Petunia Sphincters

We were just treated to a rare celestial event here. It had been predicted, and although the details of how such a thing comes about are well known to science, the casual observer could be forgiven for succumbing to awe. We'd heard about the phenomenon, of course. But until you see it for yourself, it's easy to dismiss. Nevertheless, sure enough, right on cue, the skies began to darken, and we all looked up in joy and wonder.

Yes. Water was coming right out of the sky! Just a little at first, bearing its fine mineral smell, the fragrance Life dabs behind its ears. And then a little more. By morning there was visible wetness all over everything. According to official records, this used to happen all the time. But fifty-seven consecutive days of unrelenting brightness has a way of frying the memory tank.

In fact, those same records show that sky water is a frequent visitor in these parts, to the point where people get impatient with it, and wonder if it will ever pack up all its crap and leave, but all that sounds like fake news now. Every day for the last two months, that searing ball of inevitability has barreled across the sky unchallenged, spreading mandatory cheer into the darkest crevices, more cheer than is good for us.

But Sunday it rained. Lord do love a duck. Snails are racing! Ants are excavating! Leaves are putting on weight!

Which, naturally, puts me in mind of stomata.

Stomata, or stoma pores, are my Spark Science Fact. You birders are familiar with the term "spark bird"--that would be the bird whose sheer stunninghood first sparked their interest in seeing even more birds, and consigned them to a life of nerdy clothing and gear and dangerous driving habits. My spark bird was the Western Tanager. I'd presumed that 90% of birds were indistinct and brownish, and then my brother put a Western Tanager into his binoculars for me and made me look, and that was that. WHEN, thought I, did they start making THOSE? What else might be out there?

My spark science fact also changed everything. I was in tenth grade Biology, a required class that I had been dreading since first grade, when I first heard I'd be compelled to slice up a live frog some day. I hadn't heard of menstruation yet so this was the biggest horror I thought I'd ever have to face. But there I was in Biology class and Mr. Kosek was teaching us about stoma pores. Which was one of the coolest things I'd ever heard of.

I vaguely understood that plants "breathe," but I'd never given any thought to a mechanism. This was normal for me. For instance, not knowing anything about construction, I thought walls were impenetrable, until Amy Cook accidentally sent her butt through one while roughhousing at a slumber party, and there it all was, the whole story, gypsum dust and drywall and a peeved parent. Similarly, I knew plants respired, but I didn't even think to wonder how.

Stomata are awesome. Consider a leaf. It is made up of legions of cells. But some cells are specialized: the paired guard cells of the pores. Stomata are the plant's means of facilitating gas exchange. That's right: they are sphincters. Stoma pores close up when water is scarce, and open when there's plenty. But here's how: they consist of two fairly large cells shaped like kidney beans, lying side by side in such a fashion that the concave portions meet up and, together, form a hole. Or, if you prefer to see it that way (and many do), they are like a set of matched buttocks, at rest. The portions of the two buttocks that form the hole are thicker and less elastic than the surrounding portions, like a constriction in a balloon, so that when the cells plump up with absorbed water, they bend toward each other and the hole becomes larger. At this point, you may prefer (and many do) to abandon the "buttocks" visualization and go back to the kidney beans. The point is, when there is enough water in the plant, the water can escape through the hole, and when water is scarce, the buttock beans go slack and the hole shuts down, and the plant retains its water. Nothing could be simpler, or more ingenious.

We never sliced up a live frog. There was an earthworm and there was a pickled piglet. There was so, so much more. Science class was the hypodermic syringe of joy, and I was ready for an injection. I even ended up with a degree in Biology. It is a wonder in itself.

Because I thought I would be a writer.

Blessings On The Roof

It flat poured all night long, and into the morning. We have a metal roof here at the cabin and it sounded like the saints were throwing a party while God was out of town. Dave agreed to spend the day having me read my novel to him. Six hours in, I was getting hoarse, but carried on, emboldened by the fact he was still conscious. It rained on. We had beers.

But it was getting stuffy in the cabin, and we weren't either of us designed to sit for hours. We went for a walk. Put our rain gear on, of course, but the drips by this time were all coming from the bodacious canopy of drenched fir trees. It got dark. We came back. Rustled up some beer and artichoke dip and found crackers in the cupboard ("Best By 2012"). Mountain food!

And no sooner had we sat down than someone sliced up a fat wedge of weather and slapped us upside the windows with it. 100-foot-tall trees squinted down at us and lined us up in their sights. Things was flying. Miss Gulch and her bicycle, diced to pieces, sailed past in a rapidly disintegrating swarm. Our eyebrows shot up to our hairlines and stayed there. And we both felt it at the same time: the irresistible urge to check the weather app. What was going to happen? Was it going to rain forever? Was there going to be a break? These were all knowable items.

In that somebody, somewhere knew them.

Well, it felt irresistible, but it wasn't. Because there was no weather app. Our phones lay inert on the counter, plugged in to maintain power, because they lose power so fast here: straining and searching for the mothership, a biddable satellite, their little tentacles dangling for a connection. There isn't one. Rain pounded the place, and we had to just let it, and assume it knew what it was doing. We couldn't do a thing about it.

On an ordinary day, when we could get a weather app and see what's coming, we kind of thought we could do something; we could avoid ambush; we could strategize. Aha, we would think. You thought we'd be surprised by this shower coming in nineteen minutes, but we aren't. We saw you coming. You think you're so smart, Weather. Our trouser pockets have radar right in them.

Tell you what else we don't know, here. We don't know if anyone commented on my blog. We don't know if someone's trying to get hold of us. We're not entirely sure what day of the week it is. We've got a social obligation tomorrow, unless it's the day after, or unless we already missed it. Somebody with more power than he earned probably did something massively stupid today, again, and we don't know what it was. We don't know the name of the filmmaker guy who's married to Frances McDormand. We do know we love Frances McDormand. We do know how many beers we have left in the fridge. We do know to wear rain gear when we go out.

It takes a few days to get over not knowing. It takes just that long to go back in time, say, twenty-five years, when we made idle talk and rummaged in our own brains for bits of missing trivia, instead of tipping it out of our phones, where our species' collective memory is now stored. It wouldn't take more than a good gust of unpredicted wind on a loose-footed Douglas fir tree to send us back to the nineteenth century, when, inexplicably, people seemed to navigate life just fine.

Here's what I know. I know that the water here is sweet, and that I can walk a long, long way. I know my baby loves me. I know that if I trip and fall on a long, long walk, someone will probably help me out. I know that if there's no one to help me out and I die in the woods, it's all the same to the woods. And if it's all the same to the woods, it's okay by me.

Dampened

My goodness, but it's raining; been raining for days. I thought the sky had forgotten how to do it.

We've soldiered on underneath one improbable sun after another, day after day, all through last winter and into the summer, unmoistened and edgy, wondering who'd put the order in for this unrelenting brightness. Recent immigrants, probably. Arid folk who can't even get into emotional gear unless they're pelted with photons, who require an unremitting stream of solar energy because they've never learned to put any energy by. They have failed to stock the root cellar of their souls.

I'd felt sorry for the sky. I myself experience an odd phenomenon wherein, from time to time, for no reason at all, I momentarily forget how to swallow. I'll be all ready with a nice package of excess saliva and I start to send it backwards and something locks up. My brain actually engages intellectually at this point: let's see. Is it tongue pressed up against the palate? And then something sort of relaxes at the back of the throat, and everything whooshes down? Or does the relaxation part happen first? Or am I supposed to push somewhere? Don't tell me, I've got this. I used to do it all the time. So far, it's always worked out after a few seconds.

Puddles in the 'hood

But that's how I imagine the sky. The Sky of 2015, the sky that forgot how to rain. The sun poked out in the middle of the winter for a week or so and far too many people started to admire it, and it said, well, shoot, yeah, I guess I can hang around for a while, since you're all being so nice, and that was that. OMG, the sky says on its facebook page, I can't believe I ate all that carbon! LOL! And the sky gets a zillion thumbs-up, and it likes a little affirmation as much as the next guy. And by summer, when the lakes shrink up and the big snowy mountain experiments with nudity, it's too late. The sky has lost the knack. I remember I'm supposed to pick up a bunch of water over here in the ocean and then wring most of it out over the Coast Range, and then throw the extra at the Willamette Valley, but right now I can't remember how I used to scoop it up.

But now it's raining like the clouds just fell down all at once. The

TV weathermen are standing in flooded streets with little meteorologist woodies. The roof sounds like the staging area for Santa's reindeer plus his backup team. The low spots in the garden are advertising for trout. The Coast Range is getting fifteen inches of water and it's going back to work on its abandoned Flattening Project. The valleys are exalted, and the mountains are laid low. Mud slips. Rocks loosen. Roots change their minds about things. Trees entertain existentialist thoughts. Everywhere you look, water is doing its damnedest to get to the center of the earth, thwarted only by topography. It is a beautiful display of water and gravity, of the way things should be.

"There's water in the basement," comes the text message from the new renters.

That's one way to thwart. Well, it's just a little joke rain plays on me because it knows I like rain. Ha ha! How do you like me now? Rain can be quite the scamp. I remember how to swallow and Dave goes for the ladder to check the gutters. But I'm calm. Everything is as it should be. We've still got water, and we've still got gravity. I don't want to float off into space. I certainly don't want to float off thirsty.

Probably, Rain

The weathermen around here like to comment periodically on what an interesting area we are in, meteorologically. By that they mean they really wish they worked in L.A. or somewhere they could phone in a forecast for the month and go on vacation. Here in Portland we have a lovely confluence of topographical features that result in great natural beauty, massive gastropods, and meteorologists with substance abuse issues. We take it in stride. If I need a weather report, I check the NOAA website and three different locations in the newspaper and pick the one I like the best. They won't be the same.

The TV guys look uncomfortable when they're pointing at the map. "We've got moisture coming in off the ocean," they'll say, beginning to shrug, "and an arctic blast surging in from the north"--their shoulders are now just below their ears--"and it's all going to turn on what the low pressure sweeping down the gorge decides to do." The weatherman is now noticeably shorter as measured against the latitude line on the map behind him, and he has punted as usual, phrasing his forecast in such a way that it will all be the fault of some anthropomorphized cold front with an agenda and a poker face.

It's not that there aren't things you can sort of count on. Like, it's probably not going to snow. I was excited when I moved here when, that first winter, it began to rain, and rain some more, and then a cold front was supposed to come in. Snow! I thought. I like snow. I did like snow. It was pretty and fluffy and it got you out of school for a day. I was many years past that being a factor, but it still informed my emotions. And I was not yet a mailman, for whom there are famously no snow days. Not only are there no snow days, but they're going to make you climb into an antique Jeep with slick tires and no heater and skeeter out like a greased hockey puck. The idle is set to five million RPMs in order to keep the engine from crapping out altogether and as soon as you let your foot off the brake it is just between God and gravity which ditch you end up in. This is one reason mailmen drink on the job. The other is they're alcoholics.

Nevertheless, we got no snow that year. We'd had precipitation for two months running and as soon as it got below freezing, the sun came out. The problem was we get our moisture from the south and west, which is warmer, and our cold from the north and east, which is drier.

What we don't get much of is very cold or very hot. This suits me. I do remember a particularly cold night I spent waiting for the train in Boston. It was -15F and there was a fifty-mph wind, and I thought: how interesting! I have literally never been this cold in my life. My nipples snapped off and rattled around with the coins in my pocket. Chunks of my ass calved away and clanked onto the platform. It didn't grow back for weeks.

But last week it got really cold. Oh, maybe not cold like it gets some places, but fifteen degrees, and less. We're not cut out for it. We put on our good raincoats, and then we layer on our okay raincoats and our muck raincoats, and then we're out of options. We haven't prepared. Suddenly we're Googling how to keep hummingbird feeders thawed out ("heat them"). Yes, we have winter hummingbirds. Nobody's told them about global weirding and we worry we'll find them hanging upside-down from branches like tiny popsicles.

So we have rain coming in off the ocean, cold coming in from Canada, and a large mountain in the way

of all of it. The Columbia River Gorge picks up any screwy weather it finds out east and fire-hoses it into the metropolitan area. There are so many microclimates the precipitation map looks gerrymandered.  One day we noticed it was pouring rain in the front yard and sunny in the back. So many things happen at once that the most common weather feature in downtown Portland is rainbows, which is what most of us would have voted for anyway.

Any batch of moisture drifting into this little valley doesn't know whether to pellet up, take a gut punch right down the gorge, or smack into a mountain. It's all confused. So mostly it just piddles itself out of sheer lack of imagination. The weathermen cross their fingers and count on that. The phrase here is a little different from most places. If you don't like the weather, wait six months.

Call It Merriweather

It is worth noting that Lewis and Clark, after having withstood hardships and horrors and ambush by mosquitoes, were nearly done in after a few days in the rain at the mouth of the Columbia. Their very survival was in question; their clothes were a fright; they near perished from whininess. They had fetched up in a dot of a cove they called Dismal Nitch, and so it is called to this day, there being no compelling reason to change it. Dismal Nitch is south of Cape Disappointment and just around the bend from Go Stick Your Head In The Oven Bay. It's rainy.

This is the kind of trouble you could expect from an outfit calling itself the Corps of Discovery, bound and determined to discover things all on their own, when they could have asked anybody and they would have found out how rainy it is. The whole area is renowned for moistness, but they'd have done fine with a little rain gear and a proper attitude. "This is the first of ninety consecutive days of rain," they might have said, "a good time to catch up on our reading."

Instead they come boating up wearing buffalo hides that promptly rotted away, and they got out of their canoes and into a giant snit. It rained sideways for six days, which anyone could have told them is quite typical of November, and--as Clark described it--our camp entirely under water dureing the hight of the tide, every man as wet as water could make them all the last night and to day all day as the rain Continued all day...and blew with great violence immediately from the Ocian for about two hours. Were this not Dismal enough, some of the party elected to drink too much salt water and on them it acts as a pergitive. That probably put a capper on things.

At least they had salmon. Salmon are anadromous fish that spawn in tiny streams and make their way, against great odds, to the Ocian, where they live and grow for up to five years, and if everything goes just right, they return towards the waters of their birth and become quite delectable in a lemon caper sauce, if they're not overcooked, and that's where most people go wrong. It's hard to beat a properly prepared salmon, and yet that is just what Lewis and Clark did; they subsisted on "dried fish pounded," which pretty much defines overdone. Even if they had had the faintest idea what to do with a salmon, it's going to get on your nerves if you eat it every day all winter long. It's not like peanut butter.

The native Chinook people, meanwhile, were happily high and dry, wearing clothing woven from the bark of cedar trees--essentially, they were wearing lightweight log cabins, and the rain just sheeted off them. Things were even easier on their descendants, who were able to update with aluminum siding and proper gutters, but these people were sturdy and strong. They steadily supplied the hapless Corps of Discovery with pounded salmon in an effort to turn the tide of invasion, but it was for naught. Soon enough there was an epidemic of white people everywhere you looked, and they commenced doing things Lewis and Clark couldn't even have dreamt of. Bottled water alone would have rendered them flabbergastric.

They also laid in a bodacious bridge across the mouth of the Columbia, over which Lewis and Clark could have simply strolled to Oregon, not that it would have improved their mood any. They invented automobiles to stick on the bridge. And once they had achieved the invention of the kilometer, they were able to concoct the Great Columbia Crossing, an event wherein thousands of people are bussed over the bridge to good old Dismal Nitch and allowed to walk or run 10 km back to where they started. You can almost hear Lewis and Clark's minds blowing across the winds of history, but the fact is many activities become plausible when you do not have to slay your own dinner or duct-tape your disintegrating buffalo attire on a daily basis.

On the day Dave and I joined the Great Columbia Crossing, heavy clouds were everywhere, rolling in off the ocean and piling up inland. Nary a drop of rain touched us, because God favored our endeavor, although all around us we could see the squalls dumping rain on the folks He hated. For two hours half of the bridge was closed to automotive traffic. Modern people, especially in the blue states, love bicycle or pedestrian events that inconvenience motorists, and we swell with satisfaction when we see the line of cars creeping sullenly along at our sides. For a short while, we have defeated the scourge of modern-day dependence on fossil fuels, and we swing our arms and thump our chests on our commemorative T-shirts. It's a great feeling, well worth the two-hour drive from Portland.

The Woes City

Portland, Oregon: The month of May has recently adjourned after setting a record of one hundred and forty-five consecutive days of rain, smashing the previous single-month record of eighty-nine days in 1876 ("Dead Man's April"). Portlanders woke up last week to the news that a woman who had jumped from a tall building fell directly on another woman on the sidewalk, killing both instantly. Slouching in coffee shops, languidly stroking the ridged scars on their wrists, they pondered, in that crescent of time between the last coffee and the first beer, which of the two women was the most fortunate.

Although suicide pacts among the young have largely been thwarted by lethargy, pedestrians have been observed to linger on bridges. In the animal world, cats are irritable, slugs exhibit zip, and the baby bird population has proven susceptible to drowning, with natural selection now favoring the picky eater.

In those few areas experiencing sunbreaks, rods and cones have snapped audibly; temporary blindness is reported to have led to a spike in fatal car wrecks, some of which have been ruled accidental. Elsewhere, sporadic sunbreaks have been blamed for the socially corrosive introduction of hope.

Sociologists are also studying the possible detriment to the spirit arising from Portlanders' self-satisfaction as environmental advocates, noting that the reputation is largely unearned. Anyone willing to wait a couple years can boast a green roof, they point out, although green vehicles take a little longer.

As always, natives spurn the personal use of umbrellas, which merely add to the number of items that require drying out. These are observed only in the days leading up to the Rose Festival to protect hybrid tea roses in competition. Portland is, in fact, known as the Rose City, an umbrella term (as it were) encompassing many individual Black Spot Fungus neighborhoods, and this holds the key to understanding springtime weather patterns in the area.

Traditionally, the Rose Festival concludes with a week of parades in June, beginning with the Starlight Parade, an evening event named after a mythical sky phenomenon. This parade always features a clown troupe called the Rainmakers, who carry inside-out umbrellas and spray spectators with water pistols, an activity that was finally abandoned when nobody noticed. The Grand Floral Parade is held one week later, with thousands of plastic-covered spectators lining the streets to witness the annual drenching of delicate petals and princess curls. It's a festive scene, and marks the coming of the sunny season, which begins the next day. Meteorologists explain that our prevailing weather pattern arises when a deep plume of moisture embedded in a powerful jet stream stretching from Japan to the Oregon coast collides with the Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade.

The hail, on the other hand, is thought to be caused by the planting of peonies.