Having spent the
first five decades of my life in Canada, I have became on very close
terms with rain at a young age. Lots and lots of rain. Recreating in
the mountains of Western Canada was my thing, and in Canada, summer
or winter, that is all about the weather. I feel comfortable in
saying I have suffered at the hands of the Canadian climate. Oh, how
I have suffered. Rain and I are not good friends.
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| Rain, responsible for foot rot ... and life. |
Like most
mountaineers and skiers in Canada, I became an enthusiast amateur
meteorologist. The Internet traffic from just the ski touring
community in western Canada has been known to bring down the
Environment Canada web servers when the BC snow machine is getting
fired up. I developed some heuristics in attempt to simplify the
interpretation of the weather situation, and since moving to
Australia, have had to modify those. I have found there is one simple
rule that explains 80% of observed weather in both countries:
Canada: absence of a
high pressure system = bad weather
Australia: absence
of a storm = good weather.
While those two
rules may seem the same rule expressed differently, the difference is
profound. In Canada, the weather typically sucks; in Australia, is is
typically pretty good.
My intense dislike
of rain has needed some refinement down under. Australia’s most
famous rock climbing area is Mt Arapiles in the Wimmera district of
east-central Victoria. It is justifiably famous with loads of
fantastic climbing, and over the past two years, we have spent about
four months in the area. The Wimmera is grazing and wheat country.
And it is dry – most years the agriculture must be very marginal.
Over the past couple years, as is the way in Australia, the Wimmera
has been experiencing drought. In our time there, it rarely rained,
and when it did, it was typically only a couple mm or less, which
evaporated before it had a chance to even properly wet the ground.
The place looked parched. The grounds of our favourite camping area
was mostly dirt as the grass had died and was then beaten to nothing
by the traffic of the few campers who come through. The lake is dry.
I found it depressing, year after year, to see the poor farmer’s
fields wilting and dying under the relentless sun as the spring
temperatures approached 40C.
When I listened
carefully, I almost expected to hear the land crying out for water …
but all I heard was the buzz of the loathsome fly.
Much of the coastal
areas of Australia are actually reasonably well watered, and in your
average year the landscape is green for much of the year. On the flip
side, much of the interior is desert, which makes for a stark
landscape, but it is beautiful in its own way, with the land and its
inhabitants seeming to have come to terms with the consistent lack of
water. It is the areas that lie on the margin that bring the
life-giving nature of water into clear focus: in the lands bordering
the deserts, enough rain falls some years that trees try to grow,
lakes try to form, creeks try to run, and farmers try to farm. But
inevitably, and frequently, the rains don’t come, the land suffers,
and it is a depressing sight. You can almost feel the land's pain.
And then one day at
Arapiles this year, it rained. For real. Water, pure life-giving
water, was literally falling out of the sky. What the farmers and the
natural landscape so desperately needed, but couldn’t get for love
nor money, was freely falling. At that moment I had a bit of an
epiphany: what I had come to so dread, actually made the difference
between life and death. And sometimes it just fell out of the sky.
After three years in
Australia, I looked out at the pouring rain, and thought “what a
beautiful thing, a gift.”
Perspective is
everything.
