The power of falling rain

"The quality of mercy is not strain'd.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath…"
Portia, or Shakespeare, is speaking about the sources and the power of mercy in his play "The Merchant of Venice", not the rain in Gippsland. The quote is one that has stuck in my untidy mind for a long time, and I feel that it could be re-used to show the merciful power of rain.
Australia is the driest continent. Even Africa gets more rain per square mile than Australia. If I remember my Drouin High geography under Marj Sinclair we have an average rainfall of about 21 inches, where the world average is something like 39 inches (990mm). That average is not much help because the rain does not fall evenly, obviously enough.
Nonetheless it is clear that we are a long way down the rainfall ladder, with us ranking something like 140th among the nations. This continent has the lowest total discharge into the sea from its rivers.
Even New Zealand, which we think of as not beating us in anything much (except the Bledisloe Cup) gets 1732mm, a staggering 68 inches. Val and I were at Te Anau one day when most of that seemed to fall in about 12 hours.
So how is it that children who grew up on dairy farms around Longwarry remember the rain being plentiful, frequent and cold? That, I suppose, is how our memories work.
Even so, there are memories that remain true for a lifetime, both good and bad.
At school the grade six boys were responsible for bringing in the firewood, and it was good to be given this task because you could string it out for a quarter of an hour or more. You wouldn't find even one school was a woodheap now, would you? I doubt that you'd find an open fireplace in a school anywhere in Gippsland.
For some reason it seems to me that the grades five and six room at Longwarry State School was the only one with a fireplace. Was that normal in schools back then?
I remember more clearly Hec Moir, the headmaster, standing front of the fireplace all day when it was cold. Not too much of the heat got out past him.
I remember the smell of a wet cow. It was not such a bad smell so let's just call it distinctive. That is one thing that will not have changed but it is a long time since I've checked.
I remember, and have written before, about how we looked after our shoes, drying them carefully in front of the fire. They had to be close enough to the heat to dry, but far enough away for the leather to not grow too stiff. If we got it wrong they would be very uncomfortable for an hour or two when we put them on, not that we'd complain, for a number of very good reasons.
We had rubber boots but the mud in the bottom half of the yard would flow in over the tops. There was also a sporting chance of leaving one or both boots stuck, and to wade out bare-legged. In the end we learned to put up with the mud and look forward to the warm water we'd wash our legs in before we left the shed.
I've written about all that sort of thing before – the chilblains, the walking home in the rain, trying to avoid the deeper parts of the puddles, wondering if there was time to seek a little shelter somewhere along the way, knowing the rain would not be a good enough excuse for being late home. Many of you will remember all those aspects of wet, grey, winter afternoons in the fifties. I needn't go there again.
My purpose was to link falling rain with mercy. You might have to be a farmer to know how fine is the line between success and disaster, and that fine line is where the rain is critical, and the farmer desperately hopes for mercy.
It is obvious that we need the rain. No rain, so no grass, so hungry cows, so less milk, so a smaller milk cheque. I remember Dad pointing out that if the cows did not eat well nor would we. It was a valid point.
He had a more positive view of the rain than we did. He liked to see the tanks filling and the water getting well down into the ground so the roots would go deeper and be protected from the summer heat that would (one day) return. There is another aspect to liking the rain, of course.
We are in a drought at the moment. Note that I'm writing this on 17 March, the day after a full day of rain. It was fairly light most of the time but we got 30mm, and that made us feel good. It was a long, hot time coming. We had stored plenty of water for the garden, and we have no cows.
Everyone we met was smiling about the rain, saying how good it was. I was outside for a fair part of the day – except for the heavy bits – and I got quite damp. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed all that sensory input, the greyer colours of the trees and shrubs, the softer outlines, the sounds sometimes a whisper and sometimes a roar.
Why do we like the rain? We lie in our beds listening to the rain on the roof and it makes us feel warm and safe.
I have a hypothesis that we learned many things thousands of years ago that still drive us today, albeit subconsciously. In the caves and under the crude shelters in which we once lived, twenty, thirty, forty thousand years ago, we'd have known that the rain brought water to the creeks for us to drink. We'd have known that the animals we hunted would have more feed and that, therefore, so would we when we killed them.
Most of our primitive societies lived near a water supply, or knew where to find the next one when the game ran short and it was time to move on. Who can deny that many of us want to live near the water even today. Those who do feel that know the wish but I wonder how many of us know why we feel it.
It is food for thought anyway.
Important stuff, rain. Send 'er down, Huey.