On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 5/1/2006
Enough Already!
"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."
--Mark Twain. Attributed in Hartford Courant (Connecticut, Aug. 27, 1897), editorial. Quoted by Charles D. Warner, though his actual words were, "A well-known U.S. writer once said that while everyone talked about the weather, nobody seemed to do anything about it." The remark is generally ascribed to Twain, with whom Warner collaborated on the novel, The Gilded Age (1873)."
Well now, I did not know that. I googled Twain's famous quote to be sure I had it right, and I find that it's only hearsay. If by any chance Twain did not say it, I'm sure he came to wish he had, for it's one of life's truest truisms, and it is never truer than when the folks doing the talking are cyclists (and Twain was an avid cyclist).
Weather. The topic that never stops being topical. An inexhaustible font of rumor, humor, conjecture, wild surmise, pitiful lamentation, bittersweet memories, and the rare, transcendent epiphany of perfect bliss. It's all there, up in the sky, coming your way.
I write a monthly column for the Santa Rosa Cycling Club called Backroads and Breakaways. Club gossip mostly. Ride reports. Humorous anecdotes. I would hazard a guess--without bothering to look it up--that I talk about the weather in nine out of ten monthly columns, usually as my intro. It is always an issue. In the game of cycling, the weather is always a player.
In spite of all those B&B columns on the subject, I have never written an essay in this space about the weather. I have written about riding in the winter (a favorable spin on that one). I have written about Rides from Hell (not so favorable). But never simply about the fact of the weather. This winter and spring have changed all that. I am finally ready to dance along the keyboard in the grand old tradition of talking about the weather.
Holy mud puddles, but what a miserable run of weather we have had lately, out here in sunny California! I wrote back in February about what a pleasant late winter we were having, including a record day of 76° on January 23. Well, forget the hell about that. That is so last month. Or the month before.
Actually, we had horrible weather right around the holidays, first off. Massive flooding, not quite to record levels, but close enough to get your attention, and more than enough to make riding problematic. (I was, for instance, virtually marooned on New Years Day, with almost all roads in and out of my town under floodwater.) Then we had that weird warm spell, and then it all fell apart. Late February, all of March, and most of April could be summed up in five words: rain, rain, and more rain.
Seattle made news back in mid-Spring by setting a record of something like 29 straight days of rain. One week into April, our local paper ran a front-page story with a chart comparing Santa Rosa with Seattle, day by day. We may not have had quite as many days straight with rain, but for total days of rain over a two-month period, and for total inches of rainfall, Santa Rosa blew Seattle out of the water. Not even close. We set our own all-time record for 25 days of rain in March, and April pretty much took up where March left off. This has come as quite a shock to those of us who cherish the apparently delusional notion that living in California means living in some sort of meterological eden...some lovely, balmy crossbreeding of desert and tropical isle.
Not! Not even close. Not this year. This year, we have been somewhat forcefully reminded that this part of California at least--the part north of the Golden Gate--is quite closely connected to the Pacific Northwest. All those drippy, dreary, dismal places are just a jet stream away, and when the big, globetrotting weather currents wander far enough south, we get a liberal sampling of what those misty, moldy, web-footed trolls to the north of us take as their normal lot in life.
We had a thread going about the weather on our club chat list as the days of rain kept on keeping on. Someone who claimed to know asserted that Santa Rosa actually records the same annual rainfall as Portland. Now, I know Portland rainfall. I grew up there. And I can say with some authority that it does not rain in Sonoma County the way it does in Portland. I said as much on the chat list, and as the keystone of my argument, I wrote: look at a meadow outside Portland in July and at a similar meadow outside Santa Rosa at the same time. The one near Portland will still be green, while the one near Santa Rosa will be golden and dry. Case closed.
In the real Northwest, it drizzles constantly....24-7-365. You may not get as many real gully washers, but you get persistent, pervasive drizzle...always. We used to call it liquid sunshine. And we used to say, that's not rust; that's an Oregon tan. I recall a day playing outside as a little kid in Portland. There was a new boy in the neighborhood who had just moved from California. It started to drizzle and this kid freaks out and starts running for home, and the rest of us--the amphibious natives--are all saying, "What's wrong with you? This isn't rain!" Hey, Portland is a great town. I could see living there if it weren't for the rain. But that's why I live in California, and especially in Sonoma County: because it has most of the virtues of Portland and the Willamette Valley--scenic as well as cultural--but without the bloody, non-stop rain.
However, this Spring season just past has almost forced me to recant; to eat my words, garnished with a sauce of gritty rainwater and muddy slime. This Spring in the North Bay has been an altogether too realistic facsimile of a classic Pacific Northwest wet season. If there is a difference--and there really is, usually--it's that we get most of our rainfall in one big dump, typically from late December to mid-March. We get scattered showers on into May, and these can torment us on our epic spring rides. But generally speaking, by Easter, we have rolled the cold stone of Winter away from the door and are launched on a season of blue skies and dream rides. I don't know...maybe it's global warming. Maybe it's el niño or la niña. Whatever the reason, this year the rain gods forgot the script. It just kept raining, on and on, down and down. Day after day.
This played havoc with our ride plans in the obvious sense of getting us wet and making us miserable...or causing us to leave the bike in the corner and stare out the window at the drizzle with a growing sense of restiveness. But the record rainfall has had other downstream effects. The ground is simply saturated. It cannot possibly absorb any more water. And so the earth, so lubriciously waterlogged, has been on the move. All over our hilly county, the earth has been in upheaval. Or perhaps more accurately, in down-heaval. As is subsidence, land slides...gravity at work on a grand scale. Dozens of our favorite backroads have either fallen away down their sloppy, slick hillsides, or the hills above the roads have slumped down onto the pavement in great oozing, sliming, slurries. Bridges have failed as well, as the bloated creeks and rivers have chewed away at their footings.
County and state road crews are swamped with emergency repair projects. It will be months--maybe even years--before they get around to fixing all of the roads that are now closed or down to one lane. It's almost enough to make me feel sympathetic about the poor public works department until I remind myself that 90% of the current problems are the result of deferred maintenance and penny-wise, dollar-foolish slap-dash work in the past. (But that's a rant for another day.)
And it's not just the big road closures that are a factor for riders. Even the roads that are open are pockmarked and scabbed with broken pavement, loose gravel, and potholes the size of hot tubs. And the saturated earth is going to keep weeping water across the roads for months. It would be extreme folly right now to try and bomb any descent around here where you can't see around the next corner. You just never know what booby traps are going to be waiting for you.
Then there's the poor bike. Even on a dry day, it's simply impossible to go for a ride of more than a mile without rolling through some puddles or muddy slime, usually a lake's worth of puddles and a quagmire's worth of slime. The bike is always dirty. I have cleaned my bike more times this year than in any other three years combined. And the cleaning always starts with the garden hose blasting off the accumulated layers of glop and grime. Nothing effete or dainty about these cleanings. It's cyclo-cross or Paris-Roubaix, every day. Great masses of crud adhered to every surface. Grit in the drive train? Yeah...just a bit!
So enough already! But hang on...I suppose, in the interest of being even-handed and open-minded, I should make the usual disclaimer, so here goes. If you live in Bismark or Buffalo or Burney, you probably think this maundering on about the awful, biblical rainfall in California is so much moonshine...a lot of pansy-assed weather whining from weenie wimps. I will concede the point. But the thing is, if you live back there where Winter really gets up on its hind legs and stomps about, you don't even think about riding in the months in question. You take up some other sport, like cross-country skiing or bowling or drinking.
But out here in what is supposedly the Golden State, we assume that our right to ride in all 12 months of the year is protected by the constitution. And when it happens that we get snookered in this department, we get a little upset. We don't cope very well.
Ah well, like a kidney stone, this too shall pass. And in fact, I am holding tight to the notion that we are now finally seeing the sunlight at the end of this long and gloomy tunnel. As we enter the month of May, we are beginning to see the sun, both in the sky and in the little icons on the AccuWeather forecast pages. As one fellow wrote on our chat list: "I went out for a ride today and ran into an old friend I hadn't seen in a long time: my shadow!"
Things are starting to look up. And to make it official, I have this week hung the hammock up between two pines in the woods behind the house. Once the hammock goes up, it's not supposed to rain again until the end of October. At least not much. We shall see. For now, the sun is out, the air is warm, and the skies are clear all the way to the horizon. We do not live in California so much as we live in hope, and for now the hope is that we have put this wettest of all possible winters (and springs) behind us, and that balmier, palmier days lie ahead.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net