For the Record
We slogged and slid over Hiway 26 again yesterday for the second day in a row, but this time with another hospital stay for Nyel in the offing. No long lost relatives or lunch at Papa Haydn’s this time. Just a couple of procedures and hopefully home on Friday.
The world was wet and gray just as it was yesterday. “I think we’re actually driving through a cloud,” Nyel said as we approached the summit. “How can you tell? It looks like the same-old, same-old,” was my somewhat uncharitable reply.
According the statistics on Mike’s Long Beach Weather, we have had rain every single day this month. Furthermore, so far this year, we have had 56 days with rain and there have been no consecutive days without rain. That’s wet!
On the other hand, all those rainy days are conducive to inside projects of all kinds and, if my sainted Uncle Willard is to be believed, our rain is especially helpful to historians! In a book he began (but alas never finished) about his childhood, he wrote:
The past was everywhere – in the houses and sheds that tipped further each winter, until a gale blew them down; in the Wachsmuth barn, which had been the county jail, and ours, which had been the county courthouse; in the wreckage of 50 vessels on the ocean beach, disappearing gradually under the sands and then emerging years later as the currents shifted to scour the sand away; in the overrun cranberry bogs in the marshes and the deserted launches and bateaux among the driftwood in the tidelands; in the bones of long-dead whales that made our porch chairs; in one-legged Indian Pete. The past raged against us with every sou’wester, and drenched us with every rain; and since sou’westers and rain were the order of the day at Oysterville, we were pretty well permeated. The past would have been hard to escape even if we wanted to. But we didn’t; we loved it. It shaped and sheltered us. It wasn’t until we had to emerge from the past and become part of the present that my troubles began.
Aha! I wonder how my fellow Community Historians would react to those ideas. Perhaps that wily Willard was onto something.