The Pacific Northwest

I’ve always been a Californian. Born and raised in rural Shasta County, the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Californians, you could say that despite my British and Irish bloodlines, the sun runs through my veins. So when I told friends and family I’d be moving to Seattle last year, I received a lot of blunt skepticism. “You’ll never handle the weather,” they assured me. I scoffed at their warnings – for all the fog San Francisco gets, it might as well be the Pacific Northwest, I argued. However, after my first full month here qualified as the rainiest month in this history of Seattle, then newspapers dubbed a local December storm as the most destructive seen in fifteen years, I’m beginning to eat my words. If the Giants hadn’t re-signed Barry Bonds, I’d be starting to wonder if I’d made a big mistake.

In the Bay Area, the weather represents either a minor annoyance or something to celebrate. Days range from slightly wet to a bit windy to absolutely gorgeous, and almost every one of them is a day on which you could ride your bike to work.

After moving up to Seattle, however, the month of November quickly taught me things work a little differently up here. For thirty days and thirty nights, I don’t remember much sunshine. I do, however, remember a wide variety of weather I’d never seen before. Raining sleet. Sleeting hail. Sideways rain. Big, soft snowflakes that suddenly turned to raindrops, then right back to snow again. Ice rain. Rain Ice. All told, more than 15 inches of wet stuff fell from the sky during those thirty days.