 Column - Commentary In the Time of Dripitus MaximusBy DAVE KIFFERJuly 30, 2022
That's what happens when someone comments in print about the weather. By the time the comment reaches the audience the weather has usually changed. Unless you are reading it in Our Fair Salmon City, of course. In all likelihood, it will be rainy and cold when you read this - as it is as I write this - because that is what summer in Wetchikan is. We hear a lot about Global Warming, Climate Change, the Summer of Satan, whatever you want to call it. But since everything gets to Ketchikan 10 years after the fact, it ain't here yet. And it probably never will be. You see all those wonderful climate change models that agree on nothing seem to agree on one thing. One part of the North American continent will not get warmer and dryer. It will have more rain, more storms, more wind, more yuck for the next century. That area is the Pacific Ocean coast between Nanaimo, British Columbia, and Cordova, Alaska. If you look at a map, the exact midpoint of that future Rainlandia is.....wait for it......Our Fair Precipatorially Blessed First City. So, whatever they are experiencing elsewhere in the decades to come, Ketchikan will be "more of the same." But I digress. Any who, this summer has thus far been typical. There was a generally nice week before the Fourth of July that actually extended to the day itself, making for a pleasant holiday weekend. And - if tradition holds - there will be a nice week of weather sometime in August. And that will be it. How do I know? Well, the leaves started falling off the trees in our neighborhood shortly after the summer solstice. A neighbor gave up and covered up his deck chairs in the week after July 4th. And I saw a flock of geese veeing their way south, on July 21st. These, natch, are somewhat randomly occurring events, but taken as a whole, they lead me to believe that - except for that likely sun "storm" the first week of August - we might as well go ahead and put the studded tires back on the truck. Summer - all two weeks of it - is mostly over. Of course, this is not a new thing. For three decades, my wife has been plaintively noting when the weather is miserable until mid-June, that summer has arrived "elsewhere." And it has. I noticed that it was 100 degrees in my old stomping grounds in Boston this past week. It was above 90 degrees recently in another old stomping ground, Donegal, Ireland. And I suspect that it will be about 190 degrees when my son arrives in The Valley of the Sun later this summer to continue his academic career. Yes, summer is indeed happening elsewhere than Ketchikan. It always does. But I digress again. Of course, the whole point behind this missive could be that I am trying to "jinx" the weather by saying it will continue be bad, thus causing the contrarian weather god Delugius to punk me by sending along four straight weeks of sun. A boy can dream anyway.
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Contact Dave at dave@sitnews.us Dave Kiffer is a freelance
writer living in Ketchikan, Alaska.
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