Weather woes, rice fields, and just chillin’

Jun 11, 2017 Countryman, Features / Columnists

---

By Dennis Nichols
In the midst of life’s misadventures, it may be a good thing to find distraction in nature and leisure. We

humans tend to take for granted the simple and often whimsical diversions available to us, from childhood capers to geriatric doting or ‘dotishness’.
We all need those not-so-serious, meditative, or dreaming moments, Guyanese no less than any other people. Lord knows there are enough weighty matters of individual and national concern to allow some respite from the misfortunes of our own making. The current heavy rainfall isn’t one of them.
Weather has always been used as a metaphor for life, and this year’s May-June precipitation has maybe brought more than ‘a little rain’ into the lives of even those of us who have become accustomed to weathering the storms of adversity.
Here on the Essequibo Coast, as elsewhere, the grey skies and the daily deluge are taken in stride; children still have to attend school, public servants drive, walk, and ride to work almost oblivious of the weather, police officers and nurses remain on call, and rice farmers who welcomed the rains a month ago, anxiously watch the skies, sluices, pumps, and rice fields, keeping their fingers crossed that human measures, not the rains, will determine how efficiently their irrigation systems work.
I don’t quite understand the balance between too little water and too much water at the start of the rice-planting season. But from what I gathered chatting with two rice farmers, water is absolutely necessary for seed planting but once sprouting begins, its level has to be strictly monitored and controlled. Young shoots it appears, can ‘drown’ in flooded fields which is what happens when heavy and persistent downpours expose the danger of kokers and pumps not working with maximum efficiency, along with silted-up canals. Nature couldn’t care less for human error.
Now what do you do when dark skies and unrelenting downpours are compounded by electricity blackouts, day or night? For the mostly housebound habitués (like me presently) without the audio-visual stimulus of television and the internet, it’s time for imagination and introspection.
Last Wednesday was one such day. It poured and poured, and then some. And 15 minutes into the deluge, as we say in common Guyanese parlance ‘Current gaan!’ Seven hours straight the clouds released their overburden, taking an occasional break only to resume with increased ferocity, accompanied by gusty winds.
Well, after a while, I ventured out onto the canopied stairway platform, and immediately the release from boredom and swelling frustration came. The poet in me took over. It was just the simple majesty of nature – a billion raindrops hammering themselves on slender coconut palms; the trees waving their branched arms either in delirious protest, or in an embrace of obeisance. Beyond them rivers of rice fields stretched to a hazy horizon, all of this set against a perfectly monochromatic grey sky. The atmosphere was almost primal, and I breathed it in.
I just felt like ‘chillin’ with nature, and for a while the blackout was forgotten. A more optimistic view of things emerged; the TV and internet take up too much of my time anyway, and if it wasn’t raining it may well have been replaced by a scorching sun that can drain my energy in minutes; better rain and cold that heat and humidity. Then it hit me, yes, heat and humidity are my ‘kinna,’ but those twin demons are not as scary as I found them in other places – places where I hardly expected them to be so harsh and enervating. The first was the American northeastern metropolis that is New York City.
My knowledge of geography tells me NYC lies well north of the equator while Guyana practically sits on it. So I was truly bamboozled by the oppressive heat in the summer of ’91 when one day in Brooklyn the thermometer read a skin-peeling 102 degrees; on our hottest days here it barely makes it past 90. That day I sought refuge in a (very) public swimming pool, along with about 100 others, as some residents activated fire hydrants to cool off. I then found out there are hotter places; NYC has nothing on Death Valley, California, where the temperature once hit 134 degrees. Thank God for Guyana, and the trade winds.
Twelve years later it was The Bahamas, and ‘déjà vu all over again’. Isn’t a wind-swept archipelago ringed by sea and ocean supposed to be relatively cool? Well actually that’s what the climate figures show, but somehow it felt to me way hotter than the 80-degree summer average shown in brochures. In Nassau, especially between the months of June and August, the heat and humidity could be searing. One day on a street in that city I actually sought an alcove in a vacant building where I stripped to the waist for relief from the sapping humidity. (The ‘winter’ months, between November and January, were a blessing)
Thank God for the trade winds in this part of the world. Trade indeed! My thoughts time travel to the 17th century and frame a picture of the billowing sails of slave ships fanned by these Atlantic winds three centuries ago, bound for a New World of marketed misery. And two centuries later, they did the same for ships with indentured immigrants from another part of the world. Ironically they now fan stalks of sugarcane and rice cultivated and nurtured by the descendants of those very ‘immigrants’, heralding bountiful or rain-plagued harvests.
So, I like cooler, rainier weather, but if the current torrential downpours continue, there could be serious problems for rice farmers on the coast and for residents of riverine regions like the Pomeroon. Everyone knows what’s been happening in Regions Seven and Eight, so those who man and maintain the kokers, pumps and canals along the coast need to be extra vigilant at this time.
On a brighter note, I would assume that Kaieteur is in full, majestic flow, fed by the rain-swollen Potaro River; as I implied earlier we tend to take some of nature’s wonders for granted.
The skies are still overcast, showers are intermittent but constant, and the coastal Atlantic is in spring tide mode.
The local Hydromet Office says an above normal high tide advisory is in effect until Monday, along with a severe weather warning of accumulation/flooding in low-lying areas with poor drainage, and a threat of landslides in hilly areas. Sounds ominous, but keep an eye out for those little silver linings behind the dark clouds – whether in the weather, or in human endeavour. And just chill!

---

---