Saratoga News

Columns

It doesn't rain much, just enough to complain about

By Carl Heintze

It's that time in the winter when I wish it would end. The days are getting longer, all right, but it's still raining. It's still cloudy and dark whether it is raining or not and it's cold.

I guess I could handle the rain, but it's the cold that gets to me.

I'd like it to be warmer, but then I'd like the sun to appear, too, I'd like it to be lighter. I'd like it to stop raining, even if it doesn't rain every day.

Having said all that, I know there is really no reason to complain about the weather. I live, after all, in California. About three-quarters of the year the sun rises every morning and sets every evening without clouds or with very few, the temperature is just about right--not too hot and not too cool--and the weather becomes not something to complain about, but something which is so temperate as to be taken for granted.

It's in that part of the year, the part with the pleasant weather, that no one talks about it much. It's only in this part, the wet, as the Australians say, that I keep bringing it up.

I suppose it is the contrast which makes me complain, even if it is irrational. Having been born in California and having spent most of my life here, I don't adapt well to climates that are otherwise.

I know. I've tried.

For a while, actually about a year, I lived in New Jersey and commuted to New York City and I remember standing one day on a street corner waiting for a bus and literally crying because it was so cold. I also spent a winter in the snows of western Germany under something less than ideal conditions (World War II was on), and unlike some Californians, I decided I didn't like snow. It's a conviction to which I have adhered ever since. I don't relish going to the Sierra in snowtime, even for sport.

I know lots of Californians don't feel that way. Children of the sun or transplanted Midwesterners or Easterners, they go "up" to the snow, revel in it, roll in it, slide on it and watch it come down in awe. But then I notice they come back down to the lowlands where there is seldom any snow, even in winter.

They don't really want to live in winter; they just want to visit it.

I suppose I ought to think more about winter, about its being an adversary, an enemy with which to contend, something to be overcome. It's always seemed to me that that's the way people in intemperate climates tend to be. It's as if they're being tested by it, as if they somehow have to defeat it to succeed in daily life.

They have to buy four sets of clothes for the four different seasons. They have to contend with the weather, rather than being cradled by it, or lulled by its breezes and light. In time, I suppose they learn how to do all this, to push the weather mostly out of sight. But it doesn't seem to me that they ever become quite so accustomed to it as we do, they don't really drop it as a subject in daily conversation, it isn't just sort of there, a part of the world we expect every morning without fail. Rather, the weather is an important part of every day, like going to work.

And to me there is no better proof of this than the westward movement of the United States after World War II. Before then the rest of the country had heard of California and didn't believe it, or were too busy contending with the weather to realize California existed.

But after many servicemen and women experienced the Golden State on their way to a service assignment, they couldn't get it out of their minds. After the war they quit contending with that old devil weather and came West to return to the pleasant place they'd passed through. Permanently.

Well, as a native I don't begrudge all the transplants their new climate, and I hope they don't begrudge me my complaints at the darkness and the cold of the little winter we do have. I know most years it's short and, while unpleasant, easy to take. And I suppose in these inclement days I could go somewhere warm--Mexico, say, or Hawaii.

Then I'd only have the heat about which to complain.

Meantime, just let me grouse a little about what we do have. Oh, I know, it's broken the chances for a drought yet again; farmers can be assured their crops will have plenty of water this year; life, even in this Eden, will go on.

It's just, you know, that everyone has to talk about the weather.

Especially me.