WEATHER WATCH : Soggy Time

These recent weeks in our “sunny” clime have run together in a relentless blur of fierce rainstorms, high winds--even tornadoes--and menacing clouds.

Is this California, or is this a verse from Robert Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time”?

At times, it seems as if Mother Nature has been playing a cruel joke on the very idea of life in this place. It’s rain you say you need? Well, here, courtesy of colliding Pacific air masses, is too much of a good thing.

So houses slide into ravines in Laguna Beach. Restaurants in San Clemente are awash in storm water. Too many streets to count are closed in San Diego County. Life on wheels in the San Fernando Valley stalls abruptly as motorists are plucked from floodwaters by helicopter.

And yet there is still this talk of persistent drought. It seems unbelievable. We need the water, but can’t handle it when it arrives at our doorstep, either. Too many miles, too many dry years and too many melting days stand between us and our distant water sources.

So we live in a place full of contradictions. After years of drought, the hoped-for rains send a neighbor’s house tumbling down a cliff.

Meanwhile, the same commodity arrives at our tap as an imported product, reaching us through engineering wizardry and the politicking of bureaucrats. Last year’s dry creeks run madly as today’s dangerous torrents. People who wondered if it would ever rain again are evacuated.

Sometimes parched, sometimes soggy, Southern California is never dull--and never quite as expected.