40 days of rain: February 16, 1998 issue of New Thinking

February 16, 1998 New Thinking:
40 days of rain

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February 16, 1998

40 days of rain

By Gerry McGovern

It’s been raining. Seems like it’s been raining forever. At first we paid no attention. If anything, it was welcome. The land was dry. The plants were thirsty. We were thirsty. Thirsty for the rain.

We all need the rain. Life without it has no future. I remember as a child that dry summer. It was great to see the sun, great to see the clouds staying away. Day after day the sun beat down. Our skin went brown. The color in my hair grew fairer. The football pitch was dry.

People began to talk about the dry spell. Then people began to talk about the long dry spell. My father began to worry. The river that ran at the edge of our farm was getting smaller.

One evening the cows moved restlessly outside the gate, their heads swinging in an unusual fashion. One would make a run towards the lower gap only to stop suddenly. They were looking at us, their eyes asking us why the river had gone dry.

We talked about the long dry summer tonight, as the rain belted relentlessly against the roof. We talked about how things can change. The rain now is like some terrible thing. Some demon up from the depth firing these millions and millions of drops.

Nowhere to turn. Nowhere to go. Everywhere is water. Filling, flooding every space. All the green is gone. All the brown is gone. The rivers and the fields are the same. The whole land is an ever-expanding lake.

Soon, nothing will live here except things that swim. But what life will that be? The water is being poisoned with all the drifting dead. The carcasses of cows float like giant bloated balloons. Rabbits, rats and foxes drift and bobble, get caught in broken branches.

I remember that other flood, back around the turn of the millennium. We survived that, just about. How it caught us by surprise. We didn’t see it for what it was. We didn’t react until we were almost drowning. In fact, it was we who caused it all, like we are probably to blame for these days of rain, with our endless, voracious needs.

Back then we were the clouds, full of the rain. Full of the need to rain down. No caution there. No need to measure out. No, in those early days of the digital age, everything was bountiful, everything was copyable, everything was reproducible. And so we copied and reproduced and rained down. All of us with our very own clouds, clouding the skies. Clouding the minds, until all around was flood and drift and chaos.

Or was it sameness? Was it that when we looked out into cyberspace we saw vast seas heaving and flooding and crashing over everything? We looked out and then we retrenched. It was too much effort to go out searching for the good things. It had rained for too long.

Relentlessly raining. Raining, raining. Relentlessly raining information.

Gerry McGovern

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Relentlessly raining. Raining, raining. Relentlessly raining information.