It's Raining, It's Pouring

Kids cry a lot. I’ve always guessed that part of this is bad parenting. Mostly, I think, kids can be forgiven because the adverse circumstances of the moment are, for them, more likely to be the worst thing ever.

I, like the rest of you, complained a good deal in my childhood and still haven’t kicked the habit. If I complained about the rain, whichever adult was tasked with my wellbeing would retort “What are you, afraid you’re going to melt?”

Strictly speaking, I think the fear ought to be dissolving, but the point stands. Giggling, I once had to leave a poetry event where a high schooler reading a piece about rain referred to his skin as his epidermis. This largest organ of ours keeps the water inside of us inside, and the water outside of us outside. This is what allows us to live on land. Rain, we are told, cannot kill us.

Until all of a sudden it’s right before Labor Day and rain has leapt to the forefront of things that can and will kill us. It’s impressive that precipitation came from the back of the grid to win that week’s race against Covid, car accidents, heart disease, and embarrassment.

I wrote in my journal about the many interpretations of Hurricane Ida hitting New Orleans 16 years to the day after Katrina. I wrote under the presumption that it was somebody else’s problem, that it would be far away in a famously low-lying, climate-vulnerable state. I expected that we would have learned nothing, but I read New Orleans’s flood protection systems worked, though plenty of Louisiana parishes could afford no such protections. After Louisiana, Ida tore through Tennessee and up toward the East Coast, killing dozens across Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey.

Many who died in New Jersey died in their cars. This has stuck with me because driving is meant to be an exercise in control, and when we’re trying to flee bad weather, the car is the first place we run to.

Back in New Orleans, the power outages persisted. None of the newspapers I read seemed keen to explain what happens to the life support machines in hospitals when the grid goes down, but I suppose I’d better not ask questions I don’t want answered. One crisis at a time, it seems.

The rain came down Wednesday night, causing subway flooding severe enough that a coworker claimed New York rats can tread water for up to five days. I rode an N from Queensboro Plaza to Union Square some time around 9:00 PM, only a couple hours before people started posting videos of flash floods mixed with track fires.

My roommate has since remarked that we’re such a civilization in decline that it can’t even rain in New York anymore. The city isn’t waterproof.

Thursday morning, I rode a Citi bike to the office, half because the subways still weren’t running, and half because it was the first day with the dry crispness that used to follow summer storms. I haven’t felt this weather in the summer for years, and even this time around, it was already September. I felt an unseemly gratitude for the abrupt reversal in the weather.

That day, and the rest of the week, it was impossible not to talk about the rain. As early as noon, coworkers and friends said it felt like a half-remembered fever dream.

Almost three years ago, the third night I ever spent in my first apartment, we stayed out awfully late. Returning, we found all of our elevators shut down. We took the stairs to our apartment, on an affordably low floor of an unaffordably tall building. A waterfall that didn’t smell bad enough to be sewage cascaded down the stairs. We took off our shoes the second we crossed our threshold, and we never spoke about this until just before moving out.

This flooding, initially, was another fever dream. It felt far away until the head of my office sent an email about the damage she had sustained. Some familiar faces who lived in Brooklyn didn’t come in. The trains to various friends’ upstate long weekend and Jewish holiday getaways didn’t run. More friends of friends reported stories of damage from a storm we figured was Louisiana’s problem.

All anybody could talk about was the storm. I asked strangers whether we were boring, or whether the weather had become interesting.

The word interesting is broad enough and, like specific, denotes nothing in particular. Often, somebody who tells you an impending anecdote is interesting is wrong. It’s at best a tall blade of grass that has avoided the mower, but more often it’s a pebble on the beach that’s shaped more like a lima bean than are all the others.

The weather, in fact, is not interesting but concerning.

Concerning things dominate conversation, but they make the speaker a grim reaper rather than a snoozer. Concerning things are better suited to hushed tones than to half-excited exclamations of “wow I never knew that! Are you sure? Let me google it. I’m going to google it.”

In Steve Martin’s reproduction of The Pink Panther, Clouseau tries to act natural while hunting for imagined intruders. He yells “It is lovely weather we are having! I hope the weather continues!” giving too much attention to what ought to be quotidian, we are led to believe that this is not acting natural. In 2006, the intruder would think nothing of a man yelling about how pleasant the climate was.

Gradual change is hard to recognize, until all of a sudden it’s time for a haircut. One day, I looked down at the elevator button and I couldn’t understand how I was ever too short to reach it.

About the time The Pink Panther came out, my sixth grade science class had a debate about climate change. We could decide yes, no, or not sure. I equivocated with not sure. What followed was one of the least evidence-based exercises in rhetoric to ever go down outside of a government building. Yet, even the teacher felt that there was room for debate.

Another contemporary memory is a dinner with some family friends at a long-gone Italian place uptown. After some light chitchat, the conversation devolved into an inventory of the other family’s set of “go-bags,” their in-case-of-emergency knapsacks with gold, water purification, duct tape, and who knows what else. My sister and I obsessed over the idea, trying to poke holes and suggest what might or might not be useful in case of zombies. They felt like modern day fallout shelter owners, but the newspaper just ran something on them three days ago, so as far as I can say they are now in the discourse.

As I grew up, the scientific consensus solidified, go-bags normalized, and if I ever wanted to start shit by picking on this or that unsustainable habit my parents had, I would ask whether they wanted their grandchildren to live in a world on fire. Why open the garage if the car is already outside?

Currently, we’re in the quaternary glaciation. That is, we’re in a period where there are glaciers, permanent ice, on the earth’s surface. Permanent not in a forever sense, but in a supra-seasonal sense. Some say, and I beg of you do not take this out of context, this is an ice age. Between the annual forest fires in the American West, bushfires in Australia, and this year’s Greek wildfires—which I for one did not see coming—it feels like we’re approaching this state where, at any given point, there is a wildfire burning somewhere on earth. This inverse glaciation constitutes the world on fire I once invoked so blithely.

When Sandy came to town, the damage was worse, but the warning was a bit more advanced. That was a hurricane, while this had been a hurricane. I went out to dinner and drinks a couple weeks ago, when Tropical Storm Henri broke the record for most rainfall in Central Park in an hour, just below two inches. The storm formerly known as Ida dropped over 3, eclipsing the just-made record 1.5 times over.

We’ve all been caught in the rain. Many of us have described storms as biblical. This was just about twice as bad as the worst of those.

I was out again this time, reasoning that I’d been wearing nicer clothes during the last record-breaking storm, so this should be fine. I was ok, but I was about an hour from having to throw out my shoes, and perhaps my feet, after wading through the subway tunnels away from stranded trains.

Even for those of us old enough to cross the street without supervision and press their own elevator buttons, this is starting to smell like a real candidate for the worst thing ever. Ark tickets are going fast. Get yours today.