August 15, 2001
My friend Chris Weaver, who has lived in this part of
the world, but now resides in North Carolina, wrote me the other day about the
rain:
It is seven in the
morning. The creek behind our
camp-house is noisy from the pre-dawn rain.
I am beginning to differentiate between the sounds of water, and
whether the sky is raining or the trees are raining.
Here on the 80-acre camp, even with a couple big meadows and fields,
I'd guess that 95% of the surface area of the ground has hundreds of thousands
of deciduous leaves between it and the sky.
New rain sounds different on the dry leaves as it comes in, and a
person has a significant time when the trees will provide dry shelter, as the
leaves (poplar, oak, hickory) collect, hold, and shed the rain.
But after a while the rain wins the day and the sound fills the forest,
as the trees are raining too, with big cascading drops and streams released
from the leaves. When the rain
stops, the trees keep raining, sometimes for a long while.
That is what I hear right now - the sky is cloudy and calm, the creek
has a lot to say, and all the trees are raining, even without a breeze.
That happens here too, as it did a couple of weeks ago when
an unexpected three days of rain hit us. It
was warm summer rain, a break in the drought and it simultaneously put an end to
the thimbleberries and brought the blackberries into season.
It greened up all the plants in the garden and refreshed the dusty soil
along the front of our house.
It was cool too, cool enough to split a little wood and
light up the woodstove in the evening.
And the clouds rolled over the island from the Strait of Georgia, coming
in patchy mists and thick fogs, or low clouds that clung to the mountains and
hid the tops. There was no wind,
just a lazy drifting movement of air stirred only by the downward motion of all
the water.
This time of year is always warm and usually sunny and
notably still. The atmosphere
thickens with water taken up into the air, smog from the city around the corner
and respiration from the trees. The
thickness spreads low from the city around Point Atkinson and fills Howe Sound
with haze and yellow tinged, almost dusty air.
These are dog days for sure.
The shore opposite us is a silhouette for most of the day,
two ridges of trees on top of Whytecliff, the water in front a thin grey, the
same colour of the sky, especially today when the fog has become so thick that
by lunch time it still hasn’t lifted, but just become more diffuse.
The sun is up there, a citrine point of light in the smoky sky, but it
has not 
won
the battle against the moisture at the ground yet.
This is how it is in the summer on the coast.
We lie between two sources of meteorological activity, the storm
nurseries to the south and the jet stream to the north.
This is the time of year when the stillness gives rise to the thought
that the land has climaxed in it’s growth for the year and now has turned to
begin it’s slow descent into a wintry dormancy.
In a book published by the Sierra Club, there is a succinct
description of the overall climate of this region, which shows I think just how
precious these still days are in a region characterized by constant turbulent
activity:
The Pacific Ocean is the source of virtually all
major storms to enter the region. Most
pacific storms originate as cyclonic low pressure cells in the Gulf of Alaska
when they are swept south eastward by the jet stream into the west coast of
North America. Some storms
however originate farther south over warmer water.
These storms occur less frequently but are usually wetter, brining
abundant rain to the western lowlands and heavy, wet snow to the [mountains].
Winds move around the low pressure centres in a counter clockwise
direction, so that while the storm track may strike the coast at various
angles, surface winds from an approaching front always originate from the
south.
These storms are known as “The Pineapple Express” when
they come through in the winter because of the warm moist air coming from the
southeast, the direction of Hawaii.
The frequency of storms depends on the
position of the jet stream. During
the winter, the jet stream sags southward over [southern] British
Columbia…Through spring and into summer the storm track is displaced far to
the north by a developing high pressure cell over the northern pacific.
Winds circulate clockwise around the cell, generally striking the West
Coast from the northwest. These
prevailing north westerly winds generally mean clear, dry weather, except
along the immediate coast where summer fog is frequent.
I would love to have a steady north westerly right
now, clearing the fog and smog out of the Sound and brightening everything up.
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Chris
Corrigan