Rain Read online

  Somewhere, sometime, the first rains helped lead to the first life. Whether those primordial cells were stirred up in Charles Darwin’s “warm little pond” or originated in hydrothermal vents deep in the seafloor as many scientists today hypothesize, the first life required the rain.

  Water alone is not enough, Grinspoon explains. Water is “out there,” too—in the atmosphere of Venus and in the polar caps of Mars—but it does not sustain a living world on either of those planets. To become our life force, water also had to build up in the skies, move along with the wind, and pour back to the surface, replenishing the waters, lands, and beings again and again.

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  From those cataclysmic torrents 4 billion years ago to the hydrologic cycle that slakes aquifers, soil, and rivers day after day, rain, as the source of Earth’s water, became the wellspring of life. “Sunshine abounds everywhere,” the American nature writer John Burroughs wrote in a paean that soaked nine pages of Scribner’s magazine in 1878, “but only where the rain or dew follows is there life.”

  Life, and something more. Humans have a natural affinity for rain, grounded in its necessity for civilization and agriculture. Thomas Jefferson constantly watched the sky from his Monticello home in Virginia, where cerulean thunderclouds build along the Blue Ridge Mountains as if matched by Picasso. Jefferson fretted over cloudless days the way that all farmers do. He found relief when storms returned, carrying moisture from the yet-mysterious West. His letters often closed with a word on the rain—or the lack. “Not enough rain to lay the dust,” he would lament. Or he’d gratefully share news of “a fine rain,” “a divine rain,” “plentiful showers.”

  Sometimes, after writing to his fellow statesman James Madison, who measured rain in a tin cup nailed to the front gate at his Montpelier estate thirty miles northeast, Jefferson would hold off sealing the letter until morning so he could report the overnight showers at Monticello. “The earth has enough,” Jefferson concluded after one such update, “but more is wanting for the springs and streams.”

  Wanting is apropos, a hint at something more. For the story of rain is also a love story—the tale of “certain unquenchable exaltation” that the poet William Carlos Williams felt as he beheld his storied red wheelbarrow

  glazed with rain

  water.

  And for all of history, it has inspired all the excitement, longing, and heartbreak that a good love story entails. The first civilizations rose and fell with the rain, which has helped shape humanity since our earliest ancestors radiated out of Africa when the rainfall tapered off and the forests turned to savanna grasslands. Every culture had its own way of worshipping rain, from Mesoamerican cave paintings exalting rain deities to modern Christian governors who call prayer for a storm.

  Rain and two more of its wondrous pride—clouds and rainbows—have inspired writers, painters, and poets for thousands of years. Homer’s Iliad is thick with clouds, as is much of the ancients’ poetry and prose. The modern poets wrote unforgettably of rain—what Conrad Aiken called the “syllables of water.” Other authors awakened in its absence: Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and Wallace Stegner all found their muse in thirsting lands. True, the sun and the wind inspire. But rain has an edge. Who, after all, dreams of dancing in dust? Or kissing in the bright sun?

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  We long for rain especially when we’ve gone without. Rain is bliss when topsoil has turned to dust; when springs have vanished; when frogs have gone silent; when fish have rotted to eye socket on dry lake; when corn has blackened on the stalk; when fat cattle have shriveled to bone; when half a billion Texas trees have perished; when bushfires have incinerated Australia; when unthinkable famine has spread through North Africa.

  And then, fast as hundred-mile-per-hour winds, a celebration of rain can turn to terror and the deepest grief. Consider the stormy evening of January 31, 1953, in the Netherlands. Dutch families in the coastal provinces of Zeeland and South Holland had gone to sleep in a festive mood. It was Princess Beatrix’s fifteenth birthday. Rain, wind, and waves drum-rolling into the jetties had amplified spirits.

  By 2 a.m., the apocalyptic North Sea Storm was pushing floodwaters over dikes and wooden barriers “like boiling milk.” When it was over, when all the lost souls were finally counted, they numbered 1,835. Half a century later, another biblical flood, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, took 1,836.

  Rain itself is seldom the deadly factor in a tempest; wind is often the most destructive force in storm disasters. But the North Sea Storm and Hurricane Katrina, like most every flood disaster in history, spun off an eternal human response: People viewed the flooding like an attack of nature, and vowed to fight back. Like every culture before or since, they convinced themselves that humans could ultimately master the rain.

  Ancient Rome had its rain god, Jupiter Pluvius. During drought-induced famine, Aztecs sacrificed some of their very young children to the rain god Tlaloc. In Europe during medieval times, when the extreme rains of the Little Ice Age led to crop failures, starvation, cannibalism, and other horrors, religious and secular courts stepped up hunts, trials, and executions of witches, accused of conjuring storms.

  America’s natives spun in rain dances with tiny bells attached to belts and walking sticks. Their jingling was soft compared with the cannon blasts of the late 1800s, when some settlers were convinced that firing cannonballs, setting enormous fires, or cutting tracts of forest would yield rain. These and other foolhardy schemes helped lure thousands of naïve homesteaders to try to farm some of the driest land in the new nation.

  Quackery ultimately gave way to science that birthed the field of cloud-seeding, a chemical milking of clouds. Today, seeding projects continue in the American West and many other parts of the world. The largest efforts take place in China, where government scientists say they coax showers in arid regions by firing silver iodide rockets into the sky.

  If cloud-seeding were a real solution, of course, China’s Yangtze River would not be drying up, along with nearby lakes, reservoirs, crops, and livelihoods. Parts of the United States would not be in the grip of the most severe drought since the Dust Bowl—Colorado River drying, California’s reservoirs dropping, lush croplands turned to dust.

  Even as much of the nation suffers drought, other parts endure increasingly extreme rains, and ominous superstorms such as Hurricane Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record when it slammed into the Eastern Seaboard in October 2012. Yet we carry the presumption of Jupiter Pluvius, strong enough to erect colossal storm barriers to push unwanted floodwater away in times of too much, clever enough to design enormous reservoirs to store precious rainfall in times of too little.

  It will turn out that humanity did, in fact, manage to alter the rain.

  Just not in the ways we intended.

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  Wrapping our bodies in Gore-Tex and our cities in giant storm gutters, humans crave mastery over the rain. Yet even in the age of precipitation-measuring satellites, Doppler radar, and twenty-four-hour weather streamed to our smartphones, rain does not give up its mysteries. Hundreds of tiny frogs or fish sometimes fall in a rainstorm, as they have since the beginning of recorded history. Despite forecasting supercomputers that crunch more than a million weather-data observations from around the world each day, rain can still surprise the meteorologist and catch the otherwise elegant bride cursing on her wedding day.

  We misunderstand the rain at the most basic level—what it looks like. We imagine that a raindrop falls in the same shape as a drop of water hanging from the faucet, with a pointed top and a fat, rounded bottom. That picture is upside down. In fact, raindrops fall from the clouds in the shape of tiny parachutes, their tops rounded because of air pressure from below.

  Our largest and most complex human systems often have the rain wrong, too. In the wettest parts of the United States, we construct homes and businesses in floodplains, then lament our misfortune when the floods arrive. In the driest regions, we whisk scant rainfall away from cit
ies desperate for freshwater. Amid the worst drought in California history, the enormous concrete storm gutters of Los Angeles still shunt an estimated 520,000 acre-feet of rainfall to the Pacific Ocean each year—enough to supply water to half a million families.

  These paradoxes could not be more urgent today, as we figure out how to adapt to the aberrant rainfall and storm patterns, increasingly severe flooding, and more-extreme droughts wrought by climate change. Globally, the continents recently drew the two heaviest years of rainfall since record-keeping began. Scientists are bewildered by the controversy over whether human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are to blame for the precipitation extremes. Increased greenhouse gases push temperatures higher. Higher temperatures cause greater evaporation—and therefore greater rainfall—where water exists. They make it hotter and drier where it does not.

  Climate change frightens and divides us, to such an extent that many people simply refuse to talk about it all. But everyone loves to talk about the rain. Too much and not enough, rain is a conversation we share. It is an opening to connect—in ways as profound as prayer and art, practical as economics, or casual as an exchange between strangers on a stormy day. Rain brings us together in one of the last untamed encounters with nature that we experience routinely, able to turn the suburbs and even the city wild. Huddled with our fellow humans under construction scaffolding to escape a deluge, we are bound in the memory and mystery of exhilarating, confounding, life-giving rain.

  * * *

  * Scientists have discovered impressions of the oldest fossilized raindrops in South African rock, their small, rounded indentations a geological braille that tells of a gentle shower falling on hot volcanic ash 2.7 billion years ago. But that’s yesterday compared with the Hadean.

  ONE

  CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF CIVILIZATION

  If you’ve ever admired a brilliant azure sky, and wondered how it was the heavens that day radiated such clear and dazzling color, you could probably thank a rainstorm. Rain is Earth’s great brightener, beginning with the sky. As fine dust, pollution, and other tiny particles build up in the atmosphere, our celestial sphere grows paler and paler, from blue to milky white. A good rain washes the particles away, shining the heavens to their bleu celeste best.

  On the land, spring rains are the primitive artists, greening hills and valleys and coaxing flowers to vivid bud and bloom. Summer rains are the long-lived masters of color—the steadier they fall on hardwood trees in June, July, and August, the richer reds and yellows ignite the autumn foliage.

  Even in the dead of winter, rain’s true colors glisten in the rainiest place in the contiguous United States. The Hoh Rain Forest flourishes in a valley between the Pacific Ocean and the Olympic Mountains in the Pacific Northwest. Nearly two hundred inches of rainfall a year create a Tolkienesque landscape of giant trees, moldering logs, and mosses that drape, cover, trail, and hang on every surface like fantastical hair.

  In January, the Hoh is brilliant green—Dr. Seuss on an emerald acid trip. Spring-green mosses carpet the forest floor and fallen logs as big as freight trains. Chartreuse licorice ferns beard the tree trunks; matching sword ferns pierce the understory. Darker olive mosses drape their tapestry from boughs, while a greenish-yellow creeper covers the largest branches like evening gloves.

  The wet-weather finery debunks rain’s gray reputation; its legacy is quite the opposite. Dearth of rain often means dearth of color—dry prairie, dusty sand, desert animals with pale skins to reflect the sun’s heat. Many tropical rain forest creatures evolved bright pigments and sharp markings so those of the same kind could find them in the rain-blurred jungle. The vibrancy and patterns of an African butterfly called the squinting bush brown depend entirely on whether it emerges from its pupae in rainy or dry times. The rainy-day butterfly is bigger, brighter, eats more food, and gets more sex.

  Rain is the sex for the exquisite orchid Acampe rigida, a self-pollinator with small yellow petals tiger-striped red. When raindrops splash inside, they flip off the tiny cap that protects the pollen just like an insect would. As the drops hit the teeny catapult of the stipe, they bounce the pollen precisely into the cavity where it must land to consummate fertilization.

  Just as rain brightens the natural world, it has colored the human story, too. Our prehistoric ancestors evolved big brains as they figured out how to follow the fitful rain, which continues to shape humanity in profound ways. When George W. Bush beat Al Gore in the 2000 election that hinged on a Florida recount, Democrats blamed flawed ballots. But rain played a history-making role. An exhaustive study of U.S. meteorological and voter-turnout data to test the conventional wisdom that rain on Election Day helps Republicans confirmed that theory and then some: The researchers also concluded that a perfectly dry Florida Election Day in 2000 would have led Gore to win the state, changing the nation’s electoral vote and handing him the presidency.

  In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo mused about how Waterloo, the battle that brought down Napoleon and ended France’s dominance as a world superpower, might have been a French victory if not for muddying rains that delayed combat, giving the Prussians time to regroup. “Providence needed only a little rain,” he wrote, “an unseasonable cloud crossing the sky sufficed for the overthrow of a world.”

  We’ll soon reflect on the providence and the pestilence, the rain prayer and rain prose. But to appreciate rain’s part in the human story, we must first understand how it works. Rain is created with the help of four main forces that, like the letters of the word, have to fall into just the right place. The Olympic Peninsula, home to the Hoh Rain Forest, is an ideal spot to watch these forces—sun, sea, wind, and terrain—come together to make rain.

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  The Hoh Rain Forest lies along a river of the same name, derived from the Hoh Native American tribe of western Washington. Forest and tribe also share a similarly unfortunate history. Once prospering in vast numbers from the riches of the rain, the Indians and the trees alike were decimated in the nineteenth century, at the end of which the small bands of survivors were consigned by the federal government to protection on a sliver of their former homes: the Indians on a reservation where the river meets the ocean, the forest in a twenty-four-mile stretch of what is now Olympic National Park.

  The forest is a four-hour drive northwest of Seattle and its 3.5 million Gore-Tex-cloaked inhabitants. Pass what feels like 3.5 million more log trucks rumbling along Washington’s Highway 101; blanch at miles of clear-cutting on national forestland; read large red signs protesting an expansion of the national park (“What’s for dinner? Wilderness?”); and finally, take a winding park road east from the coastal highway along the Hoh River, down its glacier-carved valley, and into the surviving rain forest. Once beyond the people and their piles of lumber, it is yet possible to see and hear the true nature of rain.

  An anti-noise-pollution organization has designated the Hoh the quietest place in the nation. Far from jets and cars, and with the trail to myself on a winter weekday, I have the sense of hearing rain for the first time. Not the singular applause we are used to, but a symphony of timbres played at softest volume. Drops strike a muffled plunk in the moss, a gentle splat on the muddy trail, a solid thwack against the mammoth logs and tree roots, a quiet pluck on fern fronds, and a louder snap when they hit the maple leaves scattered on the forest floor.

  Eye level, the dominating forest features are not the trees, but their torsos—trunks of hulking spruce, firs, hemlocks, and red cedars whose tops vanished into the clouds long ago. The trunk of the world’s biggest spruce, called a Sitka, forms crevices tall enough to stand in. Its roots spread with such mass across the forest floor that they have tide pools all their own, trembling with soft drips from the trees and drops from the sky.

  My weather app reports a steady rainfall at 43 degrees. The treetops and moss umbrellas must be catching most of it. Only scattered raindrops make it down into the understory. Each one is oddly distinct as it falls through the boughs—slow-moving
, easy to see like snowflakes, and illuminated by the shafts of sunlight breaking through the wispy clouds and big-leaf maples.

  As children we learn that water is old and constant; we drink the same water the dinosaurs did. But in rain, water feels as new as these drops as they float from the treetops—Earth’s essence reborn in every drop.

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  Here on the Olympic Peninsula, along the lonely northwest Washington coast, the beachcomber’s greatest trophy is a glass float from a Japanese fishing net, tumbled ashore after the ride of its life. The collectible orbs carry the vastness of the Pacific Ocean. Connecting East and West, the sea that Herman Melville called “the tide-beating heart of earth” is larger than all the continents combined and carries more than half the planet’s water. By virtue of that volume, it is also the planet’s master rainmaker.

  The Pacific created the Olympic mountain range, which rises to the east of the Hoh. Marine fossils embedded in the snowy peaks tell the story: About 30 million years ago, the tectonic plate carrying the ocean floor collided with the plate beneath the North American continent. As the heavy ocean plate slid beneath the lighter continental one, the seabed crumpled against the land and pushed upward into the Olympic range.

  Today, it’s as if the Pacific is trying to take back what it lost. On the coastline west of the Hoh, wild surf storms into rock arches and ricochets against driftwood logs stranded on the dark-pebble beach. Isolated rock formations called sea stacks stand inshore as if at guard, grown with shorn trees that reveal the strength of the wind here. The massive logs, piled like pickup sticks, testify to the power of the sea.

  In a single frame, the dramatic panorama captures the building blocks of rain: sun and ocean, wind and terrain.

  The sun’s energy pulls vast amounts of moisture from Earth’s surface, evaporating liquid water into our essential gas, water vapor. The ocean—and it’s really a single ocean, despite our divvying it up into the ancient seven seas or today’s five—accounts for the bulk of Earth’s moisture. Its job is to carry all that water until it is time to hand off to the wind.