It’s been a strange couple of months weather-wise around Canberra. Actually, you only have to go back a few weeks, really. This summer, we’ve had humidity (humidity! It’s been strange). We’ve had incredible heat. We’ve had some great storms. And then, over the weekend, we got the rain we’ve been dreaming of for – well, years.
From 9am Friday to 9am Monday, the Canberra region averaged 100mm of rain. We’ve had entire years where we’ve barely managed that much. And none of it was intense or stormy – it was a solid, soaking downpour that somehow has turned our previously entirely brown front yard into a surging sea of green. As it tailed off yesterday morning, I thought to myself – how nice to have the rain without the storm elements that have caused Sydney all those problems (although Queanbeyan didn’t escape totally and lost a couple of trees with the soil loosening up).
Then, late yesterday afternoon, the wind started and boy, was it a howler! We had to shut up the house because of the noise, and even then you’d get the occasional howl echoing through your chest. Today it’s bright, and sunny, and that wind is still tearing around corners, hoping to find something to tangle with.
It got me thinking – you don’t much see the impact of weather in stories, and yet it’s something that impacts on our lives a lot. And I’m not talking dramatic weather events either – for example, there would have been a lot of primary school teachers who woke up this morning, heard the wind and sighed. Kids get manic on windy days – when I was teaching, it was pretty much a given that the fabulous lesson you had planned for after lunch was a bust. You’d scramble to find a nice, quiet activity that required no mental processing cause those kids would come in after fifty minutes out in the wind acting as though it had taken control of them.
Rainy days weren’t too bad (apart from the fact that you didn’t get as much of a break from the kidlinks as you usually would) because they tended to quieten down. For a day or two. The third day of constant rain would be the day you’d start to wonder if maybe you should tip a bit of whiskey into the kid’s drinks. Or maybe into your own.
Even with the increasingly internal lives that we live – inside the house, inside work, inside the car – the weather is still a factor in our lives. If it’s really hot, we get drained. If it’s raining, we get wet going to and fro and there’s all that mould build-up. If it’s windy, you can have problems going to sleep.
Little things like this can add colour and tension to a scenario in a story. Say, for example, you have a band who are planning an assassination of the king on the day he’s crowned (and for the purpose of this story, it must happen at this time). They’re going to get into the castle through the sewer system (of course). Except it started raining last night, and it hasn’t stopped, and every hour you are aware that the sewers are slowly but surely filling with water. You keep going to the window, hoping for a break in the cloud, praying for the rain to stop otherwise you’re not going to get to the king, and then…
And then there are the dramatic weather events – storms, cyclones, tornadoes, floods – which can, in a story, add a whole new level of tension and danger to a situation. What if it’s been raining a bit on the battlefield, but raining more further upstream, and when you’re in the middle of the most important part of the battle, the river starts to rise… Can you get things done before the battle is washed out? What if the wrong people end up on the wrong side of the swollen waters?
I know that I hadn’t really considered the weather as a source of tension before last night, but I will from now on.