Rain Pleasures

Never mind snow – rain transforms the sensory world with the same force, which some people insist on calling “magical”. No magic in it for my friends and family when they curse the downpour, and I too get sick of drowned summers, winters that won’t let go. And rain is so ordinary because it comes so often in a rout of dismal days. When it is extraordinary it’s a disaster, humiliating and dangerous at the very least. It does not easily invite much love, here in the sheltered West.

But my senses seem to grow more powerful with rain, push me to the brink of synaesthesia – the taste and smell of colours, sight and hearing all bound up in the middle of a dripping garden.

Here’s one example of my love for rain: a night journey, car or train, that passes through suburban England. Every surface is alive. Streetlamps give tarmac great flowering growth. Houses launch themselves into festivities of electric colour. The spray of drops on parked cars feels to me like a cleansing raid. The sight of the rain falling matches the noise of its fall. The long knocking for attention increases the comfort and intimacy of the sheltered space (perhaps relative on a train), but at the same time its contingency and transience.

Words too strong for such a mundane event? Quite possibly. But I am trying to articulate the extent of my feelings on these occasions.

Another example: a long way up a hill in Exmoor, or in the Staffordshire Peaks. Let’s not go too far – I don’t plan to walk on miserable days. I want a bit of sun, a cool breeze. Even so, if the rain comes it comes, and it should come on properly, drench down through clothes, strain through hair and pour in at the corners of my mouth. The world vanishes, except a little arc that pushes back as I go through the miles. In that space all the grass, every stone, the bent backs of trees, become everything that is. They exist so absolutely it’s as though I partake in their reality – I am part of them. The discomfort contributes, making me more aware of my body, especially of temperature, and the water’s movement. Of course, it also doubles the pleasure of tea or beer at the end of the walk. The rain is the medium through which I increase my sense of being part of the world.

It’s not possible for me to think or write about rain without having a subtext. This is an amalgam of ideas of whose status I’m not quite sure. Are they memories, metaphors, beliefs, facts? Rain is the necessary corollary of life, sweet showers, springing lilacs and so on. As an agent of flooding, erosion, pollution runoff, its positive aspect is complicated, but not really destroyed. For me as a child it meant irritating playtimes indoors; as a cricket lover it means frustration (and occasionally relief); as a parent it becomes something to work around.

Perhaps the most persistently troubling idea among these is that of “acid rain”. At first these words remind me of the phenomenon at its worst in the 1980s and early 1990s, when pollution, most notably from British factories, as I recall it, killed Scandinavian forests. I vividly remember reading about it in BBC Wildlife – a formative experience in what I suppose I could call my environmental awareness. But sometimes in my imagination it takes an even more sinister turn, with flesh blistering and social catastrophe in the manner of a John Wyndham novel. Life-giving rain fundamentally perverted. In Wyndham, human error usually lies behind the disasters, as behind the real acid rain.

It’s not only the rain itself, but the time after it’s fallen. Often I read that the sky is “washed clean” by the shower, or some similar phrase. I’d say not. I’d say the sky and the earth have been filled with new things. Of course, intellectually I can say – seeds have enough moisture to germinate, birds and mammals can drink their fill, trees and smaller plants can draw the fluids they need up through their stems. But in the minutes after stepping outside when the rain has stopped, I try to shut down my conscious mind and live through my senses.

First, the feel of the air. It’s usually moving, but not at that cutting pace that signalled the start of the rain. It rests against my face like an affectionate hand.

The feel of the ground. It’s responsive to my tread, not so much answering my touch, as acknowledging the interaction with another. (I attribute sentience simply because that’s how it feels just then.)

The sound. Birds go crazy when the rain stops, as if the interlude in which their territories were undefended had driven them mad with repressed excitement. Whenever I’m out of practice identifying songs, the post-rain chorus makes my hearing scurry hopelessly around. Also, the amplification of all human things. Voices and cars seem closer, more familiar, as though I’ve returned from some shadow world.

I hesitate to mention the colour. I’m somewhat colour blind, and tiredness, alcohol and twilight seem to make it worse, so when I say that needles of white run through greens, and yellows appear harder, more defined, I doubt that they do. But it looks so to me. Otherwise, visually, shapes seem more clearly drawn, and distances cleared of impediments, so that more things exist between me and the horizon. The first time I climbed Snowdon was in fog and mizzle. The clouds hid all but the nearest rocks, even at the summit. My Dad and I were about to turn to go back down when everything suddenly cleared. All the peaks and all the sea as far as Anglesey became visible with extreme clarity. It’s that effect, in little, that rain has for me.

Smell and taste I bring in last, but they are where rain plays its strongest hand. These two linked senses are my most naïve. They do not mediate (so it feels), just present their vivid data. So when I breathe air just after rain, it seems as though it’s laid a claim on my identity.

What is the smell, or taste? It’s green and spread evenly through the air, unless there’s a strong breeze, when it moves quickly, leaving a luring trail. It also has the darkness of wet flagstones. It has a brittleness. It sinks deep in my lungs, makes me feel like an edge against which the world leans. To be so close to the rain makes me sure of being alive.