Standing on the waterfront of Atlantic Beach watching the brobdingnagian surf from Hurricane Irene batter the shore, it didn’t immediately occur to me that I was getting drenched. But I was. The driest part of me was my hair, covered as it was by my rain hood. Otherwise, I was thoroughly soaked. But I was oblivious to my waterlogged state, and this is something that, upon contemplation, I find remarkable.
Irene was my first–and quite likely will be my last–exposure to hurricane rain. What strikes me about that rain, apart from its intensity, is how extraordinarily comfortable it feels. It is the warmest rain imaginable, unlike anything I’ve ever experienced in Michigan or anywhere else in the United States. Irene’s rain was so bathwater warm, and the air so equally balmy, that there was no sense of chill present to tell my skin, “Yo! You are freeking wet!”
A warm summer shower in Michigan is something that your inner thermometer still registers as fairly cool, though not objectionably so. As for the rains of a northern autumn, those will freeze you to the marrow. In contrast, Irene’s rain was so warm that at first I was barely aware of being rained on. It wasn’t until I looked down at my legs and saw the state of my shorts that I realized I was saturated.
Top-to-bottom saturated, it turned out. My Helly Hansen rain jacket, which had seen little use since its faithful service 10 years ago up in the Canadian wilderness, was in a state of deterioration that rendered it worthless. Unknown to me, pieces of blue rubber from the collar were cleaving to my neck in a ring. The zipper wouldn’t zip. And the warm rains of Irene had penetrated my protective layer and drenched my shirt. Had I been in Michigan, I’d have known about this state of affairs quickly. But not in Irene’s tepid environment. Chill just isn’t a part of the skin’s alert system in a tropical cyclone. A person could drown in comfort simply by standing outdoors.
Now, isn’t that fascinating. Okay, maybe not. Not to those of you who live on the Gulf Coast, anyway. But for a lad from a small West Michigan cow town, it’s the peak of interest. Here in the frozen hinterlands, we reach for novelty where we can, and hurricane rain qualifies.
Ahem … okay, enough for tonight. There’s a bowl of oatmeal that I want to watch congeal. Signing off.
