Rain and the Barking Dog

As I look out my window over the soggy hills of Topanga the sky is blue, the sun is bright and puffy little white clouds drift by like fluffs of cotton on a placid sea. It is a scene of peace and tranquillity. I don’t trust it.

Any minute now, El Nino will come pounding at the door again and blast us out of our somnambulation and into a state of high stress until the last drop of rain falls and the last whisper of wind fades and the dog stops barking.

Barkley, which is the dog’s name, believes rain to be some kind of foreign invader attempting to break into the house, so when it falls, he opens up, running from one room to another, warning the rain away.

Since Feb. 2, according to our local weather-watcher, 25.08 inches of the stuff has fallen on Topanga, a period of disaster that coincides with my vacation. My time off began with El Nino swooping in with almost 2 inches of rain and now that my vacation has ended, sunshine. Go figure.

Instead of catching up on reading or lazing about the house looking over my collection of factoids during the calamity, I was outside cleaning storm drains, setting up a pump and clearing out a culvert under the driveway.

I like rain, but not the kind that sends houses sliding like bobsleds down muddy hillsides. Normally I wouldn’t go out into that kind of weather even if Monica Lewinsky were waiting under an oak tree, but I had no choice.

“You’re the man of the house!” my wife said over the noise of the storm and the barking dog. “Save us!” Yeah, right, sure.

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Factoids are little bits of useless information that CNN Headline News flashes on the screen between reports of disasters. For instance, “Only 0.05% of the population buys bowling shoes,” and “A woman in an average day speaks 66,000 words and a man speaks 25,000.”

I have been collecting factoids for years for reasons that escape me at the moment. No doubt I will someday be a factoid: “0.03% of the male population collects something that has absolutely no point whatsoever.”

Part of the 66,000 words my wife Cinelli was speaking at the height of the storm was that the water was rising in our backyard. I looked out and said “Yup” as part of my 25,000 words. She used up two more words by saying, “Do something!”

Twenty-six percent of all German men say they have too much leisure time, which is not my problem. It seems to me I am always doing something even if after I’ve done it nothing seems to have changed. I am man at his busiest, endlessly engaged in sweeping sand from the beach.

I sigh and lay aside the factoid I am reading (“600,000 pianos are purchased worldwide each year”), grab my Little Wizard pump and head into the backyard cursing the weather. It occurs to me as I do that I must use about 8,000 of my 25,000 words each day cursing something.

I set the pump in place and shout, “OK, plug ‘er in.” Then I realize I am standing in the water where the pump is located. While electrocution is probably not a possibility, I still jump clear as the pump kicks in. Twenty-two percent of all cases of electrocution no doubt involve angry men standing in water staring at their Little Wizards.

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We were the Isle of Topanga for a while. El Nino blocked the main boulevard at both ends with slides, but we are a hardy group up here on Walton’s Mountain. Give us enough beer, brown rice and cat food and we’ll hold out until Malibu freezes over or the beer runs out.

Meanwhile, my Little Wizard pumps water from the backyard with the spunky tenacity of the Little Engine That Could. I think I can, I think I can. . . . It grows stronger with each pump. I know I can, I know I can. . . .

I am getting drenched down to my underwear (of which 434 million pairs are sold each year in the U.S.), but that’s man’s role in a stormy world. On the other hand, nearly 200,000 U.S. women are enrolled in seminars. Mine is standing in the window watching me.

“Why aren’t you at a seminar?” I holler, but the dog is barking like crazy and she doesn’t hear me.

“Yo there!” I hear someone shout. I turn to see a spry, cheerful old lady striding through the storm followed by her goat. She gives me a thumb’s up sign and vanishes into the blinding rain. I’m thinking, an old woman and her goat in the mother of all storms shouting, “Yo there”? What the hell’s going on here? Did I really see it or has living in Topanga warped my perceptions?

I reenter the house snarling and dripping. Barkley looks at me and growls. He has never witnessed pure misery before. It keeps a dog busy barking at rain and snarling at misery. Arf to the rain! Arf to the misery!

“My goodness,” Cinelli says in a kind of Mary Poppins tone, “are we all wet and angry! My poor brave dear, out there in all that nasty water. If only rain were vodka, how much nicer it would be for you!”

I dry off and snuggle down with my factoids. The average household spends $27.21 on bananas each year. The average adult has 26 friends. The most popular lunch in U.S. schools is peanut butter. Ham is second.

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