I woke this morning to yet another gloomy, rainy day. My “home” prison rests at the edge of the Lake Erie “snow belt,” and the same meteorological “lake effect” that strengthens winter blizzards can also enhance the force and duration of our rainstorms, too. Storm fronts seem to linger, as if chained fast, spitting their annoyance from the lowering banks of angry clouds scudding off the lake.
The wide expanses of dandelion-studded lawns between the cell blocks of our “modern” prison are intended to separate groups of potential rioters, not to gratify the aesthetic preferences of country boys like me. Guards and inmates alike plod endlessly about the interlaced webbing of the concrete walkways, their daily routines made even drearier by the days upon days of bleak weather. Last winter, from the end of September to the beginning of April, I recorded 119 totally overcast days out of 183, a “depression factor” of 65%. The “doldrums tally” the year before reached 71%, a degree of misery high enough to put the ever-cheerful Teletubbies into a mindless funk.
Fortunately, I am immune to the rainy day blues. Since childhood, I’ve had a thing for inclement weather, and have enjoyed a long, happy affair with a constant mistress, whose gentle tapping upon the roofs of my life has reminded me of her faithfulness.
After morning count, before summoned to chow, I watch from my bunk the shadows of raindrops inching down the wall, their images cast by the· outside light tower, their voices muted by the reinforced concrete above my head.
In a former life, I often awakened to the friendly tattoo of rain upon the porch roof beneath my bedroom window. Sometimes, I would look outside across the fog-hung pasture to see our dispirited sheep trooping, nose to cropped tail, back to the dry barn. But now, from my tiny window, all I can see are the ragged columns of disgruntled inmates trudging to the chow hall as they carefully step over thousands of flooded-out-of-their-burrows night crawlers.
In my previous life, I fished for trout and catfish, crappies and bass, while sacrificing countless worms to the insatiable Moloch God of Angling. One day, a neighbor familiar with my obsession, told me about a section of macadam driveway at the school where he worked as a night janitor. “After every thunderstorm, it’s covered with worms. Next time it rains,” he advised, “bring along a flashlight and a bucket, and if the skunks and ‘coons don’t beat you to them, you can pick up enough to last all summer.”
Although I suspected that he was gilding the old lily a mite, I waited until the next downpour, then drove to the school to find a hundred-foot stretch of the road absolutely covered with future fish bait! In less than an hour, I half filled a two-gallon pail, and could have gotten more if my back hadn’t cried for mercy. I imprisoned my captives in a large wooden box inside the barn, fed them cornmeal and water, harvested them as needed, and rewarded my neighbor with a case of beer.
Now, as I plod head-down through the rain, stutter-stepping over the oblivious wrigglers, I ironically note how the karmic table has turned: Now, I am the prisoner, and the worms are free to pursue their collective destiny, tenuous as it may be. With water dripping from my hat brim, I enter the chow hall to devour my cornmeal grits, shaking my head over the rueful absurdity of it all.
I usually turn on my radio immediately after morning count, and leave it playing until my nine o’clock evening bedtime. Unfortunately, the prosaic playlist of the only interference-free classic rock station I can pick up doesn’t include my favorite “rain song,” the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Rain on the Roof.” Although other songs with “rain” in their titles often play – Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women” and Led Zeppelin’s “The Rain Song” – only John Sebastian’s tuneful paean really captures the magical essence of a lazy, rainy day, while the others merely co-opt the adjective and noun for effect.
When yet a boy, I often fled from my boring home to the barn on rain-bound days, where I could lie on mounds of fragrant hay and stare upward to the shadowed vault above, listening to the pigeons murmur and coo in accompaniment with the monotonal symphony playing above their rafter nests, while the sheep down below in their stalls baaed in harmony. There in that semi-dark cathedral, I rested contentedly, saturated with reverence and imbued with inner joy, oh-so glad to be young and alive.
On other rainy afternoons, I went to our attic to recline upon Granny’s old love seat, its faded green damask faintly redolent of camphor, to listen to the thrumming rain, whose song appeared to issue from the long-abandoned panpipe-shaped mud dauber wasp nests just above my head. Lying upon that dingy couch amid a dusty repository of my ancestors’ discarded pasts, ten-year-old me dreamt of future happiness, as promised by my friend, the rain.
A born Romantic, a Gemini air spirit whose soul was captured at an early age by the naiads – the water nymphs that frolicked along our creek – I entered my teens thoroughly in love with nature, roaming our 123-acre farm and the adjoining 3000-acre watershed year-round, rain or shine. The trees and flowers were my first-name pals, and I flitted among them as free as any bee, coming and going as I would, knowing that my best gal, Miss Nature, would never break my heart.
By late August, tired of summer’s heat and humidity, my soul craved cooler weather, and I itched for hunting season. Our farm was only a hundred miles and change from the New Jersey shore, and the remnants of late-season hurricanes creeping up the Atlantic seaboard often battered us with two- and three-day blows. Protected by a hooded sweatshirt and a leather cap, I would then prowl the fields and streambanks, scouting for the scrapes and rubs of (forgive the pun, please) horny rutting bucks and the tracks of muskrats and raccoons. Beneath threatening, misty skies, I walked through fallow fields of hip-high buck grass, passed under the dripping crowns of oaks and hickories as their wind-loosened masts rained upon my head. After each afternoon afield, I returned home wet-but-refreshed, my spiritual batteries recharged. Rain was my lover; nature our best friend; and ever so it would be.
But here in this prison, there are no overgrown meadows, no wildlife to track, no showers of acorns to dodge. All our trees were cut down last year after someone fashioned a half-ass shiv from a broken branch. And then, for good measure, all of the shrubs that offered brief smudges of welcome color each spring and fall were removed, too. Next, to compound the injury, a duo of border collies was assigned to chase away the only wildlife willing to visit us: the raucous flocks of constantly defecating Canada geese.
Mercifully, the authorities can’t stop the rain; it still retains the power to soothe my bruised heart, and permit grown-up me to mentally relive happier times, when a younger me came and went as he would.
Sometimes on dismal afternoons when my cellie is away, I turn off the radio and recall my high school years. Outside the windows of my rural school, cornfields and meadows crosshatched by wooded hedgerows extended to the horizon. My teachers droned on and on, but to little avail: I was outside in the rain, exploring the sodden fields, eyes wide open.
Oddly enough, however, rainy days could also evoke a sense of security that I cherished. Ensconced at my desk in the warm, well-lit classroom, sheltered from the outside storm, and surrounded by my coevals, I experienced the feeling of atavistic comfort known to my cavemen ancestors as they hunkered in fire-warmed caverns. And all those decades later, I still get the same feeling on inclement days, even though nary a cornfield or even a bush is visible from my cell, only soft clouds above hard concrete, tempered glass above supple grass, and endless lines of hapless souls trudging below the lacy hem of razor wire.
My cellie works morning shift, which affords me the privacy to write while I’m still fresh and full of pep. Every day, I baste together a patchwork quilt of faces and places from the past with my typewriter, then drape it over my characters to warm them up for action.
For several years during my twenties, I “chased the sun” as a cross-country pipeliner with some of those characters, sometimes six days a week from “can (see) to can’t,” except when it rained. And during my wild bachelor years, after yet another hard day’s hard night, I often prayed for rain.
With no family to support, I could blow my paycheck without guilt, and to expedite that end, I usually left the better part of it in the cash register of my favorite rainy-day haven, a no-frills rural tavern owned and operated by a jovial man who unplugged the jukebox to facilitate conversation. The bar was a popular haunt of the local tradesmen, and by noon its stools were filled with a boozy mishmash of blue-collar workers.
Perched on a stool, playing liar’s poker with the sort of convivial topers whose predecessors had inspired Dr. Samuel Johnson’s praise of “good” taverns, I re-experienced the same sense of fraternity that I had known in high school. Served by a happy-go-lucky Irish rakehell, nary a boring teacher in sight, I laughed away the afternoon amid a smoky nimbus of good will as the rain slanted down outside the fogged windows. From my rented “throne,” I could hear the swish of passing vehicles, and I pitied the drivers en route to their prosaic destinations, while here inside the cozy taproom, we the blessed were solving, a mug at a time, the world’s problems.
Now in my old age, I realize that some problems will never be resolved, and I’m kind of glad. Because if they were, what then would all the rainy-day philosophers pontificate about after downing a few rounds of “argument elixir”?
After spending much time afield, I have concluded that rain also soothes the nerves of usually skittish wildlife. During my pretrial stay at county prison, I often witnessed from my upper-tier cell window wary herds of deer and even warier flocks of wild turkeys venture from the woods into an open field to feed on stormy days. And on other dimly lit, rain-swept days, I have seen foxes and even once a super-elusive mink prowling about. And every duck hunter fit to wear hip boots knows that his quarry flies lower when it rains, which is good for him, but not so much for the mallards and pintails.
Just as birds need nests, and animals burrows, we humans need our refuges, too. Our Neanderthal ancestors huddled before smoky fires in damp caves, clubs in hand, cringing with fear as saber-toothed tigers screamed for meat. But now, we fortunate moderns sit in comfy easy chairs before our fireplaces, purring cats on our laps, watching the summer-cut logs burn away our winter blues. I often suspect that God created rain (and its romantic cousin, snow) not just to water the flowers and please the fish, but to bring together if only briefly His legions of contentious children. Sure, He overdoes it a smidgen now and then – Noah’s flood and hurricanes and whatnot – but more times than not those rainy days and nights comfort the souls of everyone, not only the many prisoners of this planet. They are gifts, and should be regarded as such, rather than transient inconveniences to our inconsequential affairs.
Today, I watched the walkway officer, dressed in a long, black slicker, pop in and out of the open-fronted, tin-roofed entryway of the Education Building as she checked the passes of random inmates. Between customers, she would retreat inside the building, watching through a small hole she rubbed in the clouded glass. Hers is a tedious but demanding task, on her feet all day, and I wonder if she and the rain have made a separate peace, or if she just regards its presence as just another cross she must bear on her long journey to retirement. If the latter, then I pity her inability to see the silver droplets inside the dark clouds I have come to love.
On days when I am especially blue, when my spirit is lower than a sump hole, I remember a day during the 1967 “Summer of Love,” when I was young and free and as wild as the times required. One muggy afternoon, as I strolled with my girlfriend Mary through Washington Square Park in New York City’s Greenwich Village, we heard the hollow rumble of an approaching thunderstorm. Spurred by the first spatters of rain, we raced up Bleecker Street, reaching the door of my second-floor loft just as the bottom fell out of the sky. Laughing with anticipation, we bounded upstairs to make love upon a couch near an open window, our skin anointed by windblown raindrops.
Afterwards, in bed, we shared cigarettes as Grieg’s “Piano Concerto in A Minor” played on the radio, its trills and arpeggios muted by the downpour.
“Isn’t it pretty?” Mary asked, sleepily. Hesitant to spoil the mood, I murmured my assent, eyes closed.
The concerto ended; a Mozart quintet began; the rain fell steadily. With Mary’s dozing head upon my chest, I thought of all the storm-dimmed lofts throughout the Village, envisioned all of the poets and composers and writers therein, wondered how many elegies, ballads, and memoirs would be inspired by the serendipitous convergence of the storm and Grieg’s masterwork.
When I awakened hours later, Mary was gone, the radio off, the rain ended, and the seed of this remembrance planted in my fertile memory.
Fifty-three years later, I find myself confined in a medium-security prison, a short boat ride away from a foreign country, unable to outrun a wheelchair, let alone a storm front. And although the soaked clothing draped over the second-floor railings and the dayroom seats are proof of the outside storm, its melodious bounty falls unheard upon the distant roof.
Dreary weather can engender incongruous thoughts, and on this cool and gloomy spring morning, I remember my beloved cat, a gentle creature that loved popcorn, hated television birds, and graced my lap on blustery winter evenings as my wood stove warmed our bodies and souls. She, like tender Mary, is but a memory now, just another spark of sentience swallowed by the maw of time. A younger me once loved them both, but he too has also vanished, along with his freedom. Outside this concrete and steel jungle, a softer world exists for others, but not for me.
Tomorrow or the day after – sooner or later – the rain will stop, taking with it my rainy day memories. But they’ll return with the next storm, I’m certain, and, unfortunately, I’ll be here to greet them.
No Comments