Rainy season, 2019
It’s not raining like it should be. First of all, it didn’t start until well into June. It was so hot in May, when the rainy season typically begins, that there were forest fires in the nature reserves and farmland in and around Mexico City. I haven’t been in California for the truly apocalyptic fires of recent years, but I still know that smell. It smells like you’re inside a fireplace—not bad, but suffocating. The air looks dusty and, disturbingly, it has a taste. Breathing goes from an unconscious activity to a frightening, sometimes painful sensory experience. Mexico City has more than its fair share of environmental emergencies, but I wasn’t expecting forest fires to be one of them.
It’s July going on August now. It’s cooled off over the last month especially, and it’s definitely always-carry-an-umbrella season. Mexico City thunderstorms are epic, nearly supernatural events. One minute it will be a beautiful sunny day, and the next you’ll be trapped in a torrential downpour. Streets flood, and occasionally hail piles up so high it looks like snow. The internet often goes out, and sometimes the lights (though this happens a lot less often now than it did 10 years ago). Wherever you are, you stop. And then, just as suddenly as it began, the storm passes. The rain goes from curtains of water to drops to drizzle, and the city comes back to life. This is supposed to happen every afternoon.
Not this year. It happens some afternoons, but I feel like more often, the clouds gather and thunder threatens and maybe drops fall for a few minutes, and then…nothing. When it does rain, it keeps going and going. On Thursday, it rained for almost 24 hours. The pattern is off. Everyone feels it. My cistern that collects rainwater isn’t filling up, a friend tells me. The farmers are really worried, I hear from an archaeologist I visit at Teotihuacan (where, incidentally, I get soaked in the platonic ideal of a rainy season storm).
One weird year doesn’t really mean anything. There are still many months of rainy season left, and the late start means it might end later too. El Niño is happening and messing with things in ways I don’t understand. But it’s not the actual weather that feels like a harbinger. It’s the loss of the pattern. Our unconscious sense of what the climate should be like, developed over years of living in a place, is quickly become useless. When our grandchildren ask us what the beginning was like, I think this is what we’ll remember. This year stopped feeling like last year. The homes we knew became unfamiliar, slowly, then suddenly. We never again knew what to expect.
My writing
This week I wrote for Science about how drastic budget cuts across the Mexican government are affecting scientists and research. It’s not great! (This was the reporting that had me so exhausted last week.)
Recommendations
“We Should Never Have Called it Earth.” A beautiful essay, now a couple years old, about the interplay between the atmosphere and the ocean, and the strange feeling of waiting for a catastrophe you’re sure is coming and watching the world do nothing to stop it.
“Men Know It’s Better to Carry Nothing.” On the patriarchal tyranny of always being the one with a packet of Kleenex on you.
“The Crane Wife.” Another lovely essay, this one about ending a (truly awful) relationship and studying whooping cranes. I especially like how it captures the parts of scientific fieldwork I love but never get to write about: The quick camaraderie, the meditative focus, the gear shopping, the cocktail hours.