In Celebration of Winter--and the Way It Was

That was a taste of the real thing, wasn’t it? Winter? The way it used to be? Rain, pause, then more rain?

Sometimes I think I can remember those kind of winters, and sometimes not. On Thursday night, very late, I stood on my back deck and watched the gutters overflowing. They hadn’t been cleaned in years, so cascades of water were spilling onto the bushes and shrubs.

Goody, I thought. Clogged gutters were just the ticket. The water flooding the ground amounted to a stay of execution for the bushes and shrubs. Maybe now they would make it through the summer.

Years ago, at another house, I remember watching the same scene and feeling a rising panic. That year, the winter of 1980, it rained so hard and so often that the hills had begun to slide in my neighborhood. I was afraid my failure to clean the gutters would lead to my ruin, would end with my house taking the big ride into the street.

It didn’t, and even the memory of those years has faded. Our winters have become forlorn copies of our summers, almost as dusty and almost as bright.

And that’s why, I think, this week’s rain seemed important. We’ve had other rains, of course, a couple of them this season. But they were mere imitations of the real thing, tentative and uncertain. This one was different. It looked and felt like winter.

Somewhere out in the Pacific, a door had opened. And through this door the storms--that had always been there, waiting--came rolling toward California.

Technically, the jet stream had curled southward from its old position over southern Canada. It moved more than a thousand miles and pushed aside a meteorological feature known as the Pacific High.

Figuratively speaking, the Pacific High is the door that has stayed closed for five years. A huge mound of barometric pressure, the High has hung off our coast and deflected the storms to the northwest. As long as it stayed in position, we would get no rain.

When the jet stream pushed the High south to Baja, the door opened. And the jet stream itself became a train pulling the storms eastward across the Pacific.

Suddenly, all over California, rain was falling. Millions of acre feet were pouring down on the Sierra. Just as an exercise, figure it was 3 million acre feet. Figure each acre foot is worth about $250, the pre-drought price in Southern California. That’s a $750 million rain storm.

Don’t we wish. Actually, very little will end up in the reservoirs. Most will simply soak into the thirsty ground. On Friday, the state was projecting that its reservoirs would receive inflows of only 20,000 acre feet in the next week. That is less water than Southern California uses in a day.

Still, there was this feeling, an instinct, that winter had come to Los Angeles. Other places may celebrate spring. Last week, we celebrated winter.

At mid-week, when the rains first started, I was riding an elevator to the lobby of our building. A friend got on, carrying an umbrella. I asked where she was going.

Nowhere, she said. Her intention was simply to stand on the sidewalk, open her umbrella, and let the rain fall on her. She wanted to feel the negative ions. It had been a long time, she said, since she had soaked up some negative ions.

And then there was another friend who has a daughter, 2 years old. The friend works here at the newspaper and has a day-care person for the kid. On Friday, at mid-morning, she noticed it was raining again, and called home.

Would the day-care person, she asked, please take the kid outside? The kid, you see, had lived all of its two years in Los Angeles and had never felt rain.

No one knows if winter, truly, has come. The satellite maps show more storms lining up near Hawaii, ready to go. And although the skies were clear on Saturday, the door in the Pacific stays open.

We will get the answer over the next weeks, and there is some cause for hope. Miracles have happened before. Parched Januarys and Februarys have been followed by monster storms in March and April.

Can you picture it? The world turning green for the first time in half a decade. The air smelling damp, the ground squishing under your feet. California returning to the way it’s supposed to be.

The drought people in Sacramento say the odds against a monster spring are about 70%. That means the odds in favor are about 30%. Not a good bet, certainly. Not the kind that would quicken the pulse of a horse player.

But as it stands, it’s a bet we’ll have to take.