October 22, 2014
Is it ever going to rain?
We seem to have lots of threats and some very dark clouds but not much
coming down. I left the window of my car
open last night by mistake and in the morning it was slightly wet on the inside
of the doors but barely. For a variety
of reasons it is driving me crazy. My
inner calendar calls for this season to have some precipitation, and I keep
thinking it will come.
In 1977 I was living in San Francisco in the shadow of Buena
Vista Park. BV, as we called it, has the
world’s best public tennis court. The
park is very big by city standards, the second largest park in San Francisco
topped only by the very magnificent Golden Gate Park. The tennis courts were on the East side of
the park and were sheltered from the fog and mist that passed over from West to
East, so you could be playing tennis while the rest of the park was shrouded in
dense fog. Also, the courts had an unparalleled
view of the Bay and downtown SF. It seemed
perfect to me.
While I had been living in San Francisco for years, there
had been no drought since my arrival.
That year, it never rained. The
weather was perfect day after day. While
I was carrying a significant travel schedule, still I was around for many sunny
days. We had a regular game that we
played at lunchtime and god forbid some other neighbors or players were on our public
court at that time. Using whatever
technique necessary we always got a court.
Lunch was tennis. We never missed
a day and we all improved. Still I kept
waiting for the rain.
As a short aside, in 1982, many of my tennis pals started to
get sick and of our group of about 100 players, over half of them died within
the next couple of years. It was incredibly sad and devastating to us. It was a desperate time and AIDS seemed
unstoppable. Many of our players simply
disappeared. It seemed to never end, and
of course it finally did, but way too late for dozens of my pals.
So here we are in Sonoma, 2014 and another Fall season
begins with very little promise of rain.
It really worries me that someday we will run out of water. That we will have used it all up, that the aquifers
will run dry, that winter won’t come. I
suppose I have enough to worry about, but it bugs me that we don’t seem to do
anything constructive about saving our resources. Have we reached the level of non-concern that
seems to abound in Southern California?
Maybe I am too naive. What does
it take to make our society pay attention to these primal matters? As much as I dislike the early dark and the
falling leaves, it seems the best I can do is reduce my usage and hope it
starts raining soon.
