Rain Dance

OK - so I admit it's unusual for me to have TWO posts on the same subject so close in time to one another.

Get over it.

You see, it rained again Sunday, after previously having gone 36 days WITHOUT rain from Sept 25 - Oct 31, and the show put on by the neighborhood rain idiot was too funny NOT to report in my blog.

And what a show it is !

First, this obsessed guy sets out a bunch of 15-gallon rubbermaid containers under the eaves of his home, under the drip line.

He supplements these with a bunch of 5-gallon white buckets, no doubt gleaned from a trash pile somewhere, for he is a recycler for sure. He supplements THESE with a healthy scooping up of a dozen or so gallon-and-half plastic ice cream containers that once held giant portions of chocolate or Neapolitan or some other basic flavor.

No Ben & Jerry aficionado is he. But you can tell he loves ice cream by the extra 15-20 pounds he carries.

In addition to those three sizes of water-catchers, he has a couple of odd pieces: a blue-speckled "campfire pot," an aluminum candy dish, two twenty-gallon rubbermaid box-like containers, a two-gallon rectangular mop bucket, and a twelve-foot long and one-foot wide piece of roof tin that he saved from when he fixed up his roof a few years ago.

Now he positions this piece of tin (which is ribbed and grooved) precariously on the edge of one of those white buckets, which he's positioned on the second of his four front steps (that's why all of his neighbors can easily see it), and aligns it to catch water dripping in 12-foot long sheets off the roof - and as the water is collected it then trickles downhill into one of those 20-gallon containers on the ground, upon which he placed the other edge of the tin piece.

Now all of of this was an ingenious but spectacularly Rube Goldbergian plan just to collect a bit of rainwater.

I half expected to see mice and squirrels and birds and cats and dogs brought into his scheme before too long - as he has religiously fed all of those critters under the far edge gable of his home where water does not fall and they no doubt will feel some obligation to help him eventually.

I thought the show was over after he set up this intricate system for capturing rainwater - but no. Once it actually started raining - he went to work in earnest to maximize his catch.

First he let it rain for about ten minutes before springing into action. He had disappeared for those ten minutes inside of his home - but emerged when the gallon and a half ice cream mini-buckets were near full.

I almost laughed out loud when I saw him dressed in an old-fashioned yellow raincoat (think third grade) with cap AND galoshes AND an umbrella. No rainwater would ever touch HIS skin, that's for sure. I could see only a narrow eye slit in that yellow Mac rainhat - he looked like a poor yellow cousin of Darth Vader.

Soon he leapt into action: he poured the little ice cream buckets and other small containers that were full, into the 5 gallon buckets, which he then emptied into the larger 15 gallon containers. He seemed to be even-ing out all containers - so that at any given time all of the containers held exactly the same amount of water as measured by the distance of the water from the top rim .

I later figured out why he was constantly seeking to keep all containers at the same level level of fullness: if there were a pause in the rain, he feverishly brought all levels to be equal (again - not equal in amount of water held - but equal in terms of the distance from the top rim that the water reached).

Now, if it resumed raining (which it did, on and off), all containers would receive water without any of them overflowing (and apparently causing him visible pain as his cherished rainwater dribbled away, lost to him forever, into his soil) - and they would all end up becoming full at about the same time.

Key to note here is that - for some reason I do not understand - the rate of water coming off of his roof varied from place to place along his roof - so that his containers all filled at different rates !

Sure enough - he lost almost no water to overflowing containers - as he was constantly shifting water from the almost full containers where the water runoff was heaviest - to the less full ones. I could not take my eyes off of him during this exercise - and it WAS plenty of exercise for him, I could tell.

He even slipped and fell numerous times and even splashed water all over himself several times as he fell. That was the only water lost all day. When it had finally stopped raining - he sized up his catch and began another peculiar ritual.

He must drink a whole hell of a lot of milk. He has more than 60 gallon-sized milk jugs arranged perfectly in rows - like sentinels awaiting their call to action - under his carport.

Once it had stopped raining - or even DURING a rain, IF all containers had nearly filled up and now ALL containers were in danger of overflowing - he sprung into the action of filling those milk jugs by dunking them - two at a time - into the 15-gallon and two 20-gallon containers.

Once four jugs were filled, he scurried back under the carport with this extra catch and brought out four more milk jugs - he must have experimented with carrying more and less than four - because he always brought just four out to fill. Now the race was on to fill as many of those jugs as he could so that NO container of any size would overflow DURING the rainstorm.

More often than not he succeeded at this.

Only during an extremely long rainstorm late last summer did he manage to fill ALL containers and ALL jugs so that he had NO MORE ways of capturing any more rainwater, and once this realization dawned upon him, a look of failed dejection descended upon his countenance like I have never seen.

He sat, like a beat-up and bullied third grader in his yellow raincoat, on his front steps. I swear he was crying, but those moans could have been the wind through the trees, I am not sure.

By now I am almost certain that you have guessed the surprise ending to this story: I am that neighborhood rain idiot that loves collecting rainwater so much that I cannot help myself - I must try to catch every drop I can, and share it with my beloved plants.

Truth is, I am a rippling wind, water, and rain worshipper (try saying that five times very fast).

Have any containers hanging around your home that you're not using ?