TheBanyanTree: rain dance

[Peter Macinnis]

On 4/09/2010 09:21, Sachet wrote:
> Rain drops dance on skin
> Wet caresses splish-splash down
> My perfect playtime

I have a slightly jaundiced view of rain right now.

As I mentioned in my airport post, rain can occasionally be a drawback, 
and we only just got out of the desert in time.  Weather patterns are 
shifting oddly in Australia, but nothing is ever certain, so we booked a 
trip to central Australia to see Lake Eyre with water in it.  It might 
not happen again in our lifetimes we decided.

The "Lake" is usually a salt flat, dry, parched and hot, and around 100 
feet below sea level.  The heat gets to 45C, around 105F, enough to dry 
it fast, but once in a while, a monsoonal storm comes in from the north, 
a tropical cyclone that would be a hurricane in the New World.

With enough oomph, a tropical cyclone becomes a sploshing depression 
that leaps over the divides and dumps soaking water into the catchments 
that stream south through braided channels.

It's a dry country, and one of the tributaries, Cooper's Creek (the 
officials say we must call it Cooper Creek, but blow them), is fed by 
three rivers.  They say this shows you how dry it is, that three rivers 
are needed to make a single creek.

You have to understand that Australia is a low, flat slab.  We have 
mountains to 2000 metres, but only in the fringes.  In the centre, 1000 
metres is an impressive height, and that will be 1000 kilometres from 
the nearest ocean, a slope of 1 in a thousand.  The rocks are old and 
tired: we drove through the Ediacara formations where pre-Cambrian 
fossils are found, and across plains where giant river-washed and 
rounded stones tell of a different past.  Mineral nutrients are in short 
supply, and every small variation produces a different environment. 
Paradoxically, some of the greatest biodiversity is found in places like 
this.

But while we often call it desert, and while it has camels, the outback 
isn't traditional desert.  It's just an arid zone, and there are hardy 
plants, tough lichens, even some foolish mosses in some places.  There 
are birds, hunting for wary dunnarts, small mouse-like marsupials, and 
for lizards, beetles and grasshoppers.  There are spiders in holes in 
the ground and red scorpions that fade into the red soil.  They get 
along, and they all survive.

For a month or so after the rain falls in the north, waters creep over 
the flat plains, awakening all sorts of dormant life.  Then the water 
gurgles triumphantly into the lake and spreads out.  The eggs if brine 
shrimp hatch, small bony fish appear to eat the shrimp, and water birds, 
black swans, pelicans, ducks, gulls, banded stilts and others, all drawn 
in by some mystery sense, appear on the shores to gorge and breed.  When 
the water dries, they all fly off, abandoning their last chicks to make 
a deathly landscape.

With less mystical sense, the pilots and aircraft appear, six- and 
eight-seaters that carry tourists over the lake to see the water and the 
birds.  The pilots gorge on the tourists until the water dries and then 
they all fly off, leaving the desert towns to die away again.

The water comes without warning, out there in the desert, on a bright 
sunny day.  One early explorer, Ludwig Leichhardt, died somewhere in the 
Cooper Creek catchment (or beyond it) in 1848 or so.  One theory is that 
he and his party were trapped and overwhelmed by a flood that came on 
them out of the sunny north, fifty miles across and maybe ten feet high. 
  Nobody knows for sure, but it now appears he survived that and died 
further west.

Roads in the dry outback are of several kinds: thin ribbons of tar that 
can still be stopped where the tar runs down through dry river beds, 
made and graded roads of gravel and dirt that quickly become rutted and 
holed when wet, leading to their being shut down, and wheel ruts through 
the undergrowth.

As we flew over Lake Eyre, I tracked a few of those where they went 
below water, remaining as a light line until they emerged again on the 
other side.  We didn't go on any of those.  In fact, I didn't drive, 
because the risk is always there.  Instead, we went in a 4-wheel-drive 
truck, fitted out as a coach, with a professional driver, knowing that 
the tour company would have to chopper us out if we were caught.

During the week, the signs were ominous, and we knew that we would 
barely get out before the rains came.  In fact, we reached the capital, 
Adelaide, before the rain really set in.

This morning, Leigh Creek has had 100 mm of rain, 4 inches.  Leigh Creek 
will be running tonight, but it's flat ground, and the area will be 
impassable for weeks, maybe even months.  Right now, though, the 
wildflowers will be going mad.

The farmers will be going mad as well--or some of them will, because 
they had had enough rain to turn in good crops for once, and too much 
rain can do more harm than a drought.  Let's hope for them that it's the 
sort of rain that poet David Campbell celebrated:

"Sweet rain, bless our windy farm,
Stepping round in skirts of storm . . ."

This is the third year in a row that water has run into Lake Eyre.  The 
weather ain't what it used to be.

Mind you, we were on Mull in the Hebrides in June, where drought has 
done incredible harm.  Weather patterns had shifted south, and 
Scotland's rain was largely landing in France, as we saw when we caught 
a train from London to Paris and saw beautiful greenery.

In the Hebrides, though, we had dry weather on Iona, which was nice, but 
the school on Ulva, a nearby island, gets its water from a well that had 
run dry, and the distillery in Tobermory could no longer draw water from 
the usual burn, and had to stop work, which meant farmers could not sell 
their parched and struggling crops, and workers were being put off. 
Just after we left, we heard that it had been pouring.

Maybe it's us.  The rain is following us around. Joe Btfsplk, that's me!

peter

-- 
   _--|\    Peter Macinnis       petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au
  /     \   Assistant pelican deportment judge, Australian
  \.--._*   Ornithological Training Union and Marching Band
       v    http://members.ozemail.com.au/~macinnis/index.htm