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-
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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-
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trees and feeds our river songs. It washes our
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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,
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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
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