When the Rain Came
I wanted to know how well we did at our cabin in the woods recording eight inches of rain . . . It turns out, we can run with the big dogs.
I have always proudly promoted the idea, to people visiting our area, that Mount Washington has the worst weather in the world, with the whole of New England following closely behind. There are colder, warmer, drier, and wetter spots around the globe, but as a rule, with respect to the fair weather return on a ski or beach house rental, or the average incidence of cloudless, crystalline days, or the annual likelihood of experiencing both tropical heat and arctic cold from the same spot on the front porch, the weather here is ludicrous, and Mount Washington is our poster child.
Accordingly, it was no surprise that when I asked one of my gathering AI helpers what the “official”, one-day record for rainfall was in New Hampshire, the answer was 11.72 inches atop of Mount Washington in 1946. And I got a boost from that because in the same way that an athlete might measure their performance against a current record holder, I wanted to know how well we did at our cabin in the woods recording eight inches of rain as a result of the storm that sat over Hancock for two hours a couple of weeks ago. It turns out, we can run with the big dogs.
New Hampshire’s Department of Transportation and Hancock’s Department of Public Works won’t think I am being funny. They were out the following day—Sunday—frantically filling in the canyons left along the roads after the rain swept the shoulders downhill, cutting off driveways and collapsing the asphalt in places. Monday morning, I passed a bucket line of orange DOT trucks loaded with sand to stabilize the situation down route 123. The response and repair was impressive, but obviously not permanent. There will be more to do.
I felt better about our driveway as a result of all those orange trucks. We were running with the big dogs, faced with how to recover gravel that had washed to the bottom of the creek bed, leaving sizable trenches behind. The truth is, I don’t try to fetch gravel back from the creek anymore, where it has become the sort of gravel I consider untrustworthy—the sort to keep escaping. We fire up the John Deere lawn tractor, attach the “thatcherator,” and drag the driveway until the crown is loose enough to rake into the spaces abandoned by the escapees.
But, hey, eight inches of rain (someone else reported 11, others, five or six) in roughly two hours. Can we have an amen? I was paying careful attention to the weather radar after I woke to the fact that the torrential downpour was continuing long past what we expect from a downpour, which has always been, down, and pour, as in, duck and cover, in and out, catch and release—two-step processes of short duration. After an hour of downpour, downpour, downpour, the red-orange dot inside the green circle indicating a severe thunderstorm had not moved from above our cabin. I kept zooming out on the screen to see where the holdup was down the line, over by the coast, maybe, where some white, puffy cumulus clouds might have broken down. I was a New York City commuter for years, experienced at being stuck between stations because of equipment failure up ahead. Watching the red-orange dot slowly rotate in place on the map, I suspected equipment failure up ahead. Another hour went by before the problem, whatever it was (they never tell you), was cleared, and the dot moved on.
When it was over I did the math: at an average of ten inches of liquid equivalent, per inch of rain, we would have had eighty inches of snow because of that storm, eclipsing the current, one day record of 49.3 inches that fell on Mount Washington, our hero, in February 1969. You might worry that eighty inches of snow in one afternoon favors the return of glaciers. On the other hand, it gives those of us with runaway gravel driveways something to look forward to. As the old joke goes, Where did the rocks come from? Glaciers. Where did the glaciers go? Back to get more rocks.