I guess it is a matter of perspective. I spent more time than usual yesterday watching video clips and trying to figure out the impacts of the recent rains and wind. At one point, when our son was trying to figure out a route to come home after having spent the previous night in the town where he works due to road closures, I noted that the Washington Department of Transportation was listing 110 road closures in Northwest Washington. There were so many that it was hard to go through the list to obtain meaningful information about where you could and where you could not drive. A coupe of the closures affected places where we routinely drive. Since the official policy of our church is to close the building when the schools are closed, we decided to work from home and not venture out to places where we might be in the way or might be caught up in heavy traffic. Our son did make it home. A drive that normally takes 45 minutes took more than 3 hours because of backed up traffic around detours, but his trip was safe and he was glad to be home with his family for dinner.

Here is where the perspective comes in. I’ve seen a couple of interviews with officials where the term “the worst storm in a century” has been used. Since last summer’s heat wave was the “worst in a century” we have already been present for two “worst in a century” events by living here for one year. Neither of those “worst in a century” events seemed to us to be nearly as disruptive as a good South Dakota blizzard. In early October of 2013, Winter Storm Atlas dumped over 20 inches of snow and brought 60 mph winds to the Black Hills. We were without electricity at our home for several days and it took three or four days to get dug out so we could go to town. Our lives were disrupted a bit, but we were never in real danger. We did lose some trees in our yard, but they did not fall on the house. We had plenty of groceries, and by carefully managing our refrigerator and freezer, we didn’t lose any food during the power outage. We still had a land line phone, which kept working even though our cordless phones didn’t work due to the lack of electricity. We figured out how to charge our cell phones from our car batteries.

The record rainfalls, mudslides, closed roads and power outages of the past few days simply didn’t have much impact on us. Our home never lost its electrical power. Our neighborhood storm drains worked without any problems. There was water over the roads in several places, but we could find out which areas to avoid before we headed out. And we were able to stay home for most of a couple of days while things were straightened out.

If our home had been one of the ones under water, however, we would have a different perspective. If we had been one of the people who spent the night in their cars because they were out on roads that got cut off by landslides and flooding, we might describe the storm differently. The office manager at our church was charging cell phones and other devices at the church yesterday because they do not have electricity at their home. There are some shelters that are full of people who cannot return to their homes and whose homes won’t be livable for a long time due to flood damage.

Fortunately, the storm has not resulted in many serious injuries. There is a report of a missing person in our county and there are reports of several who died and who are missing in British Columbia, just to the north of where we live. People can survive wading in the water when it is 48 degrees outside and there is the possibility of drying out after a little while of being wet.

I don’t want to minimize the losses which are very real. It is just that it is difficult to compare various events. Is a blizzard more dangerous than a rainstorm? It isn’t if you are in a car that is being swept off of the highway by a mudslide. It is a matter of perspective.

In the Bible, the number 40 is used in symbolic ways. Sometimes it is used to describe a very long time. 40 years of wandering in the wilderness was another way of saying that a generation passed without the people of Israel having a permanent home. 40 days and nights of rain is a way of saying that no one could remember there ever being so much rain before or after. We use different words to describe the weather in our time. We say, “the worst storm of the century,” without being clear whether we are indicating the worst storm in 100 years or the worst storm in the last 21 years. There is a big difference, but mostly what we are trying to say is that the event is dramatic and that for some people things are pretty bad.

After a major weather event, we continue to tell the story for a long time. I’m still telling the stories of Atlas eight years later. I’ll tell about the floods of November 2021 for the rest of my life, I suppose. Our people have been telling great flood stories and tales of Noah’s ark for millennia. Memory researchers tell us that the stories that we tell most often are usually the ones that we exaggerate the most. Absolute historical accuracy isn’t the only value in good storytelling. It is hard to tell a story with the emotions involved because we don’t remember emotions with complete accuracy. When we tell the story, our emotions are muted from what we experienced in the actual event.

Susan and I like to say that we are intrepid. It comes from our dedication to walking whatever the weather. We walk every day and sometimes we walk in the rain or in heavy winds or in the snow, though less so now that we have moved. It is our way of saying that we have survived some major weather events. We are intrepid.

As far as i know they haven’t given a name to the storm that has passed after dumping all of that rain. I guess we’ll just call it the flood of ’21 and get on with our lives.