Dear reader,
I’m going to miss the rain.
Presuming my grades muster a pass and no paperwork pitfalls open up beneath me, I will be graduating this term, spending a short summer back in Portland, and then moving to Illinois for grad school. I still don’t know what to expect: In junior high, everything revolved around getting us ready for high school; in high school, everything revolved around getting us ready for college; and in college, everything revolved around finishing up college. College is meant to prep us for a career after college, not necessarily for more and more advanced study.
There will be changes: I have to worry about comprehensive exams, oral exams, dissertations – and, oh yeah, teaching a class or two. Still, I don’t think these will be the big, mind-blowing changes in my life.
Instead of a lifestyle shock, I’m expecting a landscape shock.
I was born in Portland, I grew up in Hillsboro, and have spent almost my entire life in the Willamette Valley. Sure, I vacationed in Sunriver almost every year and I’ve visited Japan and Europe, but my home, the only home I’ve ever known, is here in the valley. The trees I know are the oaks, the maples and the towering firs, the horizons I know are undulating with hills and the weather I know is rain, Oregon rain.
When I visited Indiana, Ohio and Illinois earlier this term to decide which grad school to attend, I saw none of the trees or horizons I grew up with. For those unfamiliar with the Midwest, let me briefly describe the land I saw: On the five-hour drive from Champaign, Ill., to Columbus, Ohio, I saw maybe one hill. The land stretched on, flat as could be all the way to the horizon, with highways and farmland, rivers and the occasional copse (yes, an actual copse) of trees I could not name.
It is a unique beauty, but not the one I prefer, because I will miss the Oregon rain.
I’m sure there is rain in Illinois; it rained when I visited, after all. But it still won’t be the right kind of rain. Each place has its own style of rain. The desert has a torrent of rain, the taiga has a wet and sloppy rain, a hurricane has driving, lashing rain, and Oregon has Oregon rain.
Oregon rain can’t really be described any better than the few short words I used to describe desert or taiga rain. We can know general facts about it, like average rainfall or associated weather patterns, but we don’t really know it until we have the experience of it and that experience does not easily translate into words. To me, Oregon rain is a smell that permeates the air after a long, wet day, the smell of wet ferns and moss. To me, Oregon rain is the pitter-patter sound that commands me to throw my windows open wide even on the coldest days, just so I can hear it better.
Rain isn’t always the most convenient weather, but it is our weather. Without it we would lose some of the things that make Oregon great. We’d lose that urge to bump into strangers under the eaves of a street-side shop and strike up a conversation while we wait out a sudden downpour. We’d lose the lush, eternal green that springs up all around us. We’d lose that mist that hangs about on cool winter mornings and pricks our cheeks with tiny droplets.
When I arrive in Illinois, I’ll be able to convince myself that the horizon bows and flexes with hills, I just can’t see it through the buildings, and so will I also be able to convince myself that just beyond the town is not a vast cornfield but a vast forest of Douglas firs.
But I won’t – hard as I might try – be able to ignore the weather, the hot summers or the frigid winters. I’m certain that I’ll be laughed at for bundling up too much in January and for dousing myself in bug spray every day of the summer, but at least I will be able to return home from time to time.
And I hope when I return, it rains.
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