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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 28, 2015)
OPINION 4A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2015 Missing the rain By ED HUNT For The Daily Astorian W hen I was a small boy — the year before we moved out West — I remember a summer when some Californians came to visit. On a warm summer day, the New Jersey sky opened up in an angry cascade of warm rain. This is a common occurrence back East. The rain would crash down in torrents from the coal-gray skies, pounding the mown lawns and the tidy streets of our neighborhood. The Californians took off their shoes and ran out into the rain, dancing in their T-shirts, shorts and bare feet in the puddles that formed on hot sidewalks and concrete driveways. It was the late 1970s and California had been in the midst of an epic drought. They had been missing the rain. I n 1978, we moved with those Californians to the hills above Lyle, Wash. East side of the Cascades, but where the scrub oak are like pebbles on the shore of the vast desert ocean of Eastern Washington. It is a place where the rain quits us in early May, never to return until late October. If you blink in that early spring, the green will be gone. Cloudless summer skies and blistering heat were the norm. Sun so bright it seemed to leap up from the ground to assault your eyes. Wind was oven hot and gave no relief. It curled in dust devils a mile away. I remember one summer on High Prairie and I had a job pulling up fence posts along a property line with a boom truck. The metal of the barbed wire burned skin. We ate our lunches huddled in a sliver of thin shadow of- fered under by the frying-pan-hot truck. It was a magical thing then to even see a ghost of a cloud far off a mountain’s shoulder, even so, there was no promise of rain in it. Ed Hunt/For The Daily Astorian This is right before the skies opened up in Grays River. O ne summer we vacationed on the coast. Walked summer rain-soaked streets of Ilwaco, blue tarps rustling on hulls in the boatyard. Watercolor skies and swirling mists in late June when the grass back home had already dried to brown. I married a local girl Grays River girl that I met at college. It was Amy that taught me the rhythms of the rain forest life. Past 20 years now, it has wrapped its ways around me OLNHIDYRUHGSRODUÀHHFHDQG*RU7H[ In my little home among the Willapa Hills, we average more than 110 inches of rain each year, with 192 days of measurable rainfall. That is 30 inches a year more than the highest rainfall picked up in Portland and many surrounding communities. Indeed, the least amount of rain received at the Grays River hatchery — 75.9 inches in 1985 — was still higher than Portland’s average yearly rainfall. (data up to 2006) Astoria averages less than 70 inches a year — but has the same number of rainy days at 191. T hus the Grays River valley in particular — like Pluvius and Forks and Quillayute — lies in a perfect place for precipitation — inland just enough from the coast, tucked be- WZHHQWKH¿UVWULGJHVRIKLOOVWKDWKDUYHVWWKH fresh clouds with their peaks. I never tire of it. It could rain 100 days in a row here — it often does — yet it can be different each day. This is a wild and dynamic meteorologic magic to which we are privileged. W riter’s N otebook So it was this summer that my grass dried to brittle yellow before June had even past. So it was that the cows and horses huddled in the shade rather than graze on the dwin- dling grass. T EO Media Group/File A woman walks toward the rock embankment along U.S. Highway 101 in McGowan, Wash., in 2014 as heavy rains fell and winds blew waves of water onto the road. time on the wet side of the state to associate a rainless day with outdoor projects and work to be done. Seize the golden day between the storms. Make hay while the sun shines. Comes now a year when a dry summer follows a dry spring, following a winter write best, and most often in the rain. Sit- punctuated by an unusual number of sunny ting in my recliner looking out my window days. Good for motorcycles and horseback RUVWRPSLQJWKURXJKWKHZHW¿HOGVDQGIRUHVW rides, for outdoor projects that usually would brings relentless words to mind. not even get started until mid-summer. Not so Conversely, I have been trained by my good for quiet contemplation at the keyboard. I will not go on about its practical ben- H¿WV <HV LW ZDWHUV RXU JDUGHQV JURZV RXU trees and feeds our river songs. It washes our VWUHHWVJUHHQVRXU¿HOGV¶ It calls our salmon back from the ocean. It hides our tears. I hen came a hint of a rainstorm on the weather forecast. A summer storm at last. I found myself in a state of anticipation, dashing around cleaning up the yard, watch- ing the clouds gather. I could smell the air thickening, I longed for a growl of thunder to herald the coming rain. When at last I awoke to that music on my metal roof I found strange joy in the predawn KRXUV NQRZLQJ WKH UDLQ KDG ¿QDOO\ FRPH Later that morning, I went down and took up my book by the window. I smiled but did not read. I simply looked out at the gray. I wanted to go out then, in the summer storm. I wanted to take off my shoes I had been missing the rain. Ed Hunt is a writer and registered nurse who blogs on medical issues at redtriage.com and on other subjects at theebbtide.blogspot. com. He lives in Grays River, Wash. Lessons from the murders of the TV journalists Bryce Williams, as the Shouldn’t we regulate guns Virginia killer was known as seriously as we regulate to viewers when he worked toys? The Occupational Safety he slaying of two journalists as a broadcaster, apparent- ly obtained the gun used to and Health Administration Wednesday as they broad- murder his former co-work- has seven pages of regula- cast live to a television audience ers Alison Parker and Adam tions concerning ladders, in Virginia is still seared on our Ward in response to the June which are involved in 300 deaths in America annual- screens and our minds, but it’s massacre in a South Caro- lina church — an example ly. Yet the federal govern- a moment not only to mourn but of how gun violence be- ment doesn’t make what I Nicholas also to learn lessons. gets gun violence. Williams would call a serious effort Kristof The horror isn’t just one macabre may have been mentally to regulate guns, which are double-murder, but the unrelenting disturbed, given that he videotaped involved in the deaths of more than toll of gun violence that claims one Wednesday’s killings and then posted 33,000 people in America annually, according to the Centers for Disease life every 16 minutes on average in them on Facebook. “I’ve been a human powder keg for Control and Prevention (that includes the United States. Three quick data a while . just waiting to go BOOM!!!!,” suicides, murders and accidents). points: Williams reportedly wrote in a lengthy Gun proponents often say things to • More Americans die in gun ho- fax sent to ABC News after the killings. me like: What about cars? They kill, micides and suicides every six months Whether or not Williams was in- too, but we don’t try to ban them! than have died in the last 25 years in sane, our policies on guns are demented Cars are actually the best example every terrorist attack and the wars in — not least in that we don’t even have of the public health approach that we Afghanistan and Iraq combined. universal background checks to keep should apply to guns. Over the decades, • More Americans have died from weapons out of the hands of people we have systematically taken steps to guns in the United States since 1968 waiting to go boom. make cars safer: We adopted seatbelts WKDQ RQ EDWWOH¿HOGV RI DOO WKH ZDUV LQ The lesson from the ongoing car- and air bags, limited licenses for teen- U.S. history. nage is not that we need a modern pro- age drivers, cracked down on drunken • American children are 14 times as hibition (that would raise constitutional driving and established roundabouts likely to die from guns as children in issues and be impossible politically), and better crosswalks, auto safety in- other developed countries, according to but that we should address gun deaths spections and rules about texting while David Hemenway, a Harvard professor as a public health crisis. To protect the driving. DQGDXWKRURIDQH[FHOOHQWERRNRQ¿UH- public, we regulate toys and mutual This approach has been stunningly arm safety. funds, ladders and swimming pools. successful. By my calculations, if we By NICHOLAS KRISTOF New York Times News Service T had the same auto fatality rate as in We need universal background 1921, we would have 715,000 Ameri- checks with more rigorous screening, cans dying annually from cars. We have limits on gun purchases to one a month reduced the fatality rate by more than WR UHGXFH WUDI¿FNLQJ VDIH VWRUDJH UH- quirements, serial number markings 95 percent. <HW LQ WKH FDVH RI ¿UHDUPV WKH JXQ WKDW DUH PRUH GLI¿FXOW WR REOLWHUDWH waiting periods to buy lobby (enabled by craven handgun — and more politicians) has for years The United a research on what steps tried to block even re- would actually save search on how to reduce States is lives. If the federal gun deaths. The gun in- an outlier, government won’t act, dustry made a childproof states should lead. gun back in the 19th both in Australia is a model. century but today has fe- In 1996, after a mass rociously resisted “smart our lack shooting there, the coun- guns.” If someone steals try united behind tough- an iPhone, it requires a of serious HU ¿UHDUP UHVWULFWLRQV PIN; guns don’t. policies The Journal of Public We’re not going to Health Policy notes that eliminate gun deaths in toward WKH ¿UHDUP VXLFLGH UDWH America. But a serious dropped by half in Aus- effort might reduce gun guns and tralia over the next seven deaths by, say, one-third, \HDUV DQG WKH ¿UHDUP and that would be 11,000 in our homicide rate was al- lives saved a year. mortality most halved. The United States Here in America, is an outlier, both in our rates. we can similarly move lack of serious policies from passive horror to toward guns and in our mortality rates. Hemenway calculates that take steps to reduce the 92 lives claimed WKH86¿UHDUPKRPLFLGHUDWHLVVHYHQ by gun violence in the United States times that of the next country in the rich daily. Surely we can regulate guns as world on the list, Canada, and 600 times seriously as we do cars, ladders and swimming pools. higher than that of South Korea. STEPHEN A. FORRESTER, Editor & Publisher • LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager • CARL EARL, Systems Manager JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager • DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager Founded in 1873
