Waiting

For four days they've said it's going to rain today. But here it is 1:00 and we've gotten nothing in downtown SF. I checked the radar image at weather.com and it wasn't encouraging -- a couple of bands of light rain off the coast that might not even hit the city.

Ever since I understood the annual weather pattern in San Francisco -- no rain between the beginning of summer until October, and then a rainy season that lasts until March -- I've waited with pleasant anticipation for the coming of the fall rains. The usual pattern was reinforced ten years ago after the big Oakland fire. That year (as in many years) the Oakland hills were tinder-dry by October. High east winds raised the temperature and made a small smoky campfire expand into a huge firestorm that killed a few dozen people and burned 5000 houses. A week later, heavy rains came, and suddenly everyone was afraid of landslides, as there was no longer any vegetation to hold the hills up. There were no catastrophic landslides that year due to the fire, but the fact that both the fire and the thread of landslides were related to the weather brought home to me just how important the seasons are here. So don't let anyone tell you that seasons aren't important in California.

I don't know if it'll rain today, or next week. But it will soon. That's enough for me.