Today when I awoke this first thing I could hear was heavy rain pouring down on the roof. I is really cold at the moment and I had thick blankets on. I love being warm in bed when it's cold, and the rain is all around.
The heat of the shower is then doubly enjoyable. The warm water calms the body and frees the mind to think in a very free way. I get a lot of my creative thoughts happening in those times in bed when waking, and then in the shower. It is as if the creativity is locked up in the sleeping state and the dregs are squeezed from the dreamland by the sensuality in that last interface with the unconscious before the cerebral cortex is fully engaged.
Rain of course was taking me back to North Queensland, to the high mountains between Millaa Millaa and Ravenshoe. There the rainforest is thick and more primordial than the tropical coastal rainforest which is full of palms and heat. In the high mountains above 1,000 metres the air is cold and ferns grow huge in the misty drizzly rain. So often the moisture is technically not actual rain, because it is simply the interiors of clouds that envelop the mountains. It rains more than one day out of three when averaged through the year, but during the wet season it can set in for weeks at a time. I remember one time when it rained non stop for 12 weeks.
Other times it is unbelievably heavy. An inch falling in half an hour is common. I remember the time when two feet of rain fell in two days. It over-topped Koombooloomba Dam. For a while it was an unofficial world record for the amount of rain to fall in two days. It was the second highest fall anywhere for a 24 hour period. Then a place in India claimed the record for themselves, and it was an official record to boot. Only in places like Millaa Millaa and Ravenshoe do people think it matters that another place has more rain.
For years the officially wettest place in Australia was Tully. At about 5 metres of rain a year it is an impressive statistic. But Tully was only a short distance as the crow flies down the mountain from us. While Tully probably did get more actual inches of rain than us, they had far fewer days of rain and we thought that important.
I remember conversations in the Ravenshoe Food Store. Amazed visitors being spun tall yarns about what it is like when it REALLY rains. The story's though tall, were actually not too far from the truth.
Some people go mad in rain like that. They see the mold growing over the walls and consuming anything made of paper. Human skin becomes perpetually soft and wrinkly. It is as if the rain permeates the body until it seeps into those dark places in the mind and like the grass it starts to grow uncontrollably until it is thick and hard to walk through.
I love that rain. I am like the rainforest trees. I reach up to the sky and love the womb like essence of the clouds that are so close you can touch them. It can be very nurturing.
It can also be incredibly dangerous for young men. In rain like that there is little to do except drink and drive around to friends houses. I remember a time when I was in a car, the roads, being largely dirt were slippery, and the mountains make straight stretches rare - it is corners all the way. The Millstream was in full flood. It got too dangerous for me and I stayed behind at one house. Not long afterwards we heard that my companions had failed to take the turn onto the Millstream bridge. They had hit a tree which was very fortunate since that was all that stopped the car going into the Millstream. They both went through the windscreen but not entirely out of the car so that instead of drowning they merely were cut up by the glass. I could have been in that car. I might not have been so lucky.
It was in that rainforest, in that rain that I grew into young adulthood. That is an experience that few forget and I am no exception. But of all the memories, I think the rain is the most powerful. Certainly it was the most consistent thing that tied so much else together and led to so many other memories. There are still times when the heady smell of the growing grass on the day the rain stops comes to me. It is a sweet smell, a smell that speaks of things alive and vibrant. And when the sun comes out it is full of the promise of a new day.
I may be a city boy, but as they say, you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy. And days when I wake up to rain like today, are days when I feel my roots very strongly.
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