You Can Go Home Again, But Take a Rain Slicker

The full realization of Southern California’s four-year drought came rushing up to me a few weeks ago as my plane descended into the lush green hills of western Missouri.

A longtime resident of Southern California, I had paid scant notice to the parched brown landscape that unfolded beneath as I flew out of the Los Angeles Basin last month for a vacation with relatives in the Kansas City, Mo., area, where I grew up.

Only the day before my flight, I had been on assignment in San Luis Obispo, a Central Coast town so dry that, like in many eateries these days, water is served in restaurants only upon request--and even then with a reproving look from the waiter.

And in Los Angeles County, where I live, my wife and I had begun repairing leaky faucets and taking other steps to help conserve water.

In Kansas City, however, water conservation was the last thing on anyone’s minds. In preceding weeks, Kansas City and the rest of the Midwest had been inundated with spring showers; so much so that floods had routed thousands of people living along swollen rivers.

The Blue River of Kansas City, for instance, flooded out of its banks just days before I arrived, damaging hundreds of homes. It had rained nearly nine inches in one day. In Santa Ana, by contrast, it has rained only about eight inches in one year.

Before moving to Southern California six years ago, I had not viewed rain as an oddity. The average rainfall in Kansas City is 30 inches per year.

In Houston, where I worked just before relocating in the West, afternoon showers were so reliable during the steamy summer months that one could almost set a watch by them.

It was quite an adjustment, then, when I moved to Southern California during April of 1984, and nary a drop of rain fell until the following October. I went through such withdrawal that I even ventured into some of the local mountain ranges in search of high country thunderstorms.

Gradually, though, my system adjusted to the semiarid climate. And like many Southern Californians, I even grew to curse the one day in 30 during which a measurable amount of precipitation might fall--such as the dampening Orange County received Saturday. I also learned not to look twice at the dry concrete channels where only the sign saying River gave a clue that water ever ran through.

I was reminded what river really meant when on final approach to Kansas City International Airport, near which I could see the Missouri River flowing wide and mighty as the boundary between Missouri and Kansas. A jungle-like scene of green grass and trees sprawled from the river in all directions.

In my weeklong stay in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, Kan., where my parents live, it rained nearly every day. Most days, it poured. So much so that one Kansas City weathercaster complained that it was too much after one two-inch downpour. Back in California, residents would be dancing in the streets over this.

I was less amused with the ferocity of the Midwest storms, cringing as bolts of lightning flashed across the dark sky and thunder boomed so loudly overhead that it shook the house and sent the dog, Ben, scurrying behind a couch. Sometimes I felt like hiding too, having forgotten how dramatic a thunderstorm can be.

Tornadoes were bouncing throughout the Midwest at the time, and I remember watching TV with alarm as a newscaster nonchalantly related how a mile-wide twister had cut a destructive swath through another section of Kansas that particular day.

With this kind of threat in mind, I often made sure to calculate how many seconds it would take to sprint from one part of my parents’ 2 1/2-story house to the protection of the basement.

After bidding Kansas City farewell, I considered on the flight home how much I was going to miss the excitement of inclement weather and how boring it would be to go back to weeks upon weeks of sunshine-filled days. As it turned out, I didn’t have to miss the rain for long. A freak rainstorm hit the Southland the same day of my return.

While my wife complained of the day being ruined, I smiled to myself, thinking this was more like it.