Rain and Damp

It rained on and off yesterday and the day before, and it’s due to rain all day today and some of tomorrow. When the forecaster told us this morning that we would be lucky to see the sun before next week, all over Vermont people began whimpering and scratching at the door.

Oddly enough, rain in Vermont doesn’t bother me. Not surprising, you say: it reminds you of your childhood. And that’s true, up to a point; but the more I think about it, rain in this country is a different kind of rain. Here rain is energetic, lively; it falls with a sense of purpose, even of drama, that we hardly ever see in British rain: tornadoes like exclamation marks, hailstones the size of oranges, hurricanes, single black storm clouds that cover the whole of Kansas. One afternoon I sat watching the rain enthusiastically lash a giant ice cream cone sign outside a Vermont general store and realized, this rain was different. It was an event.

British rain, on the other hand, is a condition–it’s not a weather, but something between a recurring mood and a congenital disease.

Quite often, in fact, it doesn’t even obey gravity: in Scotland, in particular, it rises out of the sodden hills that have spent several hundred million years expecting little more than to absorb water, and hangs in a steady mist of supersaturated wetness that embraces and connects the damp ground and the damp sky. Up in the highlands there aren’t even puddles to show the rain’s downness, its motion, its energy. Scottish rain absorbs energy.

No up, no down; and therefore, by depressing extension, no beginning or end. On a wet day in industrial northern England it’s quite possible to believe that time stopped in a particularly hopeless decade of the nineteenth century and will never get kick-started again. When you see Aberdeen Angus cattle slowly materialize out of a Scotch mist, their shaggy coats hanging off them like brown drizzle, you can easily believe yourself back five hundred years earlier, with no relief to look forward to but a smoky peat fire in a mud hut. And in winter, of course, it is the same only colder, ushering in chronic bronchitis, and the chilblains that made my toes red, itchy and swollen every winter from November until March.

That’s the final, the crucial difference between the rain on this side of the Atlantic, and the rain over there: here you have central heating and storm windows. In England, the houses of even the middle classes are prone to damp, the damp that in older houses and churches brings out the smell of beetled wood and mice, the perpetual damp that oozes out of the timbers of a house in October and doesn’t retreat again until May, the dead damp that lies in a chest of drawers waiting for the night when you get into a bed made with clean sheets so it can embrace you in its damp clutch like the specter of mold and marshes.

No wonder that in the dampest lowlands, closest to the Atlantic, archaeologists have discovered the dead perfectly preserved, having merely sunk a couple of yards into the damp peat and lain there for thousands of years unchanging, still looking for all the world as if they’re just a blink away from waking up and complaining about the damp.

This essay first aired on National Public Radio in 1993.