This morning, as the dog and I were walking, the expected rain arrived. We were prepared for it, Rascal with his thick coat and I with an umbrella. The rain on the leaves was the only sound at the time, a quiet shhhhh. It was a gentle rain, whose edges move in and wrap you like a blanket. Shhhhh.
The sound of the rain on election day was something else entirely. I had walked to the polling place, a school in our neighborhood, when the world was still dry. That situation had changed by the time I came back out. This was the hardest rain I’ve ever been in, thundering down on everything including my near-pointless umbrella. It ran ankle-deep in the school driveway. It bounced back up again after it hit the ground. By the time I got home, even my shirt was soaked. My shoes probably made squishy sounds, but they were inaudible in the tattoo of the downpour.
Rain has distinct sounds in different settings. Rain on a cottage roof, with a fire crackling in the fireplace is a very fine sound indeed. It sounds like summer and loved ones and ease.
Rain on a tent is less staccato and may include a sense of risk, depending on how reliably waterproof your particular tent is. I enjoy the illusion of safety in a tent, but it isn’t always warranted. Daughter Number Two was camping once, and she and her companions hustled to put up their tents in the rain after dark. D#2 hustled so fast, in fact, that she didn’t even stake the corners of her tent. And woke in the morning to find that tent in a new location. The tent had proved quite waterproof. So waterproof, in fact, that it had floated a fair distance along the river bed in which, it turned out, she’d sited it. The river was dry when they arrived at the campground, rising only later as the rain continued. Whatever floats your tent, as they say.
Winter rain, of course, sounds different. It lands not on leaves but on hard surfaces—branches, buildings, the ground. Or whatever’s on the ground, such as snow or ice. And the sound of winter rain varies with temperature. If it freezes as it falls, or when it falls, it rests heavy on surfaces. What you hear is a lot of breaking, as branches and sometimes whole trees succumb to the weight.
In thunderstorms, rainfall isn’t the compelling noise. In our honeymoon cottage, we used to sit in the sunroom that cantilevered out over the hill, and watch and listen as storms played out over the distant horizon, in the ancient pear tree some long-ago owner had planted, and in all the other trees in the Broadway woods. It was our own little world.
Enjoying an Up North thunderstorm as I returned to the cottage after a foray into the non-cottage world, long ago, I got out of the car reflecting on what a pleasure t-storms are. Suddenly, lightning hit somewhere very close behind me, ending with a distinct snap and raising the hair on the back of my neck. I stepped lively through the cottage door.
Our friend Rhonda enjoys thunderstorms, too. As a teenager, she tried to cultivate this enjoyment in the youngster she was babysitting, who had confessed his own fear of them. Alas, no sooner had she sat down with him to watch the storm through the front window than lightning struck the tree out front. Crash! Boom! No more tree. Rhonda still feels bad about the incident, but it’s safe to say that the little boy would have noticed the lightning strike that exploded the tree, whether or not he was sitting on her lap at the time.
Our friend Pat was exploring an Arizona canyon with her young son, years ago, when she sensed something. “We have to climb out of here right now,” she told him, and they climbed as fast as they could. When they got to the top and looked back at where they’d been, they saw the wall of water and debris arrive. Rain somewhere else had started a flash flood on its way down the dry river bed. The sound of rain, for someone who grew up in Arizona, may be just a sense, followed soon after by the roar of floodwaters.
It’s raining over pretty much all of Michigan today, and much of the Midwest as well. It’s a lovely, soft, summer rain, and the sound of it is gentle and quiet. No thunderclaps. No rat-a-tat-tats. Just shhhhh. Shhhhh. Shhhhh.
16 August 2024