Driving In A Spring Storm...

We live in a desert. I learned back in college when I took a desert backpacking class at the U of U (great class, by the way...) that it's unusual for a desert to be found at such a high latitude as we are. The desert was created when the plates under the area shifted. This shift caused the water to leave quickly and because of this swift exit of water, you get Horseshoe Bend, Natural Bridges National Park, and the Grand Canyon.

Because all this water left, there wasn't the normal water on the ground. Without the water to evaporate and turn into clouds, the area had reduced rainfall, and thus = desert.

This year's winter and spring (even though we've only had three days of spring...) has been a wet one. And the past twenty-four hours has continued the trend.

I grew up here so I'm used to it raining occasionally. When you grow up in a place, that becomes "normal." When you get older, meet new people, visit new locations, you find out what their normal is and their normal can be a lot different from yours. The first time I experienced this in a "big way" was when I moved to Denmark. Let's just say that Denmark and Utah are different, in some ways, about as different as two places can be--the weather being just one of them. 

It rains a lot in Denmark, like every day. When your country's small, is surrounded by oceans and seas, and has absolutely no mountains, the clouds fly over, drop rain in buckets then build up again. And green--that place has plants in hues of green I had never seen before--absolutely beautiful.

We visited friends at their church this morning. On the drive home, it really came down. Right before we exited a crash in the carpool lane slowed down traffic. Good thing--there were inches of standing water in some areas...probably a factor in the crash.

I'm not smart enough to pretend to know why we're having such a wet year, and one wet season does not establish a trend. I don't know if this will become our new "normal" and if it does, hopefully, we'll all become better rainy day drivers. Time will tell.