The 1941 classic movie, “How Green Was My Valley,” is the story of a past which can no longer be accessed except through memory. Today, we’re thinking of a different film, but our valley is most definitely green.
Do you remember the 1982 Stephen King movie, “Creepshow,” where Jordy Verrill, played by King, and everything around him became covered with a green, alien fuzz that looked like algae? Does our recent weather remind you of that? Have you looked at your deck railing lately?
Thank God for the rain… and the ability to pay the electric bill which results from running the heat pump to lower the humidity to keep the green alien fuzz from growing on Tracey’s leather shoes.
We’ve always been blessed with rain in this area. In fact, Towns County is part of an area officially designated by researchers and ecologists as a temperate rainforest. If you want to know what it’s like to live in parts of western Washington, just go outside (although it’s considerably hotter here on average).
It wasn’t always like this. The rainfall, yes; the humidity, not so much. At the risk of dating myself, when our house was first built, we had one seldom-used window unit for air conditioning. It usually stayed in the basement until late July or early August. A box fan in a north-facing window and another in the south for cross-ventilation were more than sufficient for cooling the house. (Curiously, that window unit got progressively heavier to carry each year, which led me to suspect that gravity was growing stronger. Perhaps that’s why retailers, aware of this phenomenon, are putting less stuff in the same-sized packages?)
Today, the heat pump runs and the electric meter spins, and we have an additional crawl space dehumidifier to help keep the humidity down at a healthy level. I just finished cleaning the alien green out of the dehumidifier’s drain pipe and inner workings. It’s similar to the green stuff on the deck, the driveway, the side of the house, and any of the vehicles if they go for more than a week without a good wash. The pressure washer now has a permanent home in a corner of Tracey’s shop when not too many years ago it lived most of the year in the basement.
My grandparents never had an air conditioner at all, and their house, artfully placed to allow for maximum airflow, was never hot, even on the hottest days of summer. What has changed?
Glenn Burns says the climate has changed, and though as a man of science he resisted the ideology and hyperbole surrounding the topic, it was the overwhelming evidence of the numbers that convinced him that the planet has indeed warmed.
Of course, we could argue perpetually about whether that warming is caused by humans, solar cycles, or some combination of factors, or whether anything we do matters at all since the extra coal China is burning to manufacture our solar panels more than offsets any reduction of carbon. What matters is that the planet is warmer, and the weather is more volatile and harder to predict.
Consider that less than a year ago we were complaining about how every rain event seemed to be followed by days of wind and very low humidity.
Today, the sky is a deep, endless, beautiful blue, and the humidity has dropped to a comfortable 60%. That’s tolerable, and with the humidity at this level, I can pressure wash the deck again, possibly keeping the green alien fuzz at bay for another week. Alternatively, the desert winds might return, and we’ll find ourselves grumbling about the need to water the plants again. Indeed, the weather is as volatile as human nature, yet our penchant for complaining remains steadfast and persistent.
Outside The Box 