weather

Orion had a rough night of it two nights ago. Jenny and I do ... OK ... in this heat but he just wasn’t having any of it. Anyway he “slept” in our bed, if by “sleeping” you mean “alternately dozing and awaking and then jumping up and down and expecting Mom and Dad to play with him.”

Last night he made it through the night. (Well, until about 4:30 am which is when he always wakes up.

No, we don’t have A/C, although yesterday we discussed getting a window unit for Orion’s room. I am not above that.

On July 29, 2008, we were wondering if summer would ever arrive in Oregon ... I recall riding the Soma up Hessler Drive and taking a picture of the brooding rainclouds over Mt. Hood.

Anyway, one of the super-fun things about having grown up with Nebraska weather (“Florida summers, Alaska winters!”) but living with Oregon weather is watching the locals fold after two days in stuff that I used to endure for weeks on end. Right now I’m remembering June to July, 1995, when I was working in Arkansas City, Kansas. There were 6 or 7 (I forget) straight weeks of weather above 95°F ... with 80% humidity ... and no nightly temperature drop (last night it got down to 72°F) ... and mosquitos ... From that perspective, Oregon gets about 8 months of weather that would qualify in Nebraska as “Spring,” 1 to 2 (noncontiguous) months of “Summer,” about 5 months of something like “Fall,” and a few weeks of “Winter” every other year or so.

The short bursts of extreme weather in Oregon are perfect. A week of 90°+ heat is just enough to remind me what “summer” feels like, but not enough to make me hate the sun. I couldn’t (and didn’t) cope with that always–74°–and–sunny stuff they get in California. I like my seasons, thank you, preferably in small polite doses. Without mosquitos.

The rains have started.

I like this. This is why I moved to Oregon. I moved here for the cool and gray and damp and peaceful. And the seafood. Everything is better in Oregon in the “winter:” the beaches are empty, the trails are empty, you can go snowshoeing, less traffic when I ride my bike. All the wimpy people who dislike moistness are indoors now, at Powell’s or McMenamin’s. Which are also better in the “winter.”

It is, however, very dark. People here are pale. And let’s not kid ourselves: it starts raining in October and it doesn’t stop until about July. June if we’re lucky.

The really great thing about having grown up in Nebraska is that I have extremely wide latitudes for what I consider “bad weather.” Nebraska gets Florida summers and Alaska winters. The lousiest winter days in Oregon (sleety snow/rain driven hard from the southwest) are about like a typical March morning in Nebraska.

Oregon gets like five or six days in the summer where the mercury tops 90 degrees. But it’s a dry heat.

In 13 years in Oregon, I’ve never lived in a place with air conditioning, or insulation, or double-paned windows. Or bug screens.

Oregon shorts Fall a little bit though.

The weather today has cleared, the first break of warm weather since the Marathon, almost two weeks ago. This after a couple days of heavy rain. (Jenny said, this morning: “Xiamen has two seasons too cold and f*ing hot.” With the better weather I notice my attitude lifting substantially. Such a thing happened (every winter!) in Oregon, with its long, dark, wet, cold winters, but never to such a degree. Which makes me wonder (as does every phenomenological anomaly): WHY?

I was talking about this with a coworker from Vancouver (BC) who noticed the same thing. I said I think it has something to do with the pollution. Xiamen has had 6 months of dark, gray, chilly weather but it‘s been a) bone dry and b) the partial result of a constant pallor of airborne filth. My coworker used this phrase to describe it, I think perfectly: “dark and dirty.” Pacific Northwest winters are dark, sure, but that darkness has a kind of ancestral swamp feeling to it; it puts me to mind of Druids with antler headgear sacrificing virgins to the Sun God, or something. It‘s the primeval darkness of waiting, of potentiality, of dreams and visions. The darkness here has a Blade Runner feel to it. The darkness at the end of the world, light erased, not merely held back.

Moreover, Pacific Northwestern culture (and Northern European Culture) internalizes this seasonality. Thus the bookstores and brewpubs. Having these islands of refuge where we ritually celebrate Darkness makes it worth enjoying. This is half of why I prefer Oregon winters to Oregon summers. (The other half is that Oregon winters are about 20 degrees warmer than Nebraska winters, so you can keep riding bicycles without losing toes.) There is no local equivalent to bookstores and brewpubs; the closest analogues are tea houses, most of which are conducted out of doors anyway. Xiamen really deserves to be a tropical culture, but the climate just isn‘t cooperating.

Anyway, thank God for the sun.