California famously gets little-to-no rain from May through October, and darn little in November and April. In spite of this, most of CA is not quite a desert. Technically, it has a “savannah” climate.
The answer to this riddle is that it rains in midwinter, some years more so than others. This is one of the “more so” winters, since early December it has rained 2-3 times a week, mostly not hard or for hours on end, but significantly, more than a shower.
Up in the Sierras winter precipitation results in snowpack, which spends the spring melting, feeding the rivers that wind down into the big CA central valleys - the Feather, the American, the Kern. Back in the halcyon days when the Sierra Club didn’t have such sway, all these were dammed for flood control, power generation and summer irrigation.
Now hydroelectric generation is supposed to be an evil concept, inhibiting so-called “wild rivers.” What total horse-pucky. Hydro power is the best renewable, non-polluting, tap-it-when-you-need-it power in existence. We should be doing much more of it.
The winter rains are also why CA turns the calendar on end, being green when the rest of the country is brown, and vice versa. Our wild plants here are adapted to do their growing in the months between January and April, when our hillsides are green and our usual temperatures aren’t cold enough to kill plants. By June everything not irrigated is golden/brown except the evergreen oaks which have their own unique adaptation to our boom-and-bust growing cycle.
I notice I’ve been writing “our” but will have to adjust to writing “their” as relatively soon I will have no foothold in CA. If everything goes according to plan, effective sometime in early February we will no longer own property in CA. It is sad, one supposes, but needful. CA is a nice place badly screwed up by its residents. It’s time to be elsewhere.
