Eskimos have 36 words for snow; Portland has 154 k
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5/14/2009
"Green is the color" were the first lyrics of the fight song for the Portland Timbers, of the now defunct North American Soccer League. There's a reason for that. It's water. As far back as the journals of Lewis and Clark, people have complained about the weather in Oregon. Writing about the constant rain over the winter of 1805, Lewis wrote: "The winds violent. Trees falling in every direction, whirl winds, with gust of rain hail & thunder, this kind of weather lasted all day. Certainly one of the worst days that ever was!"
When I first moved to Portland, I remember some confusion at the weather reports. "Rain changing to showers, followed by rain in the evening. Drizzle in the morning turning to scattered showers by night, Then, overnight on Tuesday, temperatures are expected to fall below freezing, with rain and snow mixed, followed by freezing rain. Wednesday morning may well see a silver thaw."
Then it would proceed to rain for two days straight, then snow. When the rain eventually stopped, the temperature dropped overnight, so that the next day instead of constant rain it was constant snow. The "silver thaw" occurred when the air temperature warmed enough for the snow to turn back into rain, while the ground temperature remained well below freezing. This turned the two feet of snow that had just fallen into a massive sheet of impenetrable ice, making all transportation impossible, stranding people in their homes, and ending civilization as we know it. How we all survived I will never know.
Still, people love it here, and there is good reason. Eventually the constant rains become intermittent (I thus came to understand the difference between rain and showers), and sometimes in what passed for summer, it would stop altogether. Those rare days of sunshine could actually be so beautiful and perfect that one could momentarily forget the unending rain of the previous week.
The abundance of water pays big dividends. Western Oregon, where most of the rain falls, is lush and green, a paradise for gardeners, and a beautiful place to live. For a few weeks, at least, and sometimes longer in a good year.
David | Portland, OR