The Season of Flash Flood

Seasons.  Let's think about that.  It seems appropriate, here on June 20, formally the last full day of Spring, the Summer Solstice to begin in about 20 hours.  But earth-tilt and seasons aren't quite the same thing, at least not in our imagination.  Consider:

"April showers bring May flowers."  Our friends at Wikipedia tell us of April Showers that "In one day the weather can change from springtime sunshine to winter sleet and snow. The track of these depressions can often be across Ireland and Scotland bringing bands of rain followed by heavy showers (often of hail or snow) and strong blustery winds."  They go on to say "The proverb "March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers", first recorded in 1886, or the shorter, trochaic version "April showers bring May flowers" (originally "Sweet April showers/Do spring May flowers", part of a poem recorded in 1610) are common expressions in English speaking countries." Cool.

I didn't know about the 1610 poem, so tried out that rhyme.  Didn't find 1610.  Instead, I wound up with Thomas Tusser, a poet I'd never heard of, despite his life, 1524-80, being squarely in the Elizabethan era, some of his clever sayings, like “A fool and his money are soon parted,” and his A Hundreth Good Pointes of Husbandrie (available on Amazon!), being, according to the Poetry Foundation, "thought to have been one of the most popular books of poetry during the time of Elizabeth I."

  

(Notice that this cover is 500 Points of Good Husbandry--apparently so successful, he expanded 5-fold.  I, strangely, never get requests to write more...).

     Or, we can go back a bit to this poetry:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote   

The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote, 

And bathed every veyne in swich licour, 

Of which vertu engendred is the flour; 

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth        

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth 

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne 

Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,   

And smale fowles maken melodye, 

That slepen al the night with open ye,       

(So priketh hem nature in hir corages: 

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, 

And palmers for to seken straunge strondes,   

To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes; 

And specially, from every shires ende        

Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, 

The holy blisful martir for to seke, 

That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.

Translate this?  Really?  If you're reading this, you've been to college.  

It's Chaucer. 

It's Middle English.  Get over it. 

And there's this seasonal artifact, already doubtful, even back when: 

  

Well, yes.  We're headed, not for 4-part harmony, but to question that 4-part symmetry in the way we think about seasons, even when the evidence is long against it.  We certainly don't share the weather patterns of the British Isles, even if those are buried in our language habits.  But even making a few corrections in longitude and latitude, we won't find a match.  Growing up in the Bootheel, I might have been able to imagine that quartet--blazing summers, a suffocating fall, a couple months of chill and ice storms, with occasional snow, then rain and tornadoes.  Close.

But these days?  We're accelerating out of even that mismatch.  A temporary pattern of late summer drought (more west of us, true, and that part not changing for the better in the next few decades), which overlaps with the reign of tornadoes, an unstable season of hay fever and baseball and football, a cold snap to end the year, a false spring too early, which tricks trees into bud, a resurgent winter blast in February, March storms, two beautiful days in April, then months of mold, mosquitoes and more storms, drenching us before the cycle repeats.

Just now, we're at the tailing edge of being drenched, a time we could label 'a season of flash floods.'

There's Texas...  

This already foreshadowed in that scene in All the Pretty Horses, the movie version, not the book (which is one of Cormac McCarthy's more cheerful works), 

in which the goofy kid, Jimmy Blevins, is stripped down to his underwear, hiding from lightning in a ravine, which not long after, has a real flash flood.

John Grady Cole: What the hell are you doing?
Jimmy: Just sittin' here.
John Grady Cole: If this rain hits hard, there's gonna be a river come down through here like a train. You thought about that?
Jimmy: You ain't never been struck by lightning. You don't know what it's like.
John Grady Cole: You're gonna get drowned sittin' there.
Jimmy: Why that's all right, I ain't never been drowned before.
John Grady Cole: Well...I say no more.   (imdb quotes)

(He does better nowadays on NCIS.)

Joe and Soren recently strolled around Rock Bridge Memorial State Park , taking refuge from yet another Missouri monsoon in Devil's Icebox, and found the water gushing in.  There were survivors.

And then there's my yard, newly converted to swampland:

 

We keep getting the news reports, the governor declaring a rain-state-of-emergency,

much because crops just can't endure what this spring has to offer:

And more storms on the way:

One state ag official said that only 42% of Missouri's soybean crop has been planted yet, while a farmer let the TV crews film his soggy fields and empty barn, to show that the early haying season has pretty much collapsed.  We read about that same sort of thing in Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Flight Behavior, a book that looked at Monarch butterflies radically changing their winter survival strategies, because of global warming.  (Here's one book review; I like this novel better than a lot of the reviewers to.  Even without things blowing up.)  
   

A problem here is that what matters about flash flood just now is strictly shown in human terms--what happens to our roads, our crops, the hay in the field, occasionally the cattle, which figure only in relation to our fast food mania.  Does flash flood mean the same to the grasses on their own?  To the dragonflies?  To my dogs?

Long-term, of course, none of how we think about the seasons matters at all.  It's more the patterns and changes that we need to be aware of, and just refuse to pay attention to.  For instance, NASA's 

GRACE program has been identifying what's going on with aquifers around the world, and what happens to those will make quite a bit of difference.  That, and the way rain and drought play off against each other.  And they aren't playing that game the same way agriculture needs them to play.  The grass will grow, but might not get harvested.  The soy and corn and wheat might not make it at all, at least not on the predictable mass scale we depend on.

What I guess I could have said right off, and saved you all this time:  There are no seasons anymore, not even the false imports.  No seasons except maybe TV and sports.  There are only episodes of weather-time-event now, and despite our old habits or campy nostalgia, this won't change for quite a while.  We've entered two centuries  of human-caused chaos.

later, bob

John Grady Cole: I thought you might want your old horse back.
Lacey: Damn, bud.