The relentless gray skies impart a certain character to the land, and it is not always hospitable. Even the Native Americans who once lived here are said to have spoken of the Willamette Valley in winter as the "Valley of Death." Later, either by chance or self-selection, the first Europeans who immigrated to Oregon hailed mostly from New England. This was never a population noted for its bright faces or optimistic personalities, and its disposition was apparently not improved by the gloom of Northwestern winters. To this day the morose descendants of these immigrants often paint their houses the peculiar blue-gray color of leaden sky. Ken Kesey, a local literary hero, sought to capture Western Oregon's endemic winter depression in his book, Sometimes a Great Notion - a title taken from the line in the song "Good Night, Irene" in which the singer croons sadly that, "Sometimes I get a great notion, to jump into the river . . . an' drown."   

Ten years or so ago, when I announced I was moving to Oregon, my friends were aghast. "You're moving to Oregon?" You can't go to Oregon! You'll go crazy! It rains all the time out there. Out in Oregon, you don't get sunburn, you rust! Their state critter is the banana slug. The University of Oregon football team isn't called "the ducks" for nothing! Don't you know that Oregonians have a thousand different words for rain!   

Actually, they don't, but the lack is inexplicable. "Rain" is certainly a bludgeon of a word for a filigree of a reality. Perhaps it's because the taciturn European culture here is not much more than a century old; as it matures it may become more articulate about this defining aspect of its world. Meanwhile, without the proper range of expression, the reality of the thing tends to be obscured by the inadequacy of the language.   

I must confess to special perspective on all this. I spent much of my youth in the Dust Bowl, a place where outsiders presume it almost never rains. This is quite erroneous. It rains, all right -- and with a vengeance. Some of my strongest memories of childhood are of humid July afternoons, when the heat of the sun set the atmosphere boiling and great convection cells sucked cubic miles of saturated air up into the atmosphere. As the air rose the moisture it carried precipitated out to form a churning, angry fog that accelerated rapidly into the stratosphere. High dark canyons appeared in the clouds, and from within there was an occasional flicker. The thunderheads roiled, churned and merged into ever-larger clouds that moved across the landscape on writhing blue-gray undersides. We children of the prairie were taught at a young age to watch such clouds for funnels.   

In the shadows of these thunderheads the land grew dark, the heat vanished from the day, and gooseflesh formed on the bare arms and legs of children. The lightning came, now, from everywhere. Great forked tongues of fire flashed from cloud to cloud, and cloud to ground. The air reverberated with thunder and stank of ozone. Then, when the gods had delivered an appropriate Wagnerian prelude, the sky unleashed its opening fusillade. Cold, hard pellets of rain hurled down out of the sky, throwing up little puffs of dust wherever they hit. As the parched earth put up an initial resistance to the alien moisture, the first raindrops formed into little spheres that rolled along the surface like blue-steel ball bearings. But then in seconds the bearings covered with dust and merged into puddles, which then became rivulets, which grew into torrents that turned the red clay earth into glue and tore gullies out of the field.   

Now that was rain.   

Or at least I thought it was, when I was a child. But then a decade later, in naval service halfway around the world, I happened to arrive in the Philippines the same day the tropical monsoon began.   

The ship was the aircraft carrier USS Oriskany, and as tradition dictated we lined up along the edges of the flight deck in undress whites for our ceremonial entry into Subic Bay. The sky was clear and cloudless as we passed the breakwater, but before we reached the pier the blue changed to charcoal. I don't remember any clouds coming in; they were suddenly just there. And then, without thunder or lightning or any prelude whatsoever the ocean simply merged with the sky and the monsoon was upon us. We abandoned flight deck parade and dived into hatches to escape.   

I had never seen anything like it. The water came down in heavy curtains that played back and forth across the surface of the land like fire hoses. Its force was sufficient to bow people over. Breathing was difficult, because if you weren't careful you could inhale a snortful of water. Visibility was restricted to a few yards and the roads turned into ankle-deep rivers. The roar of the falling water was so loud that people raised their voices to be heard. The taxicab drivers all leaned over their steering wheels, peering intently out through the ineffective slap-slap-slap of their wipers, searching for some sign of the road. Once a taxicab I was riding in stopped when it came to what seemed at first like a brick barricade. Some investigation revealed that it was the local jail, and that the taxicab had driven a hundred yards or so up a wide sidewalk. The driver shrugged, backed out, found the road, and we were on our creeping way again. Day after day this downpour continued without pause or even hesitation. We were in port for 21 days and when we left it was still raining. We didn't bother with flight deck parade.   

So rain was not all the same, and only the innocent believed it was. What is rain in Oklahoma is not the same thing as rain on the Western slope of Luzon, and that was not the same as the rain in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., where I lived later. There, on the Eastern Seaboard, the rains came at unpredictable intervals, depending on complex weather patterns. Sometimes there was thunder but usually there was not. There might be a few drizzly days in the springtime, but otherwise the weather was fairly decisive. It rained, or it didn't, and when it was finished raining, it stopped, and the sun came out. In climates like that, which prevail where most of the American population lives, rain is an inconvenience that causes picnics to be cancelled and weddings to be moved indoors. When people plan outdoor events, they often provide what they call rain dates, which are alternative dates in case the day is rainy. The whole notion of the rain date contains the implicit assumption that if it rains one weekend, the odds are against it raining the next.   

When I first announced my impending move to Oregon, and thereby became the butt of rain jokes for the first time, I had enough misgivings to get out my almanac and look up the precipitation charts. While I was at it, I looked up Oklahoma City and Manila, as well. Oklahoma city turned out to get 39 inches of rain each year - plus a lot of wind and lightning and the occasional tornado thrown in for effect. Manila recorded 49, in an average year, and if my experience was valid it got it all at once. Portland, Oregon, averaged about 43 inches. That compared to 37 in Baltimore.   

Six inches difference. What was six inches?   

Since I was a professor, and the professorate migrates in accordance with the opening and closing of the academic year, I arrived at my new home in August. It was a typically bright, sunny summertime day in Oregon, and I could see the snowy crags of Mt. Jefferson peeking up above the front range. The next day was equally cloudless, as was the day after that and the day after that.   

This was not the Oregon I had heard so much about and finally one day, at a faculty lunch, I asked my new dean about it. Where, I inquired, was all that rain that Oregon was supposed to be so famous for?   

I remember the moment quite clearly. The dean was just lifting a spoonful of soup to his mouth, and the spoon halted in mid-air. He looked up at me with a baleful expression I later discovered was reserved exclusively for fools and Republicans. Then, apparently deciding that such a question was best unanswered, he turned his attention back to his soup.   

My wife Lynn and I, meanwhile, settled in to our new country home. The house was built into the side of a hill overlooking a little valley that fed the headwaters of the Luckiamute river. It was a stunningly beautiful landscape, almost entirely covered by Douglas fir trees - which, I would later discover, was not a fir at all but rather a cousin of the hemlock.   

The adaptation of the Douglas Fir, as I later learned, was not developed in response to the three seasons of rain but rather to the one season of sunshine. It had a tiny tap root that went down for as much as a hundred feet. Then, as the land parched beneath the summer sun, and huge cracks opened up in the clay that passed for topsoil, the fir sipped cool water from its own private well and remained beautifully green. By this evolutionary strategy the species had claimed most of the Pacific Northwest for its own. Almost any tree could thrive during the long warm, wet season -- and the spruce and Western cedar, which were the coniferous answers to the deciduous maple tree, were especially adapted to the wet. But only the Douglas fir could survive, on a grand scale, during the summer droughts.   

And so the fir knew in its DNA what I would learn to tell my friends, in mock outrage, whenever they made snide remarks about Oregon's rains.   

Rain? In Oregon? Why . . . it only rains once a year!   

Granted that it was one hell of a rainstorm, beginning sometime between September and December, depending on the mood of the gods, and rarely ending before late spring or early summer. (Once, thanks to the vicissitudes of El Niño, the rains began in August.)   

Then, like the geese gathering to fly south, the caravans of migrating vacationers begin to flock all along the coasts and mountain ridges. Their out-of-state tags make them as identifiable as the black band around the neck of a Canada goose. Soon, as the geese honk up above, the tourists will crowd the southbound lanes of Interstate 5 and Oregon, once again, will return by default to the Oregonians.   

Perhaps it is my dust bowl childhood, but it is unclear to me why rain has such a negative image. Most minds perceive it in terms of the dark and the gloomy, but on the merits of logic alone it probably should conjure up images of cleanliness, renewal and growth. My best guess in terms of a cultural explanation has to do with the way parents in other climates deal with rain: They keep the kids indoors. That way they don't have to deal with wet clothes and mud, and they figure the rain will stop soon anyway. It most climates it will, but "soon" has a different meaning to children than to adults. As a result our psyches are etched with childhood memories of interminable days spent with our noses pressed longingly against window glass.   

The discovery of "seasonal affective disorder" a couple of decades ago hints that the rainy day blues may have a biological component, as well. Low levels of light can induce depression in susceptible individuals. It is also true that the combination of warmth and moisture typical of the Oregon rainy season creates the perfect conditions for molds, which produce spores to which many people (including yours truly) are highly allergic. I suspect that some native American groups fled the valley in the winter for precisely that reason: Sinusitis generally won't kill you, but it'll make you wish you were dead.   

But whatever the proximate cause, or combination of causes, the tendency to equate rain with unhappiness has long pervaded the human tribe. You don't have to live in Oregon to know that we dance in the sunshine . . . and save for a rainy day. Or that into every life a little rain must fall. Or that rain, rain, should go away, and come again some other day.   

But in today's world all this defies logic. Seasonal affective disorder can be treated quite readily by spending a few minutes each day under bright lights, and there is a whole industry devoted to the treatment of allergies. Antihistamines don't make you drowsy, after your body has made the necessary chemical adjustments, and many Oregonians carry vials of allergy pills around in their pockets. The fabric and chemical industries have also produced a panoply of sophisticated foul weather gear, including raincoats that breathe and footwear that (at least in these parts) is as fashionable as it is effective. Most houses in the Northwest have a designated "mud room," where we change from muddy clothes to clean ones. Given this level of sophistication, Oregonians don't have to stay inside when it's raining. We don't make rain dates. We hike, camp, fish and even picnic in the rain.   

So from a certain point of view rain is just something you cope with if you live in Oregon -- the same way that residents of Arizona, say, learn to live with rattlesnakes, poisonous insects and fatal heatstroke. People adapt to the realities of their climates. Kansas has tornadoes, Wyoming has spring blizzards, Arkansas has water moccasins. Maine is cold and Florida is hot and Washington, D.C. is infested with politicians. California has earthquakes -- and a sobering number of Californians. But all the same none of those places are considered unlivable, at least by significant numbers of people.   

But there is also another perspective, equally if not more common among Oregonians, from which the seasons of the rain are not there to be endured but to be appreciated. From this point of view the gestalt of rainy gloom is but a barrier of the psyche -- the inner equivalent, perhaps, of the high Cascades. On the one side there is the familiar, mostly dry world of the continental climate, where precipitation is confined to short periods of time during which life can be put on hold. The dry world is without doubt an interesting and beautiful one, full of all manner of attractions, and many people live their entire lives in it. But it is by no means the only world.