Waking and Baking on a Snowy April Morning

Just me talking to myself about the weather. Yeah, I know.

Unretouched photo of the air
in South Carolina. It even hates
itself, and no freakin’ wonder.

The best description I’ve read of the climate in my home state of South Carolina was by Yankee writer John Updike in his 1990 novel, Rabbit at Rest. I don’t recall the precise line, but the gist was, once you get south of North Carolina on I-95, there’s something about the very air that hates you. As someone who spent his youth and young adulthood in the Palmetto Bug State, I can corroborate this report.

The eastern Piedmont of the Rockies in Colorado can take it to the opposite extremes with its blizzards and spells of subzero cold, but at least those weather events don’t last all season long. Saturday’s storm is already a fond memory, as the wind dried the worst of it up by noon on Sunday, including the four-foot drift creeping up our living room picture window. We had another snow event this morning, already melting off into the stark, dark greens of our lawns. We needed a good super-soaker, and it’s nice no one had to drown for us to get it. 

That said, my heart goes out to the folk in Houston, as it did to my fellow South Carolinians when they got their once-in-a-millennium rain event last October. There is such a thing as too much of a good thing; damn these feast/famine, drought/deluge cycles. If it makes anyone feel any better, I foresee a long, hot wildfire season ahead in the Centennial State this year. It is what it is. 

We’ll be in the balmy low 70s by the end of the week, and are good for at least one more wet, cold, sloppy one before Memorial Day. I might not be here in Colorado Springs by then, but I damn sure will be somewhere in Colorado. It’s like the Great Bukowski said of his hometown of Los Angeles, there’s something here that gets under you skin and claims you as its own. 

Kentucky-bred Hunter S. Thompson, at his home-in-exile in Woody Creek, Colorado.

I’ll always be a Southern boy at heart, but my home is in the Wild Weird West.