Visiting Seattle’s rain gardens, green streets, green roofs, stormwater parks, funky cisterns, and rain art installations, including a mesmerizing display of public rain drums that thrum to the beat of the skies, I could see it deserved the Rain City nickname even if it’s not the rainiest place in the nation. Seattle is wet proof that we humans can come to live in harmony with the rain.
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In the same San Gabriel foothills outpost where Charles Hatfield built his rain derrick and promised to quench Los Angeles in the spring of 1905, and only four miles from Frank Lloyd Wright’s La Miniatura of 1923, a more modern rain lover set out to see if one soul among L.A.’s ten million, living in one single-family home among two million, could restore the natural path of rain on her small part of the terra firma.
Emily Green is a native Californian whose mother’s family grew citrus in the San Gabriel Valley. In the great dam-building era of the 1920s, her grandparents attended openings of local dams and reservoirs to celebrate the water for their groves. When Green was young, her family built a vacation house in the British Virgin Islands whose roof fed an enormous basement cistern. “When it ran out of water, we ran out of water.” Green became an environmental journalist (chanceofrain.com) and impassioned gardener—two pursuits that have her constantly scrutinizing the skies. Her pluvial ancestry seems part rain goddess, part Daniel Defoe fact finder: Green can describe the tousled romance of native grasses, or spend fifteen months investigating the L.A. Flood Control System to expose engineers up a creek—having run out of space for the mountain debris choking their dams, yet having left no rivers intact for sediment to flow down.
Green’s modernist house in Altadena, just a few blocks from Angeles National Forest, sits toward the front of a 14,000-square-foot lot. In the back, she tends a large native garden and a small orchard of venerable fruit trees older than the house—oranges, lemons, tangerines, and an enormous avocado. Having already torn out 10,000 square feet of lawn, and the “fuck-you hedge” that lined the front yard like a castle wall when she moved in, Green fretted about using L.A.’s imported water for the citrus—as the rain that fell upon her house and landscape washed to the storm drains. Like a miniature of the city itself, her home was designed so that any rain hitting the roof or lot would flow to graded pavement encircling the foundation, then drain away from her garden to paved paths and an asphalt driveway, then pour into the street gutters, which in turn run to the great concrete culverts.
Green wanted to break the rain regime. In 2010, she hired guys with mallets to come bust out a concrete patio out back and the asphalt driveway out front. In 2011, she began her search for a rain-gutter installer with a sense of style, not an easy task. She found hers in a sheet-metal artist named Ruben Ruiz.
I have Green’s hand sketch of her roof, with its calculations of how much rain she could collect from each section and her dream of metal flower sculptures that would chime visual and aural melodies with every shower. Depending on the grade of metal, rain tapping a tin roof or running in a gutter can create in children who grow up with it a calm contentment that stays with them all their lives—or a racket to send occupants to insomnia. Green chose a decent grade of galvanized steel. It calmed.
When I visited Green in Altadena, Ruiz had just finished installing the clean-lined steel gutters. They fit the gray-tiled roof as handsomely as a well-tailored jacket—none of the ugly downspouts, awkward angles, or corrugated aluminum pieces that often make rain gutters an architectural crime. In front of the house, lengths of chain lead from small drains to the flower rain-catchers, where a metal butterfly flits at the tip.
It was all so idyllic it was hard to remember we were standing five miles from the freeway and fifteen from downtown Los Angeles. But soon enough, the vulnerability of Green’s sustainable rain plan would be revealed. She hit a stumbling block bigger than L.A.’s entire Flood Control System. It stopped raining.
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In spring 2014, California’s reservoirs dropped to less than half their capacity, revealing vast deserts of cracked mud and in one case the ruins of an entire Gold Rush mining town. The California State Water Project—the labyrinthine conveyances that move billions of gallons to millions of residents and farm acres—announced for the first time in its history that it would hold back water to cities and farms. Seventeen communities faced running out of drinking water. Farmers had to fallow a half million acres of land. California’s remaining salmon rivers had so little flow that wildlife officials were figuring out how to truck young fish from hatcheries to sea. And snowpack in the Sierra Nevada that would normally rehydrate all of it was just 15 percent of the average. Without some rain, the dream state was headed for a nightmare.
After consecutive years of below-normal rainfall beginning in 2011, California’s drought became the worst since 1977—and then the worst in history. The parallels to the drought of my childhood were many. Governor Jerry Brown, the nation’s youngest governor then, was back in Sacramento, now the nation’s oldest governor. He was trying to push through some of the same solutions he had nearly forty years before, such as a canal to capture freshwater from a tributary of the fragile Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta in the north and move it south. And many Californians, blasé about the emergency, continued to water their turf grass. During a rare deluge in February, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power had to send out a press release urging customers to shut off their outdoor sprinklers so they wouldn’t waste water on already soaked lawns and gardens.
Still, contrary to the Los Angeles clichés of concrete culture, plastic people, and dystopian future, the most urbanized arid city in America is full of revolutionaries like Green who have worked for decades to bring the city in harmony with water and its rainfall. Angelenos use far less water (about 152 gallons a day per person) than their counterparts in the state capital of Sacramento in the north or Palm Springs to the south, where residents average 736 gallons a day to fill pools and irrigate mega-lawns in the desert. The city’s lawns are slowly transitioning to native plants and food crops. Hundreds of acres of community gardens have spread across Los Angeles, which also has more farmers’ markets than any other American city.
At Woodbury University in Burbank, the architect spouses Hadley and Peter Arnold run the Arid Lands Institute, devoted to reversing the twentieth-century course of channelizing rivers and importing water long distances as local rain flushes to sea. (The couple met as graduate students at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, when he took to feeding scraps to her Welsh corgi, auspiciously named Splash.) The Arnolds see L.A. as the great western test for what they call drylands design. The idea is to make rain a centerpiece of architecture, building codes, and zoning laws rather than a scourge. They are looking to the successful storage and land-use strategies of the past, from the sharing model of nineteenth-century Mormon irrigation districts in Utah to the extensive cistern works of the Roman Empire and North Africa.* “Cities got water right when they had to think like a drop of rain on the path of gravity,” Hadley Arnold told me. The water and power-grid feats that allowed western water to be piped long distance created not only the obvious costs to rivers like the Colorado but invisible ones—not least of which the carbon emissions now altering the climate.
Tucson, Arizona, is the quintessential arid city changing to embrace its manna from the desert sky. Rain gutters gleam on many homes and businesses; copper downspouts are a status symbol. Rain tanks are becoming as ubiquitous as in the Caribbean, where rain is still the sole source of water on some islands. Bolstered by a cadre of young conservation-design gurus now training others around the world, Tucson is tearing up asphalt spillways and non-native landscaping so that floodwaters from the North American monsoons flow to natural basins, berms, and desert gardens. While most cities deplete their groundwater, Tucson is returning more to the aquifer than it draws. Still, it is hard to see how the oasis now bursting with a million residents will thrive in a rain-limited futur
e. Tucson’s population is expected to double by 2050. If we do not lower the carbon emissions that are warming the Earth, scientists predict the arid Southwest between the Texas Panhandle and Southern California could lose up to half its rainfall by century’s end.
By that time, Los Angeles hopes to have reversed the flush of rain to the Pacific Ocean. The city has launched an ambitious retrofit of the entire stormwater system, including massive spreading grounds on those publicly owned lands that absorb the most rain, and incentives for infiltration on private property, distributed like the goal of rooftop solar. “When you think of the scale, we can do 1,000 neighborhood infiltration basins, we can do 100,000 rain gardens,” says Mark Hanna, the L.A. water engineer who is overseeing the plan. “It’s an enormous amount of water saved.”
I asked Hanna the obvious: “What if it doesn’t rain?” His answer was optimistic. I could not help but think of the great rainmaker Charles Hatfield, and his prescient understanding of how California drought is often followed by deluge. “It does rain and it will rain,” Hanna told me. “And when it does, unless things go really strange on us, the rain will tend to fall in the mountains and gather in the canyons and accumulate in the low spots. As long as gravity doesn’t go anywhere and rain remains wet, it will go to these places. We need to capture every drop that falls.”
In the last piece of L.A.’s water puzzle, a tireless grassroots effort to restore the L.A. River finally won the support of mayors, and then the Army Corps that turned it into a culvert in the first place. In 2014, the Corps approved a billion-dollar plan that will tear out miles of concrete, widen the river, and restore hundreds of acres of wetlands and native willows in the middle of the city.
Amid the thrill of a real river coursing through L.A., Hadley Arnold hopes Angelenos will push restoration to a new level—to encompass all the water in the hydrological cycle including the atmosphere. “The work on the river is incomplete without also working on the water that falls in the foothills, in the low-density residential fringes, in the high-density core, in the commercial and industrial areas, in the airport,” she says. “The idea is to see water not in a 54-mile line, but in a field.”
As South Florida learned, river restoration alone won’t be enough without a widespread shift in how Angelenos treat their water and their rain. In the Everglades, federal and state engineers have spent fifteen years to restore the Kissimmee River and its floodplain, dynamiting water-control structures, remaking meanders and oxbows, and reestablishing 12,000 acres of wetlands. Native aquatic plants are thriving. Largemouth bass and sunfish returned. Snowy egrets, blue herons, and other wading birds that had vanished flocked back in astounding numbers, in some cases more than double what scientists expected. But the victory is hollow for the Floridians who’ve watched seagrass, fish, dolphins, and manatees die along their coasts. Lake Okeechobee’s floodwaters still flow in eutrophic plumes to the estuaries. The farms and the urbanites of South Florida still send off a steady stream of pesticides, fertilizers, manure, and sewage, all brought back ’round by the dutiful rain.
In L.A., Emily Green was similarly discouraged. After she’d run through her savings to build the metal gutters and flowers that never clinked with rain, her city water use—and her water bill—more than doubled as she irrigated to keep the old citrus grove alive through the drought. She was standing in line at Home Depot when it sank in that home owners with rain gardens would not be enough to lead the arid metropolis to a rain revolution. In the middle of the drought, Angelenos stood with shopping carts full of weed killers, grass killers, insect killers, weed preventers, lawn fertilizers, and lawn sprayers, dusters, and wands—hundreds of products devoted to keeping the lawn crowned king of L.A. Without rain’s dilution, the chemicals would concentrate in gardens, street gutters, and storm drains, becoming more toxic before making their way to the sea.
The last time I talked to Green, she was agitating about all the public green lawns of L.A., including the one that fronts City Hall. She was also tackling a new challenge, this time to see how one Angeleno could help change car culture. She sold her Prius and bought a bright orange bicycle at Steve’s Bike Shop in Altadena, with an electric assist to cope with the steep San Gabriel foothills.
With her new mode of transportation, I figured the skies over Los Angeles would finally begin to pour.
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* The cisterns of ancient Carthage in Tunisia are celebrated as Roman, but the Punic people built cisterns throughout their lands before the Romans ever arrived.
TWELVE
STRANGE RAIN
On a June day in 1954, Sylvia Mowday had taken her children to a park in Sutton Coldfield, just north of Birmingham, England, when the overcast skies darkened and a rainstorm caught them by surprise. Mother, son, and daughter began to run for shelter, but gentle thuds against their umbrellas froze them like statues. Something was falling with the rain. It was too soft for hail, and seemed to be alive. The family soon realized they were in a tempest of tiny frogs. Looking to the sky, they watched wee frog bodies fall with the individual symmetry of snowflakes. Mrs. Mowday estimated that thousands of frogs fell over several minutes. Afterward, they “were afraid to move in case we trod on them.”
Throughout history, bewildered observers have sworn to similar episodes of frogs falling with rain. They show up in Greek literature, in the work of chroniclers from the Middle Ages, in accounts from French soldiers fighting the Austrians at Lalain in 1794: A hot afternoon was broken by such heavy showers that 150 soldiers had to abandon their trench as it filled with rainwater. In the middle of the storm, tiny toads began to pelt down and jump about in all directions. When the rain let up, the solders discovered more toads in the folds of their three-cornered hats.
Frog and toad rains, fish rains, and colored rains—most often, red, yellow, or black—are among the most common accounts of strange rain, reported since ancient times. “It has very often rained fishes,” wrote the Greek historian Athenaeus in A.D. 200, in his Deipnosophistae, or the Banquet of the Sophists. He went on to recount tales of fish rain—including one scaly downpour that went on for three days—and falling frogs. He recites the oldest account of frog rain from a book of history (now lost) written in the second century B.C. by the Greek philosopher Heraclides Lembus. So great was the frog-fall that it poisoned the wells, forcing people to abandon their homes:
In Paeonia and Dardania, it has, they say, before now rained frogs; and so great has been the number of these frogs that the houses and the roads have been full of them; and at first, for some days, the inhabitants, endeavouring to kill them, and shutting up their houses, endured the pest; but when they did no good, but found that all their vessels were filled with them, and the frogs were found to be boiled up and roasted with everything they ate, and when besides all this, they could not make use of any water, nor put their feet on the ground for the heaps of frogs that were everywhere, and were annoyed also by the smell of those that died, they fled the country.
The account calls Exodus to mind; frogs are one of the ten plagues God sends down to Egypt, where they swarm the houses, bedchambers, beds, people, ovens, and kneading-troughs. In 1946, the professional skeptic Bergen Evans—later arbiter for the television series The $64,000 Question—proposed that stories of falling frogs and fish “are a sort of detritus of the old belief in spontaneous generation,” with roots in ancient myths and biblical references to aerial waters “above the firmament.” But frog and fish rains show up far too often to be rejected as what Evans called meteorological myth.
In 1873, Scientific American ran eyewitness accounts of a storm that rained frogs on Kansas City, Missouri. In 1901, witnesses in Minneapolis swore to a similar slimy deluge. Reports of frog rain continue in modern times, although less frequently than in the past. Residents of Naphlion in southern Greece were surprised by a rain of small green frogs in May 1981. A Belgrade newspaper reported a thick rain of frogs in the Serbian village of Odzaci in 2005. A villager, Caja Jovanovic, said
he was watching a strange-shaped cloud when “frogs started to fall. I thought that a plane carrying a cargo of frogs had exploded.” In 2010, hapless frogs fell upon shoppers in Rákóczifalva, Hungary, during a thunderstorm. The same year, frogs and fish rained from a cloud during a downpour in Nakuru, in Kenya’s Rift Valley.
In the early twentieth century, Eugene Willis Gudger, an ichthyologist with the American Museum of Natural History and editor of the museum’s Bibliography of Fishes, reported that he had authenticated seventy-one accounts of fish rain, spanning A.D. 300 through the 1920s. “I have personally never been so fortunate as to experience or even witness such a rain,” he wrote, “but I cannot disregard the evidence recorded by scientific men.” In one of his eyewitness accounts, from May 1900, family members in Providence, Rhode Island, were pelted with “squirming perch and bull-pouts, from two to four and a half inches long, which fell on yards and streets—covering about a quarter of an acre.” A reporter from the Providence Journal gathered a bucketful.
Gudger believed there could be but one explanation: “High winds, particularly whirlwinds, pick up water, fishes and all, and carry them inland where, when the velocity of air and clouds becomes relatively lowered, the fishes fall to earth.” He wrote that no one who had “experienced or even seen the prodigious effects and carrying power of a land tornado can have any doubt of the ability of a waterspout, a water tornado, to bring about a ‘Rain of Fishes.’ ”
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