Around 4:00 today, it was absolutely down-pouring. Thunder and lightening off in the distance, close enough to make an impact; absolute summer thunderstorm, the kind I loved watching from the porch as a kid. I was at the office, not-working. I'd been working earlier, of course, but had hit that afternoon slump where your brain doesn't really feel like functioning anymore, so you either need to do something mindlessly productive, get coffee, or give up. I looked out the window, and watched the rain for a while, laughed with officemates about this and that, and idly wondered how bad it really was outside.
I work on the 13th floor on a 14 floor building. The astronomy and physics building. We have a dome on the roof and multiple telescopes - all the grad students know where the keys are for the roof, and are free to get them at anytime in case they fancy a bout of star-gazing. So I thought... I could check this out. I could just stick my head out, see what it's like out there. So I got up, went upstairs, and grabbed the keys. Went to the roof. Took off my sandals, rolled up my jean legs a bit, and walked outside. It was POURING. I could tell immediately if I stood outside too long, I'd be absolutely drenched, and I'd be dripping over the office. Or....
I rushed back to my office, packed up my things, and ran home through the pouring rain to drop off my computer, my bag, and everything except my keys.
Two blocks away from where I live is Morningside Park - a lovely place for a run, full of pathways through and around big boulders, trees, and stretches of grass and plants. And there I went, tromping through the rain, laughing and yelling out at the thunder and counting the seconds between lightning and thunder. No one was around - the rain was hard enough that anyone who wasn't already out was staying in, I think. As the rain died down and the storm moved further away, I climbed onto one of the large granite boulders which are scattered around the park, and just sat there/lay on my back for a while. I got some strange looks when people did start walking through the park again, when the rain had stopped, but I was quite content on my boulder - I've always loved mucking about with rocks. I used to have a rock collection, even. Technically, I still do, since it's still sitting in my bedroom in my parents house in Baltimore - I never got rid of it, packrat that I am.
Sitting in the rain is something I haven't done in ages. Not counting 'getting caught in the rain' here - though even including that its been a while for that type of downpour. The last time I specifically remember deliberately going out in the pouring rain... might actually be on my gap year, five years ago. I'm sure - I hope - I've done it since then, just no specific instances springing to mind at this moment, as I write. When I graduated from undergrad, I knew (had known since high school, in fact) I was taking a full year off to travel, to work, to volunteer, and, most importantly, to HIKE. I spent three months hiking on the Appalachian Trail (a 2000+ mile trail spanning Georgia to Maine) - I hiked from Georgia to the half-way point in Pennsylvania, stopping there in preparation for my trip to Japan in July. It was a wonderful trip, and a wonderful year in general, and I'll have to expand on it in another blog entry at some point. But it was an extremely RAINY spring the year I went - when I went through later, I figured out that I saw rain approximately one third of the days I was hiking. Some of those days, just a sprinkle, of course. But other days I was absolutely drenched. Hopefully usually only ME - I kept my gear drier than I was, generally, and my REAL criteria for being drenched was getting my socks soaked through - which only happened three times (yes I counted) throughout those three months.
The worst rain I remember hit one afternoon in... early June? Late May? I'd have to look it up, I kept a journal almost obsessively on a day to day basis. Late afternoon. I was hiking with Hellbender (a friend on the trail, everyone had trail names) that day, and it just CAME DOWN, a three mile hike from the shelter we'd been intending to stay. After a while I stopped, told him to go on to the shelter, I was just going to camp where I was and catch up tomorrow, since it was getting late. I'd camped on my own before, that wasn't a worry. But it Just. Kept. Raining. And the place I had chosen didn't exactly have a camp site available, and despite the numerous vegetation, was actually a lot more rocky than it appeared. I couldn't get my tent up. My tarp was doing nothing against the rain, my tent stakes wouldn't stay in the ground (my tent wasn't entirely freestanding, for all that it was light and for all that I loved it). And I was getting more and more wet by the minute, until I finally gave up, threw everything back together and buckled it to the outside of my pack (too wet to go back inside without getting the REST of my gear wet) and grimly set back onto the trail towards the shelter. It was dark by the time I got there, the shelter itself was packed, and most people were in their bags, sleeping. But Hellbender had saved me a spot and waited up for me, as he realized that the rain was not letting up. I met a lot of good people that year, and made good friends. When I got off the trail after three months, most other people kept hiking on to do a complete thru-hike. So the last time I remember deliberately going out in the pouring rain was about a month after I got off trail - I went outside and stood there for a while and missed the trail and my 'fellowship.' I should do things like that more often.. randomly going outside in the rain, or dancing around my apartment singing to my favorite album, or even just going downtown someplace and trying a new restaurant on my own, for fun. Life is better with a bit of whimsy.
