Day 213

[adonnchaid]

At the moment, I live in the desert southwest, close enough to where our Old West guys would live that I figure the weather is pretty much what they'd have. Last night, or very early this morning, I woke up to a summer downpour, and the weather guy said it might have rained an inch in two hours in my neighborhood. Even after the rain slowed, there were streams of water running down the street and puddles of water in the yard, and that's the trouble with desert, it doesn't deal well with lots of rain, the ground is so hard and dry and compacted that it doesn't absorb, it runs off and finds ways down hill and to streams and makes flash floods. Not only that, it doesn't cool off too much when it rains, so maybe Ezra would feel right at home during summer monsoons -- his deep south heat and humidity would be all he remembered. Or maybe he'd remember why it was he didn't go back to live in the south again.

All of which isn't really about writing, but it is something that could flavor a story set during the summer in the Old West...

Comments

[thaccian]

I grew up in SE New Mexico. We used to just shake our heads when people not familiar with desert living when they filled in what they took to be completely dry arroyos, built their nice new houses, and were then shocked and dismayed to find themselves suddenly flooded when those arroyos ran fast and deep after a rain fall in the nearby Organ Mountains. That water would race from the mountains straight down to the Rio Grande and no filled in, built over arroyo was gonna stop it. Even after being flooded the first time those folks seemed continually flummoxed by the fact that the arroyos could be suddenly full even though it had not actually rained a drop in town.

[adonnchaid]

And their absolute refusal to believe the local weather warnings or when people who live there tell them what will happen.