Today is June First. A date significant in 3 ways:
- The baseball season is statistically over
- Hurricane season begins
- It is OFFICIALLY way too late to play hockey even though the Bruins face off against the Canucks tonight for Lord Stanley’s Cup.
But back to #2.
Everywhere else in the tropic and subtropical world this time of year is called The Rainy Season. Hurricanes are not guaranteed, but you can be sure there will be a deluge with rolling thunder and eye-splitting shafts of lightening (as there is at this very moment) most afternoons.
So why Hurricane Season? I suspect because Rainy Season sounds too quaint and colonial. Rainy Season is what happens in other places, little places, places where they make Nikes rather than wear them. The USA is biggest, baddest, most exceptional country ever, therefore we do not have showers, rain storms, squalls or even monsoons (which are actually winds that bring or prevent rain on a semi-annual cycle). No, our summer weather is characterized by the mightiest of all meteorological phenomena, the hurricane. Hawaii and California also get hurricanes, although these Pacific-bred storms are properly typhoons. Typhoons can only happen in other places where something that sounds like a baby-talk could be menacing.
Our preference for hurricane over rain is an affect of that national pride that prevents the US from having villages. Everywhere else there are villages. The news media always refer to villages in Afghanistan, France, Japan, Mexico. Not here. Any wide place in the road with a population of 2.5 where a news van stops is still a town.
“Coastal village inundated by typhoon!” It can’t happen here.
