycles of puddles full of North Korean cameras and wet monkeys where lakes used to be. Rain is behind it all… and, if we let our guard down, it might do even worse. So, I remain adamant…

Rain, I’ve got my eye on you!