The Willow Glen Resident

Point of View

Carl Heintze

El Niño helps remind us just who's boss

Well, I guess El Niño has arrived. It seems like it today, anyway, the rain is streaming down--"an inch an hour" as one of my colleagues used to say--and we have battened down the hatches, put up the sandbags, strengthened the levees and done all those things that last year's disasters trained us to do.

Whether El Niño really has arrived or not probably doesn't matter. Even if we think it does.

That's because, like many other things in life, with the weather we seem to be locking the barn door after the horse was stolen (to mix a metaphor), to have done the things we ought to have done, but from which complacency has kept us for so long, to be prepared for last year's storms this year and then to have forgotten they come, but not with any regularity.

It's not just, as Mark Twain is reputed to have said, that everyone talks about the weather, but no one does anything about it.

It's that, even though we do more than talk about it, it doesn't seem to help much.

El Niño is one of those natural disasters which always seem to arise unannounced and unasked, sort of God's way of reminding us that we are not as all-powerful and dominant on the planet as we think we are.

The ice storm which has kept most of Quebec and New England in the deep freeze is another. Want to bet that next year, Quebeckers and New Englanders will have stockpiled lots of generators and blankets and shelters and other things with which to keep warm? Want to bet, too, that next year's winter will be mild and minus paralyzing ice storms?

Then again I could be wrong.

The trouble is we never know. We just think we do.

Be wary, for instance, of those who say, "This is the worst winter in the last 10 years," or "This is the worst drought in a century," or whatever. For although the weather is more amenable to the weatherman than it used to be, predicting when El Niño is coming and what it's going to do is still more than anybody's guess.

Certainly this year El Niño did not come unannounced. Never has a body of warming water gotten such an advance public-relations spin. Television news--which loves nothing better than to predict natural disaster and the outcome of notorious murder trials--has been busy telling us for months that the end is near, destruction is at hand, be prepared. ...

And remembering last year, most folks have listened.

Besides mobilizing the disaster people, El Niño has invaded the advertising world.

All sorts of building folks--those who would reconstruct your house, beach, walk or whatever if and when the wicked wind of the west did its damage--have been urging us to get ready for the floods that came last year and are certain to make it here again.

They pitched preparations. Disaster people have had meetings. Scientists have held conferences. And television news reporters have held forth at length about El Niño as if it were at the least a person and at most a predictable natural phenomenon.

Nothing is better to newscasters than A Dire Warning.

That puts them, it would seem, in the same league as those who surface after the most recent earthquake to announce that "this isn't the Big One, but it's coming, so get ready."

Chances are when the Big One finally arrives, as inevitably it will, complacency will have affected everyone. Picking ourselves up from the rubble, we will announce that "this isn't the Big One, but look out, it's coming soon."

All this prompts me to think that God, while he may not shoot craps with the universe as Albert Einstein said, at least has a sense of humor. He wants us to be certain that we don't take him or Mother Nature for granted. We might be able to get away with it as far as Mother Nature is concerned.

Just don't hassle the Almighty.

It isn't possible to put one over on God.

He makes existence uncertain by conjuring up El Niño every few years, but at no apparently regular interval, and throws in a few earthquakes, ice storms, hurricanes and the like now and then just to let us know who is boss.

And that sure isn't us.

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