It Never Rains in Southern California
Fear The Wrath of El Niño
Up until last week, California was in the middle of a four-year drought, which is what you might expect would happen if you plonk a massive concrete city in the middle of the desert, and then make it so impossible to navigate without a massive gas-guzzling car that you are effectively a single-city campaign for climate change.
That is, until last week.
Last week, the tropical storm El Niño arrived.
The phrase “El Niño”, referring to an enormous tropical weather system coming from the Equatorial Pacific, like “The Big One”, the phrase suggestive of the apocalyptic Richter 7.0 or above earthquake that every Angeleno knows is coming someday, is laden with existential dread.
The streets have been alive with rumours of El Niño’s arrival for months: that it might make up for the four rainless years before, that the city would grind to a halt, that no-one would leave the house or be able to do anything for months. People were bandying around phrases like ‘climate change’, ‘disaster’, ‘deluge’ and other such things.
After a month or two of these mutterings, I began to imagine an LA that would come to resemble some form of concrete West Coast Atlantis, a city underwater, with mudslides and falling power lines and motorways grinding to a standstill. Shops would close. No-one would leave the house for weeks on end. The law would collapse, misrule would reign, the rich would retreat behind the gates of their houses on dry land up in Beverley Hills and Hollywood, and those of us close to the water would try to stay afloat and alive. The pristine apartments near my house would come to resemble the tower block in JG Ballard’s High Rise. I prepared myself for Los Angeles in the 1990s circa the Rodney King beating.
I contemplated investing in a one-man kayak that would allow me to paddle the 15-minute journey to work, and began to think about gathering distress flares, foil blankets, canned food, and other tools to prepare for the gathering storm. I began trying to teach my benign and docile dog a few more aggressive behaviours, and started examining my apartment building for how I might storm-and-siege proof it. I started, like a good American, assessing the suitability and price of various firearms (the ultimate marker of freedom & security during a storm, of course, being the ability to shoot at other people).
Then the rain hit.
As the ‘tropical storm’ commenced, it became apparent to me that, in LA at least, “El Niño” is, in fact, Spanish for ‘a bit of light rain’.
It rained consistently, but not that heavily, for around four days, and then it stopped.
This was not the tropical storm that I was promised.
Whilst you might also legitimately expect that people are bit unused to rain out here, the reaction here has been nothing short of hilarious.
Highlights include:
- Angelenos wearing Wellington Boots. WELLINGTON BOOTS. I lived in London for a decade and the only place I saw anyone wearing Wellington boots was at Glastonbury because the alternative was trenchfoot, or stepping in puddles composed of human urine and excrement. Everything here is concrete, so there’s not even any mud for you to step in.
- People taking photographs of the rain, like it’s some rare zoo exhibit or fleeting phenomenon not available elsewhere in the world.
- Friends and acquaintances crying off from social engagements, because it’s “too wet to do anything’. By this yardstick, most of the population of the UK would never leave the house, or see anyone, at all. I congratulate my British readers on their continued fortitude in the face of such difficulties.
To give my American readers some context in future, below is what ‘heavy rain’ looks like in the north of the UK:
(You can’t see it in the photograph, but there are probably people in those pubs, sat on stools so they don’t get wet, drinking).
El Nino has also had some positive side-effects: it appears that the benefit of a bit of rain is that it clears smog, so I find myself for the first time noticing that I can see the mountains on the drive to work, and that there’s snow up there.
(This, of course, now just makes me wonder how polluted the air must be most of the year).
Somewhere in the north of California, this storm is actually causing some problems, but down here it turns out the song was right after all, even if that was never really what it was about.
