I ate rain for breakfast with a side of pumpkin doughnut, Yuban cold brew and a hard boiled egg. I ate sitting on a large rock at the jetty while it rained on me. It occurred to me that this was my first breakfast with rain. No one was around. No gulls, either. I finished […]
A prodigious rain is falling and my thoughts rain toward a prodigious man of rain, Pablo Neruda. I just finished reading his memoirs, published in 1973. Toward the beginning of the book, which was quite obviously written under the influence of watching rain, he writes about the rain in his Chilean youth and the word […]
The news reported that over 80 inches of rain fell in Astoria between October and late April, a record amount in 96 years of keeping such records. I hope the trend continues into May and all summer. I wrote a weird book about rain. The essay below didn’t make it into that book because some […]
When you become lost, what do you do? You can plan or you can improvise. You can call for help or give up. You can lose your cool or scratch moss on the trees and figure it out. Choices abound. In my ongoing presence in the Territory of the Lost, I’ve had to improvise and […]
Recent record rains in Astoria brought to watery life some new, old, refashioned, repurposed meditations on rain. They are not about weather. Good hard rain rarely is about the weather. In Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey wrote: “Give me a dark smeary shiny night full of rain. That’s when the fear starts. That’s when […]