Rainforest

Cool, wet--snowy?

Portland is a pretty rainy place, right? We’re well-known for that dreary coffee-shop culture, where people hole up inside in the winter because it’s too wet to do anything else. Winter means months of gray: Sometimes high gray clouds, sometimes fog, always with gray sidewalks and gray buildings. Streets back up with water, sewage flows untreated into the river, mold grows on everyone’s walls. It’s a rainy place. Thirty-five inches of rain fall in Portland each year.

And then there’s camp, fewer than 25 miles away, where it rains 80 inches a year. It rains so much that there are perpetual puddles on the road in, ferns grow on the tops of buildings, trees drip long after storms pass, and most of camp turns into one big creek in the winter. Everything turns to mud, the in-camp road turns into a rushing stream, and the buildings act as giant sponges. In spring, when I get things ready for rental groups, I find pretty much every toilet seat covered with a thick layer of mold. For now, the rain means I spend a lot of time getting wet, I’m likely to get the truck stuck, and I feel even luckier to have an indoor home for the winter.

I drove out of camp tonight, to spend a night in town before a day tomorrow also in town, and the raindrops hit my windshield in huge splats, as if the clouds couldn’t pump out enough water with more moderately sized drops. It was ridiculous to see—the dollops of water hitting my windshield, the rivulets next to the road, the layers of fog that obscured my vision as my car navigated the hills—and it all reminded me that where we live is only sort of civilizable. It’s rainy and nasty sometimes, and that’s why moss drips off the trees, and the river runs fast and brown and beautiful in the winter.