The Long Rain

"The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped."  

• The Long Rain - Ray Bradbury, The Illustrated Man

It was just over a year ago that I was writing about the extended drought in Panay (see Water, Water Not Everywhere and Green, Green Grass of Home).  Now there's been an endless, ceaseless rain over the past 3 months.  It has rained most days and generally all day.  I can't remember the last time we had a sunny day.  In fact it has been raining so much of late that it reminded me of a book I'd read as a lad called The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury.  It's a collection of short sci-fi stories with one entitled "The Long Rain"; the opening quotation at this posting is taken from that story.  Here's the synopsis:

A group of astronauts are stranded on Venus, where it rains continually and heavily. The travelers make their way across the Venusian landscape to find a "sun dome", a shelter with a large artificial light source. However, the first sun dome they find has been destroyed by the native Venusians. Searching for another sun dome, the characters, one by one, are driven to madness and suicide by the unrelenting rhythm of the rain. At the end of the story, only one sane astronaut remains and manages to find a functional sun dome.

I don't know what my equivalent of a sun dome would be but it would have been nice to find it here.

I must admit, I don't think I appreciated the book back then as much as I might if I re-read it now.  Of the short stories it was The Long Rain which sticks in my memory as being particularly depressing, particularly when one of the astronauts becomes so despondent with the rain that he stops walking, tilts his head back and opens his mouth and slowly drowns.  Okay, so I don't feel like that but it can be pretty depressing when it's just grey and wet all the time.

And getting laundry dry has been a nightmare; the house is damp and mildew and mould are prevalent. I'm glad I made the investment of buying dry cabinets to protect my camera gear!

Drift wood washed up on the beach following the recent  typhoon

The people I feel the most sympathy for is the local farmers working the fields.  Already grindingly poor, they seem to have suffered more than most.  I know rice paddies are supposed to be flooded, well for part of the time at least, but they were never meant to be submerged under 5 ft of water for weeks on end.

And then, when there seems to be a respite in the weather the farmers start working the fields again, only for them to be completely inundated soon after.

Then last week this culminated in typhoon Nalgae hitting the region on the 26th September followed by a lessor one the following weekend.  Nalgae was very severe.   I woke up on the Tuesday morning having slept through the worst of the storm the night before (large quantities of beer probably contributed to my slumber but it's also a reflection of the quality of the house I live in, built by the American military).

I was up at 7:30am and feeling rather foggy from the booze the night before.  I went out to the front of the house and my neighbour Barry was just passing the driveway.  "Where are you going?" he asked.  "To work", I said, "some of us have a job to to".   "You're not going anywhere, there's a tree across the road".  And so there was.  So I went back to bed for a couple of hours.  At 10am the power went off and stayed off for the rest of the day.

Later that morning I decided to try and head out again and the tree blocking our road had been chopped up although some large branches were still blocking the road, so I jumped out of the car and in horizontal rain dragged the mossy branches out of the road and I was already I was soaked, mucky and covered in twigs not having travelled 50 yards.  I headed off in the usual direction but at the guard house I was stopped and told the road was impassable due to fallen trees and power lines (that would explain the power cuts), so I headed out on another route.

The garden covered in debris from the storm

This route was also blocked by a small tree.  The car in front of me stopped.  I stopped and then 3 cars stopped behind me.  I was thinking that the tree wasn't going to move itself but no one seemed willing to tackle the problem.  Then a car from the opposite direction pulled up and an expat jumped out.  Seeing that there was someone else willing to give it go, I got out into the horizontal rain too and met him in the road, where we agreed to have a go at dragging the tree out of the way.  No one else offered to help, they all just sat in their cars and watched us.  Worst than that, once we had dragged it out of the way and were thoroughly soaked through all the other cars sailed past without so much as a thank you or even an acknowledgement.

That day I had to head to Clark to drop colleagues off at the airport.  The road out of Subic Bay was nigh impassable from fallen trees, flooding and downed power lines.  It all rather reminded me of the morning of the hurricane that hit the UK in 1997 and trying to get to work the same day.

The road to Clark from Subic

But to give credit where credit is due, the local authority has done a sterling job in clearing up and within a few days all was back to relative normalcy (or what passes as normalcy in the Philippines).