Rain
Alizabeth Worley
Like many moody souls, I like a rainy day. I like the wet dirt and heavy air, the thick dripping from overhangs and tree branches, the cold. I like feeling the need to pull my sleeves over my hands and wrap my coat around me, and I enjoy walking outside with my kids afterward, their little shoes pattering along a dark, wet sidewalk.
In Utah where I live, however, there is little rain.
Utah is the second or third driest of the US states, depending on which ranking you follow—dryer than New Mexico, not as dry as Nevada, vying for second place with Arizona. It isn’t as hot as New Mexico or Arizona, the states with huge sequoias and scorpions; in Utah, November rides in on a tundra wind, and our winter mountains glint brilliant and silver with snow through May. Cold weather notwithstanding, though, it is dry enough that in church meetings, Utahns routinely pray for “moisture,” an allergy-inducing word for many who didn’t grow up in the area. It is dry enough that when the weather grows hot, fires catch tinder in the mountains and a haze of smoke descends and fills the valleys at least a few days each summer.
I have lived here for most of my life, and perhaps I would not love rain so much if it weren’t so scarce. I remember sitting in my high school physics class one day, staring out the window while rain rattled against the glass pane, disturbing the force field of Utah’s early summer. I thought I was alone in my reverie, but before long, Mrs. Fairchild stopped her lecture and said, both stern and sympathetic, “Oh, you poor desert children.”
We are the driest we have been in over a hundred years—the driest on record. We are in a drought.
Earlier this summer, my husband and I took our boys on a trip along with my sister and her kids to St. George, Utah. The day before we left, my sister took the four cousins (her two plus our two) up Snow Canyon in the morning, snapping photos of the kids crouching down and playing with sand as red and deep as rust. The kids loved it, and Michael and I took the four of them up again in the afternoon.
As we drove in, the beating sun was blistering, the outside temperature at a hundred and thirteen degrees. Before we entered the state park, a kiosk operator asked if we had water, and I said yes—we had packed six water bottles, and I was pretty sure there were more somewhere in the back of the car.
After a few minutes of winding through the canyon, we parked in a lot with a small wooden pavilion that provided shade and an information booth with pictures of the canyon’s inhabitants: hawks and horned lizards and rattlesnakes. Even in the parking lot, the red cliffs and mounds were handsome and enthralling. The rises were smaller than those I had seen in the red maze of Bryce Canyon or the winding slots of Zion National Park—smaller as well as closer—but no less impressive. The sun bore down overhead, the red rock faces close enough that I could shout “Echo!” and hear it call back to me.
It was a short trip, and uneventful, as planned: I set a five-minute timer, during which we walked out on an asphalt trail. When the timer went off, we walked back to the car. We had put sunscreen on, but all the kids were red cheeked and ruddy, a sweaty lethargy stealing over their faces. We buckled the younger two in their car seats while the older two buckled themselves in, and we opened all six of the water bottles.
I couldn’t help but think, as I started the engine to turn on the AC, finishing my own water bottle in seconds, how unreasonably confident I had been. We drove back out, and I realized that we were much farther into the canyon than I had thought; driving in, I was mostly focused on finding a stop that might have something interesting for the kids, and we passed exit after exit. We had all been breathless and thirsty after just five minutes out on the trail and a few more back. We needed the water, every bottle I had packed. What if our car stopped or we got stuck? What if the car’s battery had given out in the heat? We had four little kids, two just able to walk. I don’t remember if we had cell service. In any case, my comfortable security felt suddenly reckless. We’ll be fine, I had insisted, and we were fine. But we were only a dead car battery, a broken AC, a disrupted phone signal away from possible disaster.
Water is a solvent, and this allows for life. Water dissolves substances more efficiently than any other liquid, disrupting the bonds between other chemical compounds and providing free-floating atoms and molecules. These atoms and molecules rearrange and gravitate and hover, catalyzing the complex chemical reactions required for living matter. Over one hundred thousand chemical reactions happen in the brain each second, a whirlwind of dissolution and resolution. Water, and its solvency, is the key to growth and motion, to neurons firing, to cells aligning and dividing.
In the ocean, where life most likely began, water is ubiquitous by definition. Water may disperse an oil spill that poisons a school of fish it once nourished, but still, water is there, abundantly. The presence of toxic waste may hinder life, but the absence of water is an unlikely threat. And, as far as my rudimentary understanding of global warming goes, we will only see an increase of ocean water as polar ice caps melt.
On land, however, water is scarce by nature, and land dwellers can only survive so much of it. Have too much water in your lungs or your stomach and you die. You need the right amount: you need it in the soil and filtering through the air, but not sweeping the ground away beneath you. You need it coursing through your veins and breaking down your food, but not disrupting the acidity in your stomach or interfering with oxygen intake in your lungs.
Even land dwellers, however, begin their lives submerged.
In ovum and in utero, water acts not only as a way to provide life and enable chemical reactions but also as a protector. Amniotic fluid protects a baby from trauma and prevents the umbilical cord from being crushed. A baby can stretch their arms and legs, buoyant and unhindered.
Without enough amniotic fluid, a pregnancy can be jeopardized. When I was thirty-six weeks pregnant with my first son, I had an ultrasound indicating slightly low amniotic fluid—seven cubic centimeters instead of the ideal ten to twenty. “If you fall below five centimeters,” a maternal-fetal medicine specialist told me, “we’ll need to perform an immediate C-section.” I wondered then if my low fluid contributed to Jeffrey being breech, or to having a cord around his neck. I wondered then, and wonder now, if given more room, he never would have become entangled, would have had room to turn around on his own.
As a family, we are trying to conserve water. We are washing less and showering more efficiently: a minute of water to get wet, a couple minutes to rinse off the soapy suds and shampoo. We are filling our laundry and dishwashing machines before running a cycle, and we haven’t pulled out the hose for summer water play.
We have all been instructed to do so, everyone in Utah and the surrounding areas.
Driving around, I see yard signs and billboards urging water conservation, including some signs up in Sugar House with the words THE GOAL IS TO SURVIVE NOT THRIVE. While we were watching the Olympics, an announcement aired from Utah’s governor, warning that if we continue to use water at this rate, our reservoirs will run out. We hear about the shrinking Great Salt Lake, and the arsenic that could poison the air if the lake becomes depleted in the next ten years, which it could.
There are limits, however, to our family’s water conservation: our dishwasher cannot quite do its job without some dishes pre-rinsed; in the era of Covid, we wash our hands more than ever; and, on occasion, we give in to the demands of our little ones to fill the bathtub high. According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the average family uses over three hundred gallons of water each day.[1] For every weekly gallon I feel good about saving, I know I use many more.
Throughout most of Utah, this drought is classified as “exceptional,” the highest level possible, with slightly better areas classified only as “extreme.” In addition to taxing water resources, however, this drought has left landscapes in Utah—and in other states—at greater fire risk than ever. In 2021, by June 21 (still early in the season), four hundred and twenty-two fires had burned over fifty-seven thousand acres across Utah.[2]
Between Utah fires and the smoke carried in from California, Washington, and Oregon, smoky skies have started to feel normal.
On a clear day, I can see Mount Timpanogos and other peaks along the Rocky Mountains that hem in Utah Valley. We are only about five miles away from the foothills, and from the right vantage point I can easily see the painted-white “G” on the side of Mount Baldy, as well as the spiky outline of pine trees and craggy rocks. Often in the summer, though, I have been unable to see the mountains at all, as if they aren’t even there. Some days, even the homes in our complex look hazy and faded because the smoke in the air is so thick.
More and more often, I’m just grateful that our air quality is designated yellow, indicating “moderate air quality,” rather than orange, red, or purple—“unhealthy for sensitive groups,” “unhealthy,” or “very unhealthy.” On August 6, 2021, Salt Lake City had the worst air quality in the world at an AQI score of 215,[3] though many cities in California and Washington and Oregon have fared far worse many days, at times reaching “hazardous” air quality levels. I have been more asthmatic lately and have used my inhaler more than before. I am coming to expect a sky of brown, an atmosphere of broken brick.
My second son, Sam, was not breech in utero, unlike his older brother, and my amniotic fluid wasn’t low. I was reasonably well hydrated early in his pregnancy, receiving IVs to replenish the fluids I couldn’t keep down. As we came further along and I didn’t need IVs anymore, I tried to keep my fluid levels high by drinking as much as I could.
Still, he was delivered by C-section. Four days after my due date, he seemed as content to stay put as ever, and my OB worried about the increasing chances of a uterine rupture. So, we went ahead with a repeat cesarean.
I have read that the static hush of white noise reminds babies of the womb and the constant rushing of blood around them. Sam loves white noise, and it seems fitting that he takes to it so well, when he didn’t want to come out of my belly.
White noise lulls him to sleep in the way every mom hopes it will for her child. We have a white-noise machine that we put in his room at night; we press the button labeled “rain.” Sam relaxes and his fidgeting eases. He is more receptive to comfort, more willing to take a pacifier. He is happy to take a hand by his side instead of needing to be bounced or rocked. His breathing slows, and eventually, he sleeps.
When I lay there beside him, I listen to the soft shhhhh of the machine, and I can imagine my baby cocooned and sleeping in utero. I imagine him there in that warm, dark room, perfectly content, surrounded by so much rushing like the ocean beneath a storm.
I lived for less than a year in Florida as a seven- or eight-year-old, the only time in my life I have lived outside of Utah. Since then, I have parted ways with many of my eight-year-old preferences, but I remember loving the rain much like I do now. I remember the sheets of water pouring down, the heavy drops hitting the flooded driveway like sublimating dimes.
After we returned from Florida to Utah, I missed the rain. When the occasional storm did come, I relished it, making dams in the street from mud and sticks and rocks, plugging up the holes with socks pilfered from the laundry room.
Michael’s parents live in Arizona, which is similar to Utah in precipitation and humidity but much hotter, and this makes a difference when it comes to rainfall. While Utah receives significant portions of its water supply from spring snowmelt, Arizona primarily receives water through rain; unsurprisingly, it rains much more in Arizona. I find the heat of Arizona hard, but I do love the rainstorms when they come.
Earlier this year, we stayed at a townhome in Arizona while visiting Michael’s parents. On the last night of our stay, Michael asked his dad if he could get a ride back to the townhome in his dad’s convertible, just for fun, while I took the boys back in our car. Soon after he asked, it started to rain. After buckling Sam and Jeffrey in their car seats, I walked up to Michael and his dad as they stood in the doorway, and I caught his dad saying, “It’s physics. If you go fast enough, the air carries the rain right over your head.”
I laughed and said, “I was just thinking, not sure you’d want a ride in a convertible now, but I guess that’s been addressed.”
We started the drive, and I hoped that Michael and his dad weren’t getting too wet at the stoplights as I drove behind them. On the way to the townhome, Jeffrey was telling me that when we got there, he wanted to take a “rain bath,” because, as he put it, he hadn’t had a rain bath in a long time. But it was well after dark, and the rain pattered on the windows, and the windshield wipers swished back and forth, and the highway thrummed beneath us, and by the time I pulled into the driveway behind Michael and his dad, both soaking wet from idling at stoplights, Jeffrey had fallen asleep in his car seat.
This drought is teaching me. I didn’t know that the majority of wildfires, at about eighty-five percent, are caused by people—though mostly by accident.[4] I didn’t know that relentless smoke can drive you inside just as effectively as rain, can leave you taking shelter indoors for most of a summer. I didn’t know that a turbulent rainstorm punctuated by lightning can start more fires than it puts out. I didn’t know that rain does not always clear away the smoke, that sometimes a storm front can carry in more smoke than it clears, leaving a deep stench far worse than that of a wet sweater hanging out after a campfire.
I didn’t know that if the air quality is bad, in addition to getting a HEPA filter and staying inside with all the doors and windows closed, it can help to wash your bedsheets more frequently—though, of course, this can produce the undesirable effect of using more water to do more laundry, at up to thirty gallons of water per load. I didn’t know that the best masks for preventing infectious disease are also the best masks for reducing inhaled pollution.[5]
I didn’t know that, generally, it’s better to water a tree three to four feet away from its trunk, where the roots are most able to absorb the water. I didn’t know that it is better to water a lawn at night, so as to reduce how much water evaporates under the sun. I didn’t know that, in many cases, it is better to flood a yard or an orchard on occasion than to sprinkle it every night; if you water a little each night, the water stays on the surface, easily evaporating instead of reaching the roots. I didn’t know this, even though Michael’s parents have long done exactly this, flooding their lawn under cover of darkness. When their lawn is flooded at night, lights from the house glisten on the mirrored pool of their backyard, and it is beautiful. I just never knew the reason behind it.
During the drive back home from our trip to St. George, about twenty minutes after we left, the cars ahead of us came to a stop. The roads in southern Utah are usually clear and empty, with long expanses of seemingly deserted highway, but the cars ahead of us stretched as far as we could see, edging forward only in brief starts.
Soon enough, we could see why: a fire, not on the mountains, but in the brush beside the highway. The brush was low, and the fire was low too, but it had spread far.
We had two children in the car—sleeping. It was late and dark. The motion and sound of the car had lulled them to sleep, encased in their car seats. I wondered as I drove, how could I keep moving us toward a fire that only seemed to be coming closer? How could I keep going with these two kids, unknowing and innocent, when the risk felt so palpable? I thought about turning around on the bumpy stretch of shrub between our lanes and the southbound lanes, whatever the fallout might be.
Instead, I stayed in line, easing off the brake pedal to keep up with the cars ahead of me. At moments in our stop-and-go traffic—eerily silent, a mix of bright orange fire and red brake lights in the dark of night—Sam would wake, crying until Michael or I reached back to hold his hand. I kept telling myself, I could always ditch and run the other way, turning our car around through the median’s brush, if the need became clear enough.
Ash was falling on our window, and emergency trucks passed us in the coned-off lane to our right. Firefighters and officers walked along the curb of the road in reflective yellow vests and hats. When we approached the line of fire, it was still several meters from the freeway, stalks of flames illuminating a sky of billowing smoke, silhouetting the small strip of scrub left between us. As we continued forward, the fire grew closer, creeping into the wide ditch that hemmed the road in.
Finally, sometime after all the cars had merged into the lane farthest from the fire, we followed the thinning tail of flames back into the darkness. The flora and fire were short enough, and the asphalt road wide enough, that I suppose there was never any substantial danger, as long as we moved far enough to the other side.
In the years to come, I’m not sure the danger will be so fleeting. Granted, I am not much of a scientist, and there is much I don’t understand; I do not understand the complexities of a global climate that ebbs and flows for reasons ranging from solar intensity to sea floor spreading, as well as decades of human effect. Still, I can’t believe that there is nothing we can do, as individuals and families and countries, to treat our atmosphere better, even if imperfectly.
Every accidental fire, every inch of reservoir water lost, every increase in the global temperature affects the quality of the air we breathe, the water we drink, the safety of our immediate ecosystems and the species within them. Climate change is not an all-or-nothing trend but a slow and cumulative migration across multiple gradients. Even the margins matter, and therefore, so do our small efforts.
Between mishaps and mistakes, I keep trying and hoping. I keep hoping that the fire will spare the road, that the brush will recover, that a gentle rain will shower us again soon. I keep hoping, naively, that if it comes to it, someone will turn us around and let us go back to where we came from.
[1] “How We Use Water.” United States Environmental Protection Agency. www.epa.gov/watersense/how-we-use-water
[2] “2021 Utah Wildfires.” Wikipedia. web.archive.org/web/20210707213022/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Utah_wildfires
[3] Helean, Jack. “Salt Lake City air quality ranks among worst on the planet.” Fox 13 (Aug. 6, 2021).
www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/right-now-salt-lake-city-has-the-worst-air-quality-on-the-planet
[4] Patel, Kasha. “What you need to know about how wildfires spread.” The Washington Post (July 28, 2021).
www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/07/28/wildfires-spread-faq-west-explained/
[5] “Will Your COVID-19 Mask Protect You from Wildfire Smoke?” Healthline. www.healthline.com/health-news/will-your-covid-19-mask-protect-you-from-wildfire-smoke#The-best-mask-to-keep-you-safe-from-everything
Alizabeth Worley is a writer and artist who lives near the shore of Utah Lake with her husband, Michael, and their two kids. She has hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and Michael has Cerebral Palsy. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Iron Horse Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, Brevity Blog, and elsewhere. You can find her at alizabethworley.com.