Seventy nine days and seventy nine nights:
Between two and three months ago it began to rain long and hard. The rain was still going strong after twenty days. I was a pig in … well I was a very happy pig. Ever since I moved in I had had a tile roof. For decades it never turned back a heavy rain; it always leaked. I had it replaced, but it still leaked. The problem was that real soaking rains were so rare that by the time we had a good frog strangler I’d forgotten who worked on the roof last.
I put it down to the Seneca guns. A booming sound is occasionally heard over open water, and if my memory of the Children’s Digest serves, it was reported by Marco Polo to occur over desert. Dunes or waves, if quite regular, could produce in wind at just the right speed a disturbance that would be a harmonic of the time it took air to pass from one peak to the next. The accumulated energy over many miles can be enough to shift tiles and tear tarpaper. At least that’s my interpretation, and I’m sticking with it. The Bedouins explained to Marco Polo that the booming was wind over the dunes. So far as I know, wind over water is one of those mysteries; I’ve never heard any explanation but my own.
Well living on a cliff over the Gulf and understanding the mechanism, I went for a shingle roof. And that rain never got through. I love rain, and I love a rain proof roof.
Twenty days and going strong. After that it ameliorated a bit but it sill rained every day. We broke Noah’s record. Now I was counting a day on which rain was predicted as rain even if I did not personally see it. There was a day on which it was not predicted to rain, nor did it rain. I shrugged the outlier off. After all, who’s to say when the day begins, midnight, dawn or sunset? We carried on for seventy days without rain. Would we double Noah’s record? I began to watch with increasing excitement. On day seventy nine it neither rained nor was is predicted. Day eighty could fix that by the same argument as before.
A total eclipse of the moon had come and gone. The equinox had come and gone. There is a hurricane off the east coast. Day eighty, first day of October dawned with promise although no prediction of rain. Now day eighty is done. It’s dark. We got seventy nine days of rain. And rain is already predicted for October 2, day eighty one.
Do you ever get the feeling something up there likes to make fun of you? All right, it didn’t rain on day 80, but it’s pouring now, day 82, and has been predicted through day 84. In other words day 80 was the ONLY day since I started counting when it did not rain, was not predicted to rain and couldn’t be made to rain by any shift in when days begins and ends. Well it’s gratifying to note that I said I was being mocked, and the proof comes along right away.
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