Rains Comin'

Rains Comin’

Rare for the Pacific Northwest and especially our region, rain had not fallen all year. Sure, dark clouds had come and passed over our mountain, but never once did they cool the hot ground.

On Main Street, caked in dead pine needles and hot dust, a man preached, atop a metal bucket he had found in a dried out pond.

“But this all could’ve been avoided, all of it!” He was not made as a preacher; when he spoke, his voice shook – not with power or determination, but anxiety. Despite his attempts to sound straight and confident, the fear of a young man with little happening in his life rang clearer than any sermon.

“One day.. ” he shook again. “One day long ago, this place was beautiful. The sun and the water worked as one to deliver us grass as high as your middle. And flowers, beautiful flowers which rose up out of the waterlogged mud. And the birdsong would echo about alive forests. Friends, the water would trickle down the sides of the streets and settle in ponds and puddles.”

Calamity, was how a few people described it. To the outside world, it was a disaster, albeit a natural one: a drought that sometimes happens. And it had happened, in the past – I think about a decade ago – rain stopped falling for a good while, but we had the insurance of the glaciers to protect us. This time, the glaciers at the top of the mountain had dried up, and the mighty river was reduced to just a silty bed, which blew dust up and into the town.

The preacher was advocating a solution as well, a sorta ‘religion’ that had sprung out of people's desperation. You see, when the river dried up, and the plants began to die, and the well water came out like thick mud; folks around town had begun to seek strange fixes, similar to a terminally ill mother seeking out ‘alternative’ ‘traditional’ medicines. A community that has incurred a similarly morbid diagnosis begins to seek treatment.

This all came to a head with my father’s friend's friend, who was a very strange person. A small mountain town tends to attract its fair share of weirdos, but he was one of the weirdo’st. His name was Dr. James. He had never gone to college, but insisted on being referred to as a doctor. He said it gave an air of ‘deserved’ professionalism to his work.

For years, he served the town as a ‘Doctor of healing’ Which I always found strange as I assumed all doctors were meant to heal. What he actually did was sell herbal treatments and give (good) massages. The poor preacher from earlier was advocating for people to join in Dr. James’s cure, for well on four years he had been claiming that “This next year. Mark my words this town will face its greatest threat, if I'm wrong you can shoot me dead.” And every year he had been wrong, but no one shot him.

For a long while I was preparing to be the one to do it (Not actually, I just found him annoying.) But this year he had come out as the man who had predicted it. So he graduated for possibly the first time from town masseuse to town Soothsayer, and his predictions were morbid: no rain, more death, people hurt. People were hurting. His predictions continued to come true as they were fairly reasonable.

Now I’m not one to radically shift my beliefs. When I was little, I went to church because my father did, and then later I went to church because all my friends did, and now I go to church simply because I go to church. I think many people are passive like that. I remember my friend had just got back from a business trip halfway across the world and I told him how hard it was to be boring. He then told me about the horrible circumstances of the trip and described to me in detail getting robbed at gunpoint and nearly having to sleep on the street. He would go on to kill himself. And so I’d say I'm happy to live passively, I'm glad that I know where I will be when I die.

I suppose that's why people found the cult or the ‘James Water Group’ so enticing. The first to join his group were the people like the preacher. Young folks with little going on, they were scared of a world without the river they had grown up swimming in. The next group was the people already interested in ‘eastern medicines’ and those who took after non-mainstream spirituality. Eventually, hundreds of people joined, including me. It wasn’t so much that people were convinced of Dr James’ accuracy, but more so that everyone else was already in it.

The community, which so rarely united, was able to. The James Water Group was able to do some good: they got local governments to send relief money to the local farmers, ranchers, and basically everyone who made a claim that their job was negatively impacted by the loss of water.

The next thing on his agenda was to build a ‘Water House’ (place of worship) on the bed of the river. Some people were sceptical to do it as it seemed very self-aggrandizing and made the Christians especially anxious about the religious symbolism. In one of the sermons I listened to him give, he argued for his church “This is very very easy to understand, when the water comes it will wash the Water House away, this is no vanity project, this is a step” he pointed to the sky, “A step towards the rains comin’."

Dr. James was definitely egotistical, he was definitely a crazy, he was certainly an asshole, but most importantly he truly believed what he said. I suppose that’s what separated him from a politician. He wore all blue clothing that had been tarnished, worn and muddied. He would publicly wash his clothing in water he said was from the last rain. He also had the capability to make you hopeful, and I guess that's what made him so incredibly popular.

They finished the Water House in mid July and I came to sit for its opening celebration. The wood was fresh, unsealed, and probably already rotting. Dr. James walked up the plywood to his very real podium, taken from the town hall. “Friends, associates” he spoke “This is a momentous day, not only have we achieved the glory of building our first Water House but I have also learned of when the rains will come, momentous rains, thunder and lightning, an incredible storm like you will never believe, it’s hot now, it’s burning now, the concrete is fire to touch with your bare feet but will be wet and wonderful. Let me tell you when they will come. It's a question everyone has asked but I have not been able to answer, well I can tell you now I certainly can. You have sacrificed all you needed to, every day putting the water on your bed, every day working in the burning sun creating this great building, every day making damn sure that your prayers included sweet, wet salvation, I’ll tell you when it will happen, I can tell you when it will happen and don't worry I will. It will happen next Friday!”

The whole room burst into cheers, and Dr. James was carried out of the House down Main Street and all the way back to his massage parlour where he turned in for the night. This prediction was strange for him. Most of the time his observances were never so direct. This direction took the town by figurative storm.

In the center of the town, people began to dance, forgetting any norms: good dancers and bad dancers, young and old, of each color or stripe or wealth all together in a throng of heat. The sun was just cresting the edge of the horizon and the rot of one hundred days of dry was still leaving its mark. Across from me, swinging wildly, was an old man with skin damage and a hollow expression. He danced as a peacock would and for the first time in a long time, water hit the packed dust in the form of a bead of sweat off his forehead.

The heat had a baking effect on the citizens, shearing them of any strength they had. But after Dr. James’ prediction, it seemed as if people were, in spite of the sun, running, laughing, and very restless. After news of what he said hit, the knowledge types and critics of Dr. James, they began describing the unfeasible nature of it, how the prediction will come in what is ‘likely to be the bleakest dead heat of July’ and that instead of preparing for that, people would ‘dance around like hooligans’ but the celebrations continued, and the ripple of hope hit the masses like fire to gas.

It was the day of Friday, and the only gathering storm clouds were the tired and sweaty. I lived further up the mountain than most, and further out towards the river too. The high watermark flooded the road that led up to my house, but at normal levels I could descend the cliff to meet the river. From there if you looked left you would see the whole valley.

I had brought some of my friends to watch from my property, but the real group was further downstream. Outside and all around the Water House were one thousand people sitting; on the ground, in chairs, on logs, in the dried river bed, and up in trees. Those that believed came, those that had their doubts came, and the ones looking for a cheap laugh came too.

I took one of my friends, Eve, away from the celebration and the fireworks and the anxiety watching the horizon hoping for any cloud formation. We had all drank a little bit too much and I asked her a few questions.

“What do you think about that?” she didn't say anything. “About all of it, the commotion, the people… especially the lack of clouds.” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, it’s neat.” She said,

“I mean do you think it's true? Dr James and all.” I said.

She furled her brow “Do you think it matters?”

“Well sure, when the water does come y’know it's doing a lot of people, it's stripmining local businesses and the dry heats led some people to die.”

She interrupted; “No sure, that matters, you asked me about the guy.”

“Dr James?” I asked.

“Yeah, it doesn’t matter if he's wrong or right, he's just doing the same thing the weather boys do, but without the meteorological stuff. It's an assumption.” I suppose she was right.

As the sun slowly went down and the time for the prediction came and went. The hope dwindled and was replaced by that recognizable anxiety. The people cleared out slowly and Dr James sat in the shadow of the ruins of his short-lived party, still he was surrounded by believers, who couldn’t think to substitute their hope for anything else. The night closed on a few lights still waiting by the riverbed.

The next day came and went and I found myself in the evening watching where everyone had been the night before, when I saw the slow moving march of thousands of tons of water, sitting in a bucket of clouds. I watched as the great columns rolled towards the town. They passed over without any rain, I assumed it would be another disappointment. The clouds hit the mountain top and suddenly without any prediction or expectation large droplets of rain began to fall. Making the dirt bounce as they hit the ground. The dust quickly turned to mud and then the mud turned to pools and puddles. Starting as a trickle from the high point of the mountain came water, and then a stream, and quickly transformed into a thick river of mud and dust and rain. People came out in droves and ran into the river and the emotions of the town had transformed in hardly a day from hope to exhaustion to pure and utter joy.

In the end I don't think anyone particularly cared about Dr James or the washed up wood from his Water House.