April 2006

Seasonally Affective Spring

by Lindsay Thompson

“On May 11, 1894, in Bovina, Mississippi, a gopher turtle measuring six by eight inches, entirely encased in ice, fell out of the sky along with the hail, and even my Mississippi Almanac lists it as the state’s all-time ‘most unusual weather occurrence.’”

— Julia Reed, Queen of the Turtle Derby and Other Southern Phenomena (2004)

Although every year brings odd bits that get the TV stations in a lather, spring in the Northwest is something between a theory and a joke. The days grow longer but the weather’s little improved. Early flowers come out, the triumph of hope over experience. Maybe we will get some sunshine by June.

It gets me more than a little meteorologically morose, and I tend to take refuge in memories of spring in the North Carolina Sandhills. Back there, spring is well along by now, sunny and warm, pushing 70, with dogwoods and azaleas coming out nicely. Church in-gatherings and the Easter Sunday kickoff of the ladies’ spring hat wars can’t be far off.

Southerners are especially prone to mooning about that sort of thing, what historian Albert Cowdrey called “…the life that is lived there, linked to a certain ridge, a certain river, a certain quality of days in summer…. The South, like other regions long inhabited, has become a landscape of the mind.”

But, as Simone Signoret reminds us in her memoirs, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. In the small towns where I grew up, and on my grandparents’ farm in Richmond County, spring also means nature is waking up. Cowdrey dryly notes: “The climate … is kind to life in many forms, including some that most humans would rather do without. The vivid fauna of the marshes and the still vigorous wildlife of the southern woods are not the whole story. Heat and damp encourage a legion of buzzing, creeping, leaping and gnawing insects.”

I could never figure out how the Sandhills could be so dusty-dry and swampy at the same time. The remains of a once-inland sea, the soil in the Sandhills is more or less beach sand. Rain runs right through it, and I guess it then runs into low spots where it collects to form swampy creeks with water the color of Coca-Cola.

So venturing out in spring and summer back home meant being equipped, from earliest childhood, with a bewildering array of cautions and creatures to watch out for. Ticks, chiggers, hornets. Bees and yellowjackets. Mosquitos. Ants — black and red. Spiders of several poisonous sorts.

Underfoot, whether hunting or fishing, lurked snakes. Rattlesnakes in the leaves, cottonmouths in the ponds’ edges. Copperheads. You had to learn early about poison oak and poison ivy, and one of the great banes of barefoot recreation was sandspurs, the Death Star of the plant world. Imagine running along, cares to the wind, and your sole jamming down on a sort of dandelion capped by little spike-covered burs. Then imagine trying to extract one from your foot.

Then there was the weather. Cowdrey says “…it favors the melodramatic…. Many summer days feature the pregnant pause and the wild onslaught: the palmetto fan pauses while the prostrate farmer gapes at hailstones bounding in the street.” Thunderstorms come up out of nowhere, mid-afternoon, tornados in tow. Rain in such quantities that a friend and I went bodysurfing on the soccer field after the storms. Hurricanes bound up the coast; people are still talking about when Hazel tore inland through the Sandhills 50 years ago.

After half a lifetime in the Northwest, people still occasionally ask what brought me here. “The weather,” I reply. They look at me like I’m Rick Blaine, extolling the waters of Casablanca.

But it’s true. Yeah, it drizzles all the time in western Washington, but it still rains less than back home. It’s never so hot in the summer, or humid, and not so cold in the summer. Half the year in the Sandhills is like being forced to live your life, clothed, in a sauna whose temperature regulator has stopped working.

Sure, out here we get the occasional earthquake, winds and rains for a day or two at a time, and we contemplate volcanology. But we can sleep with the windows open — much of the state doesn’t need air conditioning most of the time — and we are spared the Linnaean smorgasbord of hungry insects the South endures.

Home, for me, is Washington.

But I’ll admit it: a sun break would be nice about now. Especially on a weekend. 

For personal correspondence, Lindsay Thompson can be reached at tradelaw@hotmail.com. E-mail letters to the editor to letterstotheeditor@wsba.org or mail to WSBA, Attn: Letters to the Editor, 2101 Fourth Ave., Ste. 400, Seattle, WA 98121-2330.