Best blog buddy NewMexiKen is celebrating actual rain after months or years or maybe decades of little or none in his home town of Albquerque, New Mexico. Which, I feel obligated to point out, is in the middle of a desert. Still the normally sensible NewMexiKen seems shocked and disturbed that it doesn't rain there. In his delight, he goes ironic:
When will this horrible weather ever stop?
That reminds of what was, to me, one of the most vacuous moments in the history of that most vacuous of pursuits, local TV weather. Naturally, the most ridiculous weathercasters are in Los Angeles, where there is an enormous "news hole" to fill and no actual weather with which to fill it. (In Steve Martin's movie, L.A. Story, he played a weatherman who pre-recorded his weathercasts when he went on vacation.) There are only so many ways to say "late night and early morning fog burning off late in the morning and hot in the afternoon," the forecast from, roughly, February to November.
Anyway, for six years there was a horrible drought. The water shortage was so acute that garden and lawn watering was illegalized. A fireplug near my house had a leak, and people would fight over who could put a pan beneath the drip to capture the water to save their plants. Water cops came into our apartment and took our great shower head to prison, replacing it with a conserving shower head that felt like needles against your skin. We smuggled a regular head back into the state and put it on. Somehow, the water cops detected our subversion and confiscated our new showerhead, replacing it again with the officially sanctioned pins and needles model.
This was back when they still used to have Earth Days, though not so far back that they were meaningful events. They were more like corporate picnics, with lots of officially sponsored booths handing out brochures touting corporate sensitivity.
Earth Day is coming up and southern California is embroiled in a nightmarish drought and, at long last, here comes a front off the Pacific. For the first time in six years there's a good solid storm headed toward L.A. and it's going to hit on Earth Day.
I'll never forget the weathercasters hoping the storm wouldn't ruin the big Earth Day celebration.
Six years witout significant rain and they're on the air hoping the storm will pass us by so it won't inconvenience a picnic being held to promote nature.
I remember, at that moment, saying to myself: I can't raise my children in this place. I can't let them grow up this ignorant.
The perhaps greater irony is that we moved to Kentucky, which is not exactly a hotbed of knowledge. But at least it rains here.
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