Rain

by Cynthia Barnett

  The BBC crew is up too, frantically readying equipment to at last document the rain in the rainiest place. While the technicians grab up video cameras and umbrellas, raincoat-clad weather personalities Clare Nasir and Mike Theiss run around outside to soak themselves in a storm that is surely lighter than she is used to in her rain-famous home of Manchester, or he in the even-rainier Florida Keys. Duly dripping, they practice lines out front of the resort, where the million-dollar view is now one giant cloud of morning fog:

  “Battered by rain and storm clouds, THIS is the wettest place on Earth!”

  “It’s not just raining cats and dogs. It’s raining elephants and rhinos!”

  A cameraman starts filming. I hear Nasir tell her young audience a white lie—or maybe it’s a gray one: “It’s been raining here for days!”

  Like yesterday’s, this rain doesn’t last the morning. But I’ve made more certain arrangements. I’ve e-mailed rain an invitation to accompany me on this afternoon’s trek.

  —

  Manoj Gogoi was seven years old when his mom, pregnant with his little sister, went into labor three months prematurely. It happened during a heavy thunderstorm. Manoj was the one who called for help. While his mom was rushed off to the hospital, he stayed back at the family’s apartment in Guwahati. During the hours he spent praying for his mother and baby sister, he watched the rain sheet outside his window. When he learned they were both okay, his little-boy brain conflated their survival with the storm. He insisted his parents name the new baby for the rain—Rimjhim.

  Rimjhim Gogoi is now twenty-one and in glowing good health, an undergraduate student in computer-science engineering in New Delhi. My new friend from the plane, she has come home to Guwahati, in the state of Assam, to spend summer break with her parents.

  Like Meghalaya next door, Assam has a tropical monsoon rain forest climate, with cool summer temperatures and lots of rain. But this month has smashed all heat records. The week we flew in, Guwahati and Assam hit their highest temperatures in history, 38.8 degrees Celsius in Guwahati, or near 102 degrees Fahrenheit. Across Assam, twenty-six people died of heatstroke and related illnesses in two days. Local governments shuttered the public schools, which don’t have airconditioning; they generally don’t need it.

  Thinking of the six-hour drive from Guwahati along hairy roads, I did not imagine Rimjhim would take me up on my invite to go trekking. But right on time, a tiny taxi crunches up the steep, gravel road and Rimjhim jumps out—followed by her mom. Dressed in strappy sandals, Mom insists she’ll be happy spending six more hours waiting for us. I hand her the key to my room, and Rimjhim and I set off for the most spectacular tree-root bridge, known as the Nongriat Village Double-Decker.

  The morning’s clouds have cleared the sky like an eraser, leaving a washed-out slate. We head for the two thousand stairs. After the Swiss Family Robinson bridge, we’ll hike again that far, descending deeper into the valley, climbing up part of the other side, and crossing two rivers on suspension bridges made of steel-wire rope.

  A small, white sun burns through the white atmosphere, making the two thousand steps feel like two thousand oven vents. But they go more easily with someone to talk to. Down the first thousand, Rimjhim and I cover our families, and love marriages versus arranged. During the second, as we begin to drip, Rimjhim has a confession. She despises sweat. This does not surprise me. I had noted, without judgment, I hope, the chichi dress on the airplane; the red-manicured fingernails; and the e-mail address that contains the word “fashionista.”

  Her next string of confessions is more substantial. She delivers them at the first suspension bridge, which stretches some thirty feet above the Simtung River. Rimjhim is terrified of heights. And water. And she can’t swim.

  I am flabbergasted. True, I never mentioned the steel footbridges. But the words “tree-root bridges” and “rainiest place on Earth” would have dissuaded most nonswimming acrophobics from this trek.

  “I am so sorry, ma’am,” she tells me. “I’m afraid I cannot cross.”

  The bridge’s base does seem meager—just eight steel ropes, an inch of sky between each. Wire woven between the base and steel-rope handrails, presumably for safety in the monsoons, is rusted from all the rain, and springing out here and there. Since it hasn’t been raining as much as usual, the Simtung isn’t raging beneath us, or swollen as it normally would be in June. Through the clear-rushing water, I can see the boulders that line the riverbed. If the bridge gives way, I don’t think Rimjhim will drown. She’ll just be crushed on the supersized rocks.

  Having already e-mailed with her brother to learn the story behind her name, I know that Rimjhim is the beloved miracle baby of her family, center of the universe to her brother, father, and sweet mom waiting back in my room. Still, after 8,000 miles and 2,000 steps, I am not inclined to turn back before I get to see the Double-Decker Root Bridge grown strong in the rain.

  I do the only thing I can think of, which is to tell some serious lies. Lies worse than the white or gray ones Clare Nasir told the children watching Fierce Earth: Monsoons. Lies worse than any I’ve told my own kids to convince them okra is not that slimy, or that the end of the hiking trail is just around the corner. I tell Rimjhim I am absolutely certain this bridge is rock-solid, that it is safe, that we will make it across fine, and that all she has to do is hold on, put one foot in front of the other, and follow me to the other side. “Just don’t look down.”

  I take Rimjhim’s gear, step onto the bridge with feigned confidence, and tell her we will be across in no time. This is true for me; my fear makes me scramble, water shoes slipping on the ropes. Rimjhim takes the bridge impossibly slowly, gripping the handrails and looking down with every step. When her feet touch soil on the other side, she is drenched in the dreaded sweat. She is shaking. But her enormous smile is back. She is thrilled to have conquered the bridge, and we snap triumphant pictures.

  The next suspension bridge is higher, longer, and flimsier. It sags where the other was taut. As an added bonus, a sleepy-looking villager is squatting near our end, making a repair. He signals us to wait, and we go through an almost identical sequence: Rimjhim eyes the barefooted repairman and says she can’t cross. I tell her lies as big as the boulders underneath us.

  The water in this river, the Umkynsan, is faster-moving and deeper, rushing down the boulders in rapids and flowing into gorgeous turquoise pools. When the villager waves us across, I step onto the bridge and try to ignore the bamboo and other mysterious, shifting patches covering gaps in the steel-wire rope. Tortoise-like, Rimjhim follows me across. More triumph, more pictures, more sweat.

  After the suspension bridges, our final climb up moss-grown stairs and stones into Nongriat Village feels easy. Gateway to the Double-Decker, Nongriat announces itself with a small, handwritten sign and a trash can made from a mustard-oil tin, both nailed to a tree. A tight bouquet of yellow butterflies, clinging lower on the tree trunk, blossoms out into flight as we walk by.

  Through the tiny village and down one more flight of mossy steps, we finally lay eyes on the monument built by generations of villagers, roots, and rain.

  Seeing the pair of bridges is divine, like spotting a double rainbow: One alone is already a masterpiece. The double-decker tree root bridges seem more a miracle. They stretch across a gorge from a giant Ficus elastica, an Indian rubber tree that has grown over and around large boulders to become part of the riverbank. Untold generations ago, villagers began threading thin new roots across to the opposite side. They used long, hollow betel-nut branches and flat stones to create the base, and molded handrails, too. Now the living roots have grown huge, and hardened into two vine-muscled walkways with waist-high walls, all sturdy as concrete. (As if anyone will trust me on the topic of bridge sturdiness.) Most constructed bridges, from the two we crossed this afternoon to the urban freeways of Delhi or Detroit, weaken over time. The double-decker has grown stronger.

  I am deeply disappointed that I have missed the monsoons.
I am also mad at myself for the magical thinking that Rimjhim would bring rain—and a tidy ending to the story. How easily I succumbed to my own version of praying for rain, no different than the governor of Georgia clasping hands at the gold-domed capitol in Atlanta or the Sumerians worshipping Iškur, the lightning-bolt-wielding god standing on the back of a bull.

  Rayen and Shati fear that Cherrapunji’s rainfall has changed permanently since Shati’s girlhood; that Meghalaya will lose its “Rainiest Place on Earth” title to global warming. Scientists say this is not yet possible to conclude. The latest climate models suggest changing patterns to the Indian monsoon will mean more extreme dry spells, but also far more intense rainfall in the future as the oceans warm. By the time I left India, the extreme rains that had surprised religious pilgrims at the Tibetan border in the north had killed more than five thousand people in flash floods and massive landslides. While Cherrapunji pined for rain, entire villages and towns in northern India had been washed away.

  When I finish out my last two days in Meghalaya, both will measure zero on the rain gauge, a rarity for June even in these past few years of rainfall deficits. But admiring the double-decker root bridge at Nongriat, I see rain in every pixel: Rain has filled the pools where a villager is washing her clothes and Rimjhim is having a splash. The young woman afraid of water is enjoying it—the need to drink, to cool off, and to celebrate a journey’s end now greater than her fear.

  As it has quenched humanity, rain has nourished this jungle, carved this gorge, fed these waterfalls, and made this stream, the Umshiang, gentle today but raging during the monsoons, tempests that led someone long ago to dream of protective treeways in the sky. The storybook Ficus elastica is part of the banyan family, and rain is the banyan’s mother’s milk—even the reason for its heart-shaped leaves. The “drip-tips” guide rainfall gently to the ground, protecting soil from the pounding monsoons. Roots dripping from its canopy like showers, the mythical banyan tree needs no soil to get established, no groundwater to drink. The water and nutrients that give it life come entirely from rain.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Of the many people who helped with these pages—and helped care for my two exuberant children so that I could write these pages—no one has contributed more than Aaron Hoover. As well as my husband, Aaron is my first editor, a speechwriter who elevates my words as he does my life and our children’s.

  Will and Ilana Hoover inspire everything I do. I thank them for being remarkably good sports—patient with my work and the sort of kids who not only swim, hike, and bike in the rain, but always aim for the puddles.

  I am grateful for my writing partner, environmental historian Jack Davis, whose wisdom, critiques, and support helped shape Rain from the day I had the idea through the weeks, months, and years I worked to turn it into this book. Rain is also much better thanks to three writers who became trusted friends over our shared interest in water and words, Heather Dewar, Emily Green, and Christine Klein.

  At Crown Publishing Group, I thank executive editor Rachel Klayman and publisher Molly Stern for believing in a book of rain; Domenica Alioto for her kindness and skillful editing; and Emma Berry for a million details. I treasure Anna Kochman and Chris Brand’s design, classic as an umbrella, and I thank production editor Christine Tanigawa and copy editor John McGhee for their saves. Dyana Messina and Danielle Crabtree are tireless promoters like the old-time rainmakers. At the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency, my thanks to Elise Capron, known in our house as my secret agent.

  I owe debts of gratitude to umpteen meteorologists and other scientists, none more than Greg Hammer at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, who was there from the time I set up initial interviews to the final days of fact-checking. In addition to the atmospheric and other scientists quoted in these pages, I am obliged to many others behind the scenes, all devoted to helping the public understand weather and climate and their risks. They include Dave Easterling and Mike Brewer at NCDC and Kevin Kelleher and Jonathan Gourley at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. I thank University of Oklahoma professors Bob Puls and David Sabatini, and Renee McPherson with the Oklahoma Climatological Survey. At the Met in Exeter, England, I thank Dan Williams and ever-patient Mark Beswick.

  Special thanks to Melissa Griffin, assistant state climatologist of Florida, for the many years she has answered my questions on the vagaries of weather and climate.

  At the University of Florida, I am indebted to the librarians, especially Florence Turcotte, and to scholars including Glenn Acomb in landscape architecture, Pierce Jones in extension, Joe Delfino in water resources, Paul Mueller in geology, and Bron Taylor in religion. For her warm and relevant introduction to India and Hinduism I am grateful to the Hindu scholar Vasudha Narayanan. At the University of Utah, thanks to Robin Craig and Robert Keiter.

  I thank Orion magazine and managing editor Andrew Blechman for the opportunity to write about water in Seattle, work that made its way into several of these chapters. The Seattle rain artist Buster Simpson is a font of information and inspiration.

  In Scotland, I thank Willie Ross and Daniel Dunko, and in England, Cambridge University Museum of Zoology Director Paul Brakefield. In India, a river of thanks to Jose Kalathil, Shakti Vinay Shukla, Dr. Ramesh Srivastava, and Brijesh Caturvedi; to the Rayen family: Denis Rayen and Carmela Shati and their children, Angela and Joel; and to the Gogoi family, rain-named Rimjhim, Manoj, and their parents, Dipti and Dilip.

  The Society of Environmental Journalists and its members have been incomparable sources of support. Many SEJ members, including William Souder, Robert McClure, Bill Kovarik, and Craig Pittman, came through when Rain needed them. I am indebted to other SEJ members including John Fleck and Nancy Gaarder for inspired reporting on climate change, weather, and rain.

  I owe much to the Escape to Create artist residency, Marsha Dowler, Karen Holland, my fellow E2C artists, and the community of Seaside, Florida—a town that proves the influence of urban design (and rainstorms) on creativity. I wrote my favorite chapters at the cottage of Seaside founders Robert and Daryl Davis, watching storms move in from the Gulf of Mexico. I am grateful to Jane Toby for caring for the children then. For other cherished writing spaces, I thank Bill and Julie Pine and the island of Cedar Key, Florida; and Bob Knight and Debra Segal and the community of Celo, North Carolina.

  My heartfelt thanks for the specific assistance of Anthony Anella, Karen Arnold, Maribel Balbin, Kate Barnes, Laura Bialeck, Mindy Blum, Joe Browder, Julie Brown, Michael Campana, Gracy and Mike Castine, Brenda Chalfin, Ronnie Cochran, Mary Furman, Lesley Gamble, Gerry and Joe Garrison, Kim Gregg and the Rev. Steve Gregg, Thomas Hallock, Melanie Hobson and Charlie Hailey, Paul Hoover, Yasuko Horie, Larry Leshan, Jacki Levine, Dr. Bernie and Chris Machen, Whitey Markle, Karl Meyer, Emily Monda-Poe, John Moran, Pat Morse, Louise OFarrell, Melissa Orth, Jim and Claude Owens, Annie Pais, Nancy Peck, Jonathan Rabb, Walker Roberts, Sonya Rudenstine, Ros Sadlier, Steve Seibert, Dan Smith, Kristen and Dan Stoner, Makiko and Dave Waldrop, Virginia Walsh, and Clive Wynne.

  I owe special thanks to Stephen Mulkey, president of Unity College in Maine.

  Finally, for a book this wide-ranging, I sought help from many more experts than I am able to acknowledge here, including the authors in the source material. I thank them all and absolve them of any responsibility for my interpretations and any mistakes, mine alone.

  NOTES

  PROLOGUE: ORIGINS

  Scientists viewed Mars: David Harry Grinspoon, Venus Revealed: A New Look Below the Clouds of Our Mysterious Twin Planet (New York: Perseus Publishing, 1997), 49–51.

  Hawking newspapers: Sam Weller, The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 43. For Bradbury’s love of rain, see p. 90.

  Earth, Mars, and Venus were born: Author interview with Dr. David Harry Grinspoon, NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, April 9, 2013.

  This is the beauty: C. Donald Ahre
ns, Essentials of Meteorology: An Invitation to the Atmosphere (Belmont, Calif.: Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning, 2012). Professor Ahrens’s Essentials of Meteorology and Meteorology Today: An Introduction to Weather, Climate, and the Environment (Belmont, Calif.: Brooks/Cole, Cengage Learning, 2012) are indeed essential for anyone who wants to understand weather and climate. For a primer on water vapor, see Essentials, pp. 5, 84–87.

  Nature’s trustiest timepiece: Author interview with Dr. Paul A. Mueller, University of Florida Department of Geological Sciences, Gainesville, Florida, February 27, 2013.

  The irony: Grinspoon, Venus Revealed, p. 31.

  Mars, too, appears: Author interview with Grinspoon; and David H. Grinspoon, “Chasing the Lost Oceans of Venus,” in Michael Carroll and Rosaly Lopes, eds., Alien Seas: Oceans in Space (New York: Springer Publishing, 2013), 3–10.

  Venus cooked: Author interview with Grinspoon; and Grinspoon, “Chasing the Lost Oceans of Venus,” 3–10.

  “Sunshine abounds everywhere”: John Burroughs, “Is It Going to Rain?” Scribner’s Monthly Illustrated Magazine, July 1878, 399.

  “The earth has enough”: Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, May 23, 1806, Monticello. Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress.

  Amid the worst drought: Hadley and Peter Arnold, “Pivot: Reconceiving Water Scarcity as Design Opportunity,” BOOM: The Journal of California, vol. 3, no. 3 (January 2013), 97.

  Globally, the continents recently drew: NOAA National Climatic Data Center, Global Analysis, 2011. The 2011 globally averaged precipitation over land was the second-wettest year on record, behind 2010, with greatly varied rainfall across the world including severe drought in the Horn of Africa.