And Now for the Weather

The coldest I have ever been was in Barrow, Alaska, when the wind off the Arctic Ocean was 20-below and I was dressed in nothing warmer than polyester slacks and a cable-knit sweater.

The wettest I have ever been was on the Sea of Japan standing guard on the main deck of a troop ship that was taking a bunch of us Marines to Korea in the belly of a typhoon.

The most miserable I have ever been was last Tuesday in a rainstorm that brought traffic to a standstill on every freeway and surface street in L.A. during a time when I was in a desperate hurry.

I hold Dianne Barone personally responsible.

She is the noon weather lady on television station KCAL who, as I recall, had predicted that there was only a minimal chance of showers on Tuesday.

This is important. In a city where a mattress in lane three can paralyze the world’s most complicated freeway system, a little rain generates a level of chaos that can achieve historic proportions.

I was in Long Beach when the rain began. It got increasingly heavy and the day increasingly dark as we crawled northward along the 405 at a slowly diminishing rate of speed.

And then somewhere around Lawndale everything came to a halt due to a semi that had jackknifed on the storm-slicked highway, blocking all five lanes and turning the 405 into a parking lot.

That’s when I began cursing Barone.

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It would have done little good for me to have shaken my fist at God because he is busy these days campaigning for Pat Buchanan. But television weather forecasters are always good targets for invective because, like God, they occupy important positions in the conduct of our daily lives.

We don’t pray to them exactly or ask their forgiveness for anything, but we do rely on them to tell us when it’s going to rain.

I used to curse KABC’s Johnny Mountain, but, in the tradition of Willard Scott, he seemed so irrepressibly goofy that I switched over to Dianne Barone who, like my sister Emily, is pleasant but rarely foolish.

Barone is the weather forecaster women trust, the way men trust Norman Schwarzkopf or little children the Cookie Monster. My wife, Cinelli, turned me on to her several months ago and I learned to trust her too.

“You could do worse than Dianne,” Cinelli assured me one day. “She’s a lot more coherent than the guy you used to watch in Oakland who got drunk with his dog every time it rained.”

“That wasn’t a weatherman,” I said. “It was a traffic reporter. The dog had a drinking problem and was dragging him down too. It has been my experience that you should never try to outdrink a Yorkshire terrier.”

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I talked to Barone after I had missed all of my Tuesday afternoon appointments due to the unexpected heavy rain and discovered that she was not happy with miscasts either.

“I holler, ‘Oh my God, it’s raining!’ when we go out at night and it begins to pour after I’ve spent the day forecasting clear weather,” she says. “My husband, Harley, teases me by saying it’s only a drop, but then turns on the windshield wipers.” That’s a guy for you.

Barone, who is 36, loves weather the way a boy loves his puppy. She never wearies of talking about it at home or at parties and sometimes to strangers in supermarkets who approach her and ask whether it’s OK to plan a golf date Sunday in Palm Springs.

She stands there by the checkout stand and gives a whole report, like it will be partly overcast with a 20% chance of showers and daytime temperatures in the low 70s. Winds from the northeast at 12 miles an hour.

Unlike those other goofballs on television, she doesn’t try to use her time on camera as a forum for stand-up comedy. There is nothing funny, dude, about relative humidity. And she doesn’t refer to a day of rain as bad weather.

“It is not my personality to be funny,” she says, “and I try not to editorialize. I just tell you what to expect. What may be bad to some isn’t necessarily bad to everyone.”

As we finished our conversation, Barone was telling me again how much she loved weather, to the extent that I didn’t have the heart to chastise her for my misery on the 405 during an unanticipated rainstorm.

It wasn’t her fault, I guess, but we all have to blame someone for our misery. The traffic guy in Oakland used to blame his dog when he missed a tie-up somewhere, but the dog had the right attitude. He’d just shrug it off and pour another martini. Smart dog.

Al Martinez can be reached on the Internet at al.martinez@latimes.com