Recycled entry

[kate_schaefer]

I wrote this in spezzatura's LJ in response to her rant about Seattle-area drivers not having a clue how to deal with this frozen white stuff, as opposed to people from practically anywhere else in the country including folks who grew up a few miles north, south, east, or west of here (the ones who grew up west of here lived on the Olympic Peninsula, mostly, not in Puget Sound. If they lived on islands in Puget Sound, they learned how to drive boats at an early age and their driving-cars-in-snow skills are irrelevant to today's sermonette). Since it was a longer and more discursive entry than I usually put into comments, I decided to repost it here.

...packs of feral drivers...

I learned to drive in Ohio; Glenn learned to drive in Alaska. We had to know how to drive in snow. I used to practice putting my car into a skid and pulling it out again, over and over, on my way to high school, while my carpool passengers giggled insanely. People who grow up here don't have enough time with snow on the ground to practice. It's hard to learn a skill you can only use for six or ten hours every other year.

A billion years ago (okay, 21 years ago), there was a real snowstorm, about a foot of snow, just before Thanksgiving, 1985. It was a smaller city then, after the Boeing bust, before the dot-com boom, and people stayed home.

I didn't; I was buying my first house, and it was due to close that day, just before I was due to fly to Florida to see my grandparents. It was due to close that day, and the seller was putting on a new roof as a condition of the sale, and the roofer left the roof uncovered overnight because he was a doofus who didn't check the weather report, and a foot of snow fell into my kitchen-to-be.

Well, said my friend the attorney, you would have bought the house as it was, with the bad roof. Now you're getting the house with a roof about to be replaced and a kitchen floor that's about to be replaced as well.

I took the bus downtown to the escrow office, and we closed the sale. Right after I signed all the papers, I called the airport to see if my flight was going to take off. In those days they wouldn't tell you over the phone. Come to the airport and see, they said. No way, I said. All flights ended up being cancelled that day.

I was dating a guy who grew up in Idaho then. Once the roads were clear of cars, he put on chains and we cautiously drove out on the crunchy snow to pick up some friends to see Sun Ra play at the Fabulous Rainbow. What a lot of saxophones! Sun Ra's band was so big, it may have outnumbered the tiny brave audience that night.

The next day, the snow melted and I went to Florida. I sat on the beach with my sister Gini, scooping up handsful of dripping wet sand and tiny burrowing tellins, talking about men.

Comments

[cynthia1960.livejournal.com]

You know, it could be worse. When I was in college, some of my friends from WA/OR would mock us native Californians for our inability to deal with water falling from the sky in liquid form. Driving in snow in the Bay Area? I don't even want to think about the disaster that would ensue.

Of course, our streets aren't engineered to deal with large quantities of rain; the drainage sucks.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure. Sometimes it is worse. Seattle is accustomed to dealing with large amounts of water falling from the sky in a very gentle drizzle during much of the fall, winter, and spring. When it rains hard -- as hard as it normally rains for half an hour every day all summer long in Ohio, for instance -- Seattle drivers are completely disoriented.

I'm disoriented, too, but I know what to do. If it's raining so hard that I can't see other drivers through the rain, I pull off the road and wait in a safe place until the rain slackens, then I go on my way, driving a bit slower and leaving a bit more space between me and the car in front.

Oh, sorry. That was the rain rant, wasn't it? Not appropriate for today's weather.

I don't see how the drainage could suck in the Bay Area. The streets are so steep that the water has to run right off and down into the Bay, right?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

They assume it's all steep, you see.

In the flat parts and lowlands, it backs up terribly. First sign that a rainfall is heavy here is always the same thing: 101 is flooded at three spots in Marin: Richardson Bay, Corte Madera, and San Antonio Creek. Every damn time, it seems. Then the wadis, which is what we have for creeks down here, overflow.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

So it's not that there's a lot of water falling through the air all at once, too much for the drainage system to deal with, but that it keeps on falling longer than anyone expects? Or is it that the heavy rainfall takes place out of sight, out of town, and then the flooding comes into town because it has nowhere to go?

I don't go to the Bay Area often enough, and when I haven't been there for a while, I think of the climate as being much like the climate here. It is, and it isn't; here we have a Mediterranean climate with rain forest not far off, and there you have a Mediterranean climate with high desert not far off, and in both places there's the geological confusion of earthquake and volcano country mushing the land around.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

NOAH: How you gonna do it, Lord?
LORD: I'm gonna make it rain for a hundred days and drown 'em right out.
NOAH: Listen, I've got an idea. You'll save water. Make it rain for forty days and forty nights, and wait for the sewers to back up.
LORD: Right.

That's kind of what happens here. If there's been enough earlier rain that the ground is saturated and the drainage reservoirs full, any significant additional quantity of water has nowhere to go. So the critical question here is not just how much it's raining, but how much it's been raining.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

So the critical question here is not just how much it's raining, but how much it's been raining.

I can see you saying this and trying hard to keep your affect completely flat between the sections of the sentence. Ayup. It's also the thing that determines how many trees fall down when the wind comes right behind the rain.

[cynthia1960.livejournal.com]

Nope, that only helps if you're in a hilly area. Most of my commute is close to the Bay level, and you get lots of standing water in the streets (crap clogs the storm drains). There was really evil flooding back in the winter of 1982-1983 (levee breaks) that made it impossible to get through on Highway 237, and I had to double my commute distance going all the way through Milpitas, San Jose, Santa Clara, and Cupertino to get to Sunnyvale. I'm at a different gig now, but I still have that sh*tty Fremont to Sunnyvale commute.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

The amount of geographical variation even in a small area is amazing, isn't it?