All This Water,and It’s Not Even Evian

Two inches of rain broke the monotony of sunlit perfection, an intrusion as irritating as a small hair trapped and flittering in the lens of a movie projector.

On what the newscasters are fond of calling Day One--whether they are tracking a storm or a war--our fair-weather affability did not entirely desert us. Barry Manilow signed autographs on the shoulder of I-5 for an hour, after his Range Rover got tangled up with three other cars in the rain.

Weathermen who in September were plaintive about the heat and drought have not yet begun wringing their hands about this endless pummeling of rain; that begins on Day Two.

Owners of massive, manly four-wheel-drive vehicles finally need not feel silly taking them on the finest roads in the country. Pedestrians, trustingly, still stand close to the curb and get sprayed in the prop wash from gutters; it never rains long enough to remember not to.

If TV cameras were disappointed in the footage of Malibu mudslides that were, by official reports, “teeny,” there was a construction trailer teetering obligingly above a quarry in Irwindale; flooding on the Ronald Reagan Freeway in Northridge; a choice of 196 freeway accidents in four hours; and the Fire Department’s daring swift-water rescue drill on the Reseda stretch of the L.A. River.

Farmers try to calculate rain in acre-feet. Commuters think of it in water-hours: Distance multiplied by rainfall equals drive-time. Roofers might as well measure each drop in gold. Street vendors switch adroitly from sunglasses to umbrellas, making as much money in foul weather as fair from we thousands who hardly remember to buy umbrellas and then hardly remember to take them, so unnatural a state is rainfall.

You will not find us singing the Zuni corn-grinding song: “Lovely! See the rain, the rain draws near!”

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Tuesday was the day of the New Hampshire primary. The temperature there topped out in the low 40s. The voter turnout percentage was in the high 70s. When it rained in Burbank on election day two years ago, it tamped down the turnout to a frail 20%.

New Englander Robert Frost, in a poem he titled “New Hampshire,” wrote: “I met a Californian who would/Talk California--a state so blessed/He said, in climate, none had ever died there/A natural death.”

Frost’s booster had it partway right. We long ago waterproofed ourselves with concrete. We paved our rivers, our streets, de-natured ourselves into one big sluice basin, funneling rainwater and runoff around us, into a pauseless rush from the mountains to the ocean.

In “The Control of Nature,” John McPhee writes of our hillside settlements as places that “would rather defy nature than live without it.” To Southern Californians, says the state’s official librarian and unofficial historian Kevin Starr, rain amounts to a personal affront.

As much as we need rain, we have been wary of it. As desert people know that water comes most reliably from wells, we of this seaside desert know our water comes regularly from the north. Controlled water we like; uncontrolled water is somehow as alarming as an earthquake.

Our distrust is not just born of the deadly floods of the 1920s and ‘30s, or the freeway messes of today, when our roadway skills, in Starr’s words, devolve at a frightening rate. It must be primordial. In the tar pits of eons past, rainwater pooled tantalizingly over the depths of the tar, luring thirsty creatures into a happy hour that would last forever.

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It was raining in Pacific Palisades, and Dr. Roderic Gorney took immense pleasure in it.

His roof was leaking, yes, and one of his boots had a hole that would mean a wet foot when he led his horse across what the news media always call “a rain-swollen creek,” but oh, the pleasures of weather.

He is a professor of psychiatry and bio-behavioral science at UCLA, and the role of climate and weather in psychosocial adaptation problems has held an interest to him, in no small part because of his own aversion to the heat and aridity of the seaside desert where he lives.

He remembers New York City even less fondly, but in the woods of Connecticut he found what he finds in the brief rains here: “the verdure and moisture . . . a sense of growing and abundance.

“When I came out to California and felt this abominable dryness, especially heat . . . on days when there’s tremendous increase in heat, temperatures in the 80s, Santa Anas, I can be sad where everyone else is saying, ‘Oh, isn’t this great?’ ”

Seasonal Affective Disorder is a condition of recent diagnosis, and Dr. Gorney has patients who suffer from it, showing profound symptoms when deprived of sunlight for long. They can be treated with light-lamps. Whether one can suffer from too much sunlight is not yet, perhaps, a matter for diagnosticians, but for urban anthropologists, who must calculate the effect of eternal midwinter barbecues on a region full of Peter Pans, where it is always, absurdly, summer, or we want to know the reason why.