Halfway down the Danube

Rainy Season

It's the rainy season here.

Understand that this is relative. When I lived in the Marianas Islands, "rainy season" meant that, several times a day, it would just pour down rain, in curtains and sheets so thick that you couldn't see across your yard. Brown torrents would run down the roads. Toads would move into your house to get out of the wet. Then the sun would come out and the world would turn to steam.

This isn't like that. More like, it rains most days, and sometimes two or three times a day. On the wet side of a normal April in, say, New York.

But in New York, it rains year round. In Yerevan, this is about it.

I noodled around for meteorological data. Yerevan has a dry continental climate; it gets about 550 mm or 21 inches of rain per year. (For reference, 500 mm or 20 inches is the point where ordinary agriculture, without irrigation, starts getting a bit challenging. Go under 20 inches, and the word "arid" enters the conversation.)

In April and May, Yerevan can expect to get between 80 and 90 mm of rain. Not too different from New York or Germany.

But in July, August, and September -- combined -- we can expect about 25 mm of rain. Less than one inch. In Europe or the eastern US, that's a rounding error. Basically, all summer long, it doesn't rain.

You can see it, too, if you look. The vegetation has that shaggy, manic look that dry country plants get when the rain comes. You can see that they're sponging it up for the long drought, and leafing and flowering like crazy while they can. Our back yard (despite Claudia's best efforts with the weed whacker) has gotten very jungly. You just know that by September, everything will be shriveled and dry and yellow.

Anyway. One interesting side effect is that we all have colds.

Another is that it hailed yesterday. That was way cool. I was out on the back porch with the boys, and it was thundering. They liked that. Then we heard this sound -- hssssss -- and I thought, ah hah, here comes the rain, walking across the city towards us. But after a few seconds I thought, no, that's too loud. And as it came closer, it was more of a staccato sound: tik tik pop whack boom.

Yerevan has a lot of corrugated tin roofs, do you know? And there's nothing like the sound a curtain of hail makes as it falls towards you, miles wide and high as the sky, ticking and banging on a thousand acres of tin. Staccato becoming a growl becoming a ROAR, as suddenly the little pieces of hard whiteness began falling all around us.

"It's from the North Pole!" yelled Alan. And he's remained convinced of that since.

Anyway: rain. We should enjoy it while we can.

Posted by douglas at May 1, 2006 09:12 AM