Keeping Up With Weather

The most fun Don Lins has is hanging around the house watching the Weather Channel.

It would be more fun walking through blinding sleet or watching lightning punch holes in the freeway, but since that doesn’t happen very often, the Weather Channel will have to do.

There is something about the weather, he will tell you, that fascinates him. He thinks about it all the time and sometimes daydreams that he is on the roof during an electrical storm.

He didn’t say exactly what he’d be doing up there but, recalling an “X-Files” episode about a kid who absorbed the energy from lightning to cause all kinds of havoc, I decided not to ask.

I was on my roof just yesterday with a man who was putting in new rain gutters due to the ominous nearness of (shudder) El Neeno. He was showing me how the old ones had rotted through and, while he didn’t say so, I could see the expression on his face that wondered what kind of damned fool would have rain gutters with holes in them.

Lins, 25, had the same look on his face when I seemed blase about the weather. It was just such an attitude that caused him to e-mail me in the first place, scolding me for scoffing at Hurricane Linda and for making fun of El Neeno.

He wrote that when the storms generated by the weather condition reach us, “CALIFORNIA WON’T KNOW WHAT THE HELL HIT HER!!!!” I think I left out one “!” He had five of them. ! There.

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Lins calls himself a weather radical. That is not meant to imply he is out there trashing meteorological stations or stalking Fritz Coleman, only that he doesn’t like anyone to dismiss weather as unimportant or inconsequential.

He works for a marketing and promotions company but in his free time concentrates on watching, listening to or reading about wind, rain, sleet, snow, lightning, thunder and maybe a fog bank or two.

He also spends hours online checking out Web sites that deal with climatology. “Did you know,” he asked, focusing on me with the intensity of a chicken hawk, “that in 1939 six inches of snow fell on the Valley?”

“That must have been,” I said jokingly, “when hell froze over.” He didn’t laugh.

His obsession, Lins says, is probably due to a lightning bolt that struck just outside his window when he was 3. It may have rearranged his chromosomes or short-circuited his synaptic connections, because from that point on (Shazam!) he’s been a weather radical.

A similar incident altered the life of Richard Kelly, a self-described weather nut (that’s one level up from a radical) who lives on a hill in Topanga.

Kelly, 57, was in his grandmother’s kitchen in Chicago at age 6 when lightning crashed into the house, bounced around the room and disappeared into an electrical outlet. Such was the elemental force of the shock that it caused grandma to speak Norwegian.

Well, yes, she was Norwegian to begin with but usually spoke English. The lightning didn’t touch her, which, Kelly says, she took as sure proof that God loved her. Later Kelly stuck his finger in a light socket to prove that God loved him too and, in his words, “It shocked the hell out of me.” But he didn’t speak Norwegian.

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Kelly is the kind of guy who does something about the weather. He measures it. His wife, Lee, says that when it rains in the middle of the night he jumps out of bed to make sure his rain gauges are set and comes back in looking like a wet turkey.

He has two rain gauges, two weather vanes and a barometer, all of which he uses to track weather conditions for the local newspaper, the Topanga Messenger. While he isn’t obsessed with the Weather Channel, he does watch weather reports on television and argue back with the forecasters when he doesn’t agree with them.

“He used to be a real nut about the weather,” Lee says, “but he’s mellowed somewhat. I can remember when he’d come home all excited over a cloud. He’d go crazy during a drought because there was nothing to measure.”

When I asked Richard what he liked about the rain, he said it was the idea that you could go out into it and then come back to a warm, dry place.

“You go out into the rain just to come back to a warm place?” Lee asked incredulously. It may have been the first time she’d heard that. “I didn’t say I was right,” Richard replied uneasily, possibly a little sorry he’d even mentioned it.

Don Lins is considerably more intense about the possible presence of El Neeno than Kelly is, although I detect in Kelly the same sense of a Second Coming. I think Lee keeps him real.

What is stirring up people like them is the endless warnings on television. Weather forecasters like Johnny Mountain and Dallas Raines go absolutely Fishbeckian just talking about El Neeno. The only one who stays calm is KCAL’s Diane Barone. There is a perky, chipmunk quality to the way she delivers the weather report on KCAL that ameliorates even the worst news.

If we do get El Neeno storms, she will report them with the same pleasant demeanor with which she greets a sunny day. Lins and Kelly may be out there dancing in the nude when the storms hit, but nothing will rattle Diane.

I, meanwhile, will be standing under my new rain gutters and remaining perfectly dry. I still don’t know what kind of damned fool would have gutters with holes in them, but mine don’t.

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Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com