She’ll Take the Weather as It Comes

As I sat writing this column on Wednesday, my reporter colleagues were plugging away on their weather stories--those breathless accounts of pounding rain and roaring surf that we trot out each time it drizzles in Southern California.

But outside our office, the sun had broken through a bank of clouds--the white, fluffy kind, not the gray, rain-bearing variety--to produce a day so dazzlingly clear it left folks wondering what to do with all those sandbags they’d scrambled to fill on Monday.

After all those gloom-and-doom warnings laid on us by weather forecasters, the string of ferocious storms that El Nin~o was supposed to send rolling through this week petered out, amounting to no more than a couple days of what the weather gurus like to call “scattered showers.”

Along the way, there were storm watches and flood advisories, news bulletins and front page stories, geophysicists and meteorologists talking about “high-speed jet streams” and “flares of moisture.” And there was a total of about one-half inch of rain.

That’s how much fell at the Civic Center on Monday and Thursday, and the clear skies in between forced forecasters to back off their predictions of heavy rains.

The expected storm had unexpectedly bypassed Southern California, they said. And the deluge they’d warned of had dwindled to a “possibility of showers.”

Now, maybe by the time you read this on Friday, rain will be pouring down in buckets, and I will sound as foolish as I’m trying to make the forecasters appear.

Or maybe you’ll be basking in the brilliant sunshine and gearing up for a weekend outing at the beach.

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I admit I’m one of those California transplants drawn here by the mid-winter warmth I saw on those televised Rose Parade broadcasts each year.

I came here from Cleveland 18 years ago, after one particularly cruel winter that paralyzed northeast Ohio. It snowed so hard, for so long, during that January stretch that streets became impassable, clogged with cars abandoned in snowdrifts, and freeways were shut down, stranding residents at home or work for days. I was trapped at my newspaper’s office until my husband was able to make his way there through the blinding blizzard in my dad’s old panel truck. (He brought along our Irish setter because, he told me later, if the truck stalled and was buried in snow, the dog’s body heat would keep him alive until help arrived.)

It was a winter when we’d rise before dawn each day to shovel away the night’s accumulation of snow, and find that by the time we’d showered and dressed, enough snow had fallen to make our driveway impassable again.

So we chucked our parkas and shovels and headed for sunny Southern California, and were rewarded with a winter so mild that we spent our first Christmas here lying by the pool.

Then came the winter of 1982. They didn’t call it El Nin~o then; it was just a series of seemingly endless storms that left us waterlogged and windblown with torrential rains, gusty winds and surf so strong that beach-side homes were sucked into the ocean . . . and we were trapped, again, in our homes for days on end.

I remember thinking then that moving here had been a terrible mistake. We had simply traded one set of weather calamities for another.

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In time, that nightmarish winter came to seem like nothing more than a distant bad dream.

And I came to believe that the Southern Californian obsession with weather is merely a way of overcompensating for the lack of variety in a climate so perpetually mild.

Only here would a gentle sprinkling of rain--lacking even the drama of thunder and lightning--litter the streets with car accidents, prompt schools to be closed, send torrents of water gushing along traffic-choked streets and provoke pronouncements of gloom and doom.

And given what now looks like hyperbole, it’s hard to know what to believe in this game of weather roulette. Is disaster looming on the horizon this winter? Who can say? Weather forecasting sometimes seems only slightly more reliable than reading tea leaves.

So when it comes to El Nin~o, I’m making my own kind of personal preparations. I haven’t cleaned out my rain gutters or gotten burlap bags to fill with sand. But I have loaded up on hot chocolate mix, stacked a half-cord of wood next to the garage and bought a couple of extra mops.

My El Nin~o survival plan goes something like this: Lots of long walks with the kids in the rain, followed by warm baths and hot cocoa. We snuggle in front of the fireplace, watching videos, doing jigsaw puzzles and playing board games. We sleep a lot.

And when my children ask me if it’s going to rain today, I’ll consult the newspaper, tune in to the weather channel and . . . flip a coin. I’ll stop trying to translate off-shore flow and high pressure systems into whether to wear pants or shorts, take an umbrella or not.

Tuesday I made my youngest wear boots, believing reports of the downpour to come. She clunked around campus--dry and miserable--all day.

On Wednesday, I tried to shove an umbrella in her backpack . . . “We still have two more storms to go, you know.”

But she pulled it out and left it behind, and headed for school wearing shorts and sneakers. “It’s only rain,” she said.

“And besides, the weatherman doesn’t know everything.”

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* Sandy Banks’ column is published Mondays and Fridays. Her e-mail address is [email protected].