HOLLYWOOD — It rained for three days last week, which in this town qualifies as an event, a crisis, and a personality test, usually all before lunch.
I want to defend the rain, and more than that, I want to defend what it does to us. For most of the year Los Angeles behaves as though the sky were painted scenery, a fixed blue flat that nobody has to think about. We schedule around a climate we assume will cooperate, and it usually does, and the cost of all that cooperation is that we stop looking up. Then a real storm rolls in off the ocean, and the whole performance falls apart in the most revealing way.
Consider the driving. There is a particular local genius for treating a wet road as an unprecedented natural disaster, as if water falling from the sky were a rumor we had all heard but never believed. Freeways that handle a hundred thousand cars a day seize up over a drizzle. People who tailgate at eighty in July suddenly creep along the Cahuenga Pass at a funeral pace, hazard lights blinking, humbled. I find I don’t mind it. For one week a year, this most confident of cities admits it does not have everything figured out.
The rain also does something to the light that no amount of good weather ever manages. The dust that hangs over the basin for months gets rinsed out of the air, and for a day or two afterward you can see the mountains with a clarity that feels almost rude, like meeting a neighbor you’d only ever seen through a screen door. The sunsets go operatic. The sky at the end of a storm-scrubbed afternoon turns the kind of orange that would look overdone in a painting, and everyone stops on the sidewalk to photograph it, sheepishly, knowing there is no way to hold onto it.
And the smell. Anyone who has spent a winter here knows the specific perfume of the first rain on months of dry pavement and eucalyptus, a smell that arrives about ten minutes before the water does. It is the one thing about this place that cannot be bought, franchised, or improved. It is simply given, briefly, and then it’s gone.
We are told, endlessly, that our lack of seasons is a feature. No shoveling, no ice, no dark February afternoons. Fair enough. But a place with no weather is a place that never has to gather itself, never has to look out the window and reckon with something larger than its own plans. The rain makes us reckon. It cancels the hike, floods the underpass, ruins the outdoor party, and reminds a city built on the fantasy of permanent summer that it is, after all, sitting under an actual sky.
So let it come down. Let the freeways crawl and the umbrellas turn inside out on Highland. In a few days the sun will return, the town will resume pretending, and the mountains will vanish back behind the haze. Catch them while you can see them.