Folks around the high desert are talking about the weather again and for once the complaint is too much of a good thing. This has been one of the rainiest years many of us can remember, with storm after storm rolling off the Mogollon Rim and across the Painted Desert. Dirt roads have turned to soup, washes have spilled their banks and crews in Joseph City and Holbrook have been kept busy regrading roads and filling sandbags.
A wet year has real costs and they deserve to be counted. Ranchers are fighting muddy pastures and washed-out stock tanks, drivers have turned back at flooded dips in the road, and some roofs are showing their age. Still, in a part of the country where every drop is measured and prayed over, there is something to be said for a year when the sky kept its promises.
Then there is the small beauty that comes with the rain, the kind you only notice when you are stuck at a stoplight with nowhere to be. In a steady drizzle, a windshield stops being glass and becomes a canvas. Brake lights bloom into red halos, a motel’s neon melts into pink and blue and the gray road ahead turns to silver. It always reminds me of my favorite painters, the Impressionists, all light and suggestion, with no hard edges anywhere. Each drop is a tiny lens and when they crowd the glass, the view through them is mostly other bits of the same blurred scene, a painting made of smaller paintings.
The wipers break the spell, of course and a driver with a healthy attachment to living wants them going. But parked outside the post office, or waiting on a train to clear the crossing, I catch myself leaving them off for a minute. The drops slide, merge and run in crooked rivers down the tempered glass and the street outside becomes something I would hang on the wall.
Nobody is wishing for another flood. Still, as clouds gather over the mesas again this week, remember that a dry spell will come and we will long for this. When it does, we may find ourselves wishing for one more gray morning and one more windshield full of watercolor.
