October 8, 2024

Sometimes, it rains.

 

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning how to dance in the rain.

-Vivian Greene

 

Finally!  The weather has cooled.  Highs have dropped from the mid-eighties to sixty degrees.  That means that Waldo and I can go walking just about any time of day.  But it’s still too warm to walk with a jacket on during peak temperature times and too cold to walk in the mornings without one.  I don’t like to take my jacket off and then have to carry it, so we’ll wait until the afternoon to head out to the rail-trail.  The kicker is, it’s raining all day.  That means I’m going to wear my rain jacket and pants.  Normally, that would mean I will be uncomfortably warm, but my rain clothes are old and have lost their impermeability.  So I’ll get wet, but not as soaked as I’d get without them and the wet will keep me cooler.  Life is full of compromises.

The rain is light, more like a drizzle, really, but constant.  There’s not much wind, which means no driving rain.  My rain clothes soak up water, instead of repelling it, but the process is slow, so there is some protection from the wet.  Still, it doesn’t take long and my shirt and pants are damp, although not nearly as soaked as they’d be if I took off my rain gear.  It’s all tolerable; I won’t melt and my toes aren’t going squish, squish in my boots, so we’re good.

Waldo could care less about light rain.  If it’s raining really hard, he’ll try to take shelter by going from bush to bush, but in this kind of drizzle, he pretty much ignores it.  In fact, I think he rather likes it.  Rain means there are puddles and he prefers lapping up water from puddles to drinking water from his water bottles, for some reason.  There are also fewer bicycles to contend with (although the number is not zero), which is appealing to him.  We are not the only ones out here in the weather. doing doggy duty, so we get to do some socializing, which he enjoys.

The rain is light enough that the visibility is about two miles.  In the clearing where the new park is being constructed, I can see all the way across Fort Meadow Reservoir and north well into the hills.  This is the kind of weather I used to like to fly in – dense enough to require instruments, but light enough that everything was above minimums.  At altitude, you’re surrounded by a soft blanket of white.  But as you descend to land, you pop out underneath the clouds and there in front of you, as if by magic, is a long straight runway ready to gently accept you to its bosom and give harbor to the wet and weary.

Nature is different in the rain.  The light is dimmed from the clouds, and you get a little more green and blue with a bit less yellow and red.  Things take on a darker, more verdant hue and lose the vibrant glitter they have in bright unobscured sunlight.  The light is so diffused that there are no shadows, which give things a flatter look.  Much of the texture of living things, like tree bark, is lost.   It’s quieter outside, not just from the scattering of noise by raindrops, but also because most animals, like birds, insects and squirrels, are quietly waiting out the drizzle in their hidey-holes.  The air smells different, saturated with wetness, the odor of mud and, well, wet Waldo.

None of this makes walking in the rain less pleasant than walking in sunshine.  It’s just different.  You see nature from a different perspective that adds to its beauty, it doesn’t detract from it.  I remember scuba diving at depths of 60 to 100 feet and things had a similar appearance.  At that depth, only the green and blues can be seen, the other wavelengths of light are absorbed by the water.  Diving at night, when you bring your own source of light in the form of an electric lantern, and all the yellows oranges and reds magically appear.  The world seems so different, but not necessarily more beautiful.

For Waldo and me, walking in the rain is not a burden.  It just adds to the variety of our experience.  We still get our exercise and time outside in the woods.

And that’s what’s important.

 

Things are quite green in the rain.

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