The Last Word On Nothing

I’ve prayed for rain many times, thirsty in the desert, craving a flash flood in a remote canyon. Watching rain fall, silky virga growing legs and touching ground, is worth any petition.

I don’t know if prayers work. I’ve been a supplicant in the face of an oncoming thunderstorm only to see it make a hard turn at the last moment and avoid me entirely. 

What I do know, born and raised in dry country, is that you don’t curse precipitation. If it rains on your parade, consider yourself blessed.

This has been a big water year in the Southwest. Winter has kept on through spring and is touching into summer. Last week I woke to a couple inches of snow at home in Colorado. Local reservoirs are topping off, rivers are running high, and the green of spring makes me think I’m living in the Pacific Northwest, not in an arid, bony piñon and juniper woodland.

In 124 years of record keeping, the last 12 months have been the wettest in US history, a lot of that focused in my region where local snowpacks are exceeding 700 percent. In the desert, the difference is beyond profound.

I’ve been tempted to ask the clouds to lay off, for the rain and snow to hold back just a little. I’m tired of being wet and of mountain passes snarled with sideways cars, but I wouldn’t dare. The common denominator around here is drought. It’ll be back. For now, savor.

A few weeks ago I talked with a water attorney in Santa Fe, praising all this moisture. He shrugged and said it makes things harder. Policy people in the intermountain West can deal with drought, it has protocols, but excess water is a nightmare. He said that nobody knows what to do with it, but everybody thinks they do. Lawsuits spring up like carpets of spring flowers. He said he likes the greenery this year, but drought is more familiar, easier.

Not being in drought is a fresh, new feeling. Every time I look at the mountains where I live, as white as shell from skirts to summits, I am relieved, overjoyed, even, for the rivers, swollen ditches, and aquifers filling below. A third of the contiguous US was in drought a year ago, now it’s under three percent. California has finally broken a drought that started in 2011. 

Rather than beseeching the expanse of the sky, it’d be more direct to offer gratitude to the Southern Oscillation, the El Niño pattern that brings cooler, wetter weather to the lower half of North America. Meanwhile, Alaska and Northern Canada are much warmer than average. The event has been in full swing this year, warmer South Pacific waters sending storms across the American Southwest in regular procession. On top of that, Arctic amplification, forced by the warming of far northern waters, tends to set up stationary jet stream waves around the globe. The warmer the Arctic, the more pronounced and stationary the waves, which causes extreme weather to be more persistent. In this case, cool, wet weather has persisted in my neck of the woods.

If rain can be forced to last longer, so can drought. One or the other could go on season after season, stacking up in years, hardly stopping for decades. Let’s hope it’s rain.

Who or what do I pray to? If it’s El Niño and Arctic amplification, then I’m invoking climate change and a warming planet. If all I want is more precipitation, more storage, bigger, wilder rivers, do I stand on a high point and chant my heart out? What can a prayer do? What should a prayer do?

“The short answer is that the historic rainfall over the past year is somewhat of a random occurrence,” meteorologist Jason Samenow wrote May 16 for The Washington Post. “It is mostly a result of weather patterns that have frequently arranged themselves, by chance, in an optimal way to squeeze water from the sky.”

Random. By chance. Squeezing water from the sky. Variables are too many to pick out one or two. That’s when I start to feel paralysis. Forces are too great, butterfly wings fluttering everywhere. I’m tempted to keep my mouth shut, in case my prayers are actually answered. I hardly know where to begin. 

Every cloud I see building into a dark-bellied monster, I wish for nothing but its rain to fall. That’s where my prayer begins.

Wood engraving: Whymper, Charles H., 1853-1941. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/htcw54er#licenseInformation