Sky to Gutter
Washed into Halloween with our Atmospheric River
It’s the first day of the atmospheric river, and the gutters are full.
If you live in a drier environment, you might not know the phrase “Atmospheric River,” at least the way we do. You might have heard that term on a weather report and thought, “Hm, a river in the atmosphere! What would that look like?”
We can tell you. Seattleites, people of the Maritime Northwest, have visceral atmospheric river experiences. When we get credible reports that it’s on its way, we do tend to get ready, put away the moisturizing lotion and shake the dust off our waterproof jackets.
I hear it’s coming and I think back to try to remember the last time it hit. What I was doing or, more to the point, what was I prevented from doing? Day hike to the mountains? Fall camping? The rare drive-in movie? Ah…better not.
The AR is really just a sustained rain storm. Every area has those sometimes, right?
I remember visiting south Florida and driving across the Everglades when a rainstorm hit so hard I had to pull over because I could not see the lines on the highway. My rental car’s wipers couldn’t keep up. I waited for the car to rise up and float into the swamp.
Researching my book Cycling the Pacific Coast, I hit a deluge so persistent on the Oregon coast that I stopped at a Goodwill store and came out wearing rain-resistant baggy National Guard sweat pants and a golfing windbreaker over my soggy cycling togs.
I recall many pleasant summer afternoons as a youth in North Dakota when I’d settle onto our covered back patio and enjoy a good storm, sheets of lightning illuminating the white bark of the weeping birch, claps of thunder shaking my eardrums. I would count the seconds between lightning flashes to predict when the next thunderous blast would hit, charting the direction and proximity of the storm.
But here in the Maritime – emphasis added – Northwet, I mean Northwest, the storms come a little differently. They arrive as a river in the sky. Picture yourself swimming while standing up. Fully clothed.
This AR might be a little early. It doesn’t usually arrive until November. But maybe it won’t last. They’re predicting a few wet days, but we often end October in a crisp blaze of orange leaves and billowy clouds rushing across changeable skies.
AR or not, the weather of October here is unlike the experiences of my youth in many ways. I remember one North Dakota Halloween where I trick-or-treated in my winter parka, trudging through snow.
Too, my home state was sadly devoid of much fall landscape color, which I’m sure has changed now, as Japanese maples and fall-color shrubs have proliferated in the plant nurseries. No leaf-peepers were we. Whereas here in Seattle, the various shades emanating from deciduous plants as they shed their chlorophyll could fill half a Crayola box. I can stand in my living room and see multiple shades each of red, orange and yellow in ours and our neighbors’ trees.
I should not brag, and I can easily jinx it.
We have our comeuppance when the AR sets in.
Often just as the fall color is reaching its peak and I think “we should go for a bike ride in the country to see…” the wheels fall off the bike that is our metaphorical weather machine. (I mangled that one like a baboon piloting a bus, didn’t I?)
No, just as we smugly enjoy those beautiful hues, the AR washes in, accompanied by a strong, persistent wind, and the remaining leaves either fly off the trees and into the soggy gutters or droop and are sapped of their color, turning a uniformly muddy brown.
However it happens, drain is the operative word.
So today, as I jumped over one gutter after another to keep my soaked shoes from becoming so saturated as to result in spoiled socks, I considered the drain.
Gutters lead to downspouts lead to outflows at the base of buildings. Windshield wipers and spinning tires spray sogginess to the sidewalks. The slightest slope results in a vernal pool on the downhill side, whether the edge of a lawn or a pothole.
Much of Seattle, indeed the Maritime Northwest, sports topography ranging from hilly to downright mountain-steep. If you’ve been to our house, you have seen the ski slope that is our street. We’re usually safe from the water pooling up in our angled environment. I pity the folks on the receiving end of our elevation.
Here in Seattle, the AR can really swamp those low areas, sometimes with a smelly, unsanitary result. Let me explain. In a persistent AR assault, the city storm drain system fills up. It eventually interacts with the sewer drain system, supposed to be closed and sanitarily sending our sewer waste off to a treatment plant but somehow not. In an extreme situation, the two systems merge and mix, and some of the human waste floats up into our street environment or, among the most unlucky residents, our basements. Floating poo we do not do.
Our area has spent many millions of dollars on measures to alleviate that problem and prevent it in the future. Huge storage pipes are now in place to hold the overflow until the sky-spigot turns to drip and the system can drain it out. The most susceptible areas now contain “rain gardens,” an ingenious landscaping system where the water is ushered into a basin filled with a pervious, mulchy soil mix and bog-loving native plants so water can slowly percolate into the ground instead of causing a flood. Got a water problem? Get a rain garden!
But let’s return to the gutter.
Sometimes, like today, the atmospheric river arrives before the residents and the winds can clear the fallen leaves away from the gutters and drains. So we vault ourselves over the puddles, sometimes as wide as a car and flowing like spilled beer. And we resolve, once the sky-river gods grant us a reprieve, to get out the rakes and get those leaves into the compost and the garden beds, where they can do some good.
Once we’re prepared, then let the rain come, and wash us into a squeaky-clean holiday season.
Here’s a song that is not exactly about rain but it is a favorite. “Teardrop Windows” by Benjamin Gibbard (of Death Cab for Cutie) is an ode to Ben’s favorite Seattle building, the Smith Tower. It cries when the Space Needle is built and the “maids turn out the lights.” Ahhh, say it wasn’t so.
I love everything about this post but the line that will stick with me? This: "They arrive as a river in the sky," which feels like the start of a beautiful and mysterious poem that arrives in a dream.