My wife was just climbing into
bed, and I was already heavy with sleep after a coastal trip the
other night, when something began tearing at the screen outside our
small bedroom window. This something was eager to come inside. In
the few seconds it took for us to yell and wave our arms madly and
finally bang on the window to scare whatever it was away, one side
of the screen was ripped off. My wife Hayley grabbed a camping
headlamp nearby and shone it out on the porch roof below. Was it a
cat, a desperate human?
Nothing there. Just rain,
slanting hard into the night.
The “what” remained
mysterious, but the “why” was very clear: Something wanted refuge
from the incessant rain outside. Jumbo drops were falling, and we
were in the maw of non-stop rain in Portland; only three days have
been dry in the last month and a half (and who can remember them?).
The rainfall topped 17 inches in December and January.
Portland and the Northwest may be notorious for their wetness, but
this latest extra-long episode — breaking continuous rainfall
records in Seattle and drawing comparisons to El Nino years —
has even the most duck-footed natives crying uncle to the climate
gods.
I’m only in my fourth winter here, so I like
to prove my heartiness by riding a bike or shooting hoops even in a
cold drizzle. This month’s experience has eroded that
bravado. I’ve also taken up the umbrella, a seldom-used tool
here, and am getting the hang of the well-timed brolly-raise to
avoid hitting pedestrians on downtown sidewalks. Other Portlanders
seem to be carrying more protection as well, and the weather,
usually a given, has become fodder for café chats and headline
writers.
Washington residents took the brunt of the
storms, with evacuations and massive floods following a recent
one-day deluge. Here in Oregon, repercussions have been milder,
with washed-out roads concentrated on the Oregon coast. There have
been power outages, but there’s little to demonstrate just
how drenched we are.
During a recent trip up the coast to
escape the Portland rain, we watched Weather Channel footage of a
recent flood to the southwest. A swollen river had undercut a
neighborhood, and one by one, houses exploded in a cloud of
insulation as they fell into the river. Bang, gone under water in
an instant. Hollywood couldn’t have directed it better.
We’ve escaped that drama. It just pours — all the time.
Following Highway 101 toward Astoria, the coastal town featured in
Tim Egan’s 1991 biography of the Northwest, “The Good Rain,”
we drove through what seemed like a 30-minute car wash, with drops
the size of golf balls.
“Wet out there,” Hayley told the
man behind a diner counter in town after we’d run inside,
already soggy. “Seems to be going around,” he said slyly, from
below his blue ball cap with the word HAWAII stretching across it.
The constant rain made us cancel a trip to Cape
Disappointment on the Washington Coast and head back to Portland,
only to encounter the midnight intruder. It was, as you’ll
recall, scared away from the window but still unidentified.
I threw on boots and jacket and bounded for the front
door. Should I open it? “I think it’s a cat,” Hayley called
down. I burst outside, covering my head to protect it from flying
claws, then, a good distance from the roof, shined my flashlight at
the house. Two red eyes reflected back from under an eave near our
window.
Out into the open came the striped and
waterlogged lump of a large raccoon. He slowly hopped up onto the
second floor roof, probably making for someone else’s yard.
Halfway up he paused and cast a deliberate — some might say
cheeky — gaze in my direction. What were his plans if he had
gotten the screen off our window? We’re spinning our theories
with kin on the East Coast as to just how desperate a raccoon might
be for a dry bed.
Oakley Brooks is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He writes about business in
Portland, Oregon.
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