Musings - on the editor's mind

Harbinger. Great word, that. It is a signaling by one thing – eight days of sunshine – of the approach of another: possibly a year of little rain.

We start the third week of the new year with mild, bright blue-sky sunny weather. It might rain the rest of this week and on into next but precipitation to date, at 0.79 inches, is well below the 4.13 inches January average for this century.

And the forecast, another projection, is not our friend. The models predict a winter that is warmer and dryer than normal. They do not show 3.5 inches of rain in the next two weeks.

January in our region is forecast to be drier and warmer than normal. So far it is.

And the snow pack? While it is near normal in Washington, the section east of La Conner is at 68 percent. North and east of that section the snowpack is about 90 percent of normal this week. That is a relief.

Saturday, I went upriver, well east of Marblemount, to Diablo, Spanish for devil. I was bedeviled by the bright blue sky, the full sunshine, yet with a soft haziness to the light. It could have been April or September except for the chill and the early disappearance of the sun.

The almost bare peaks immediately above us match late spring days of old. Where’s the snow? The fiberglass snow poles marking curbs have not been needed this year.

My first summer, after moving here in June 2017, I kept asking “Where’s the rain?” I kept getting shushed, as if I was giving away the keys to paradise. So I am sensitive to ongoing blue sky and a lack of rain in western Washington. I am just trying to be aware of my surroundings.

Am I foreshadowing another dry year, or another “D” word, drought? Or forewarning: providing advanced warning? I hope this is not forbidding. If it is, it certainly foreshadows a real crisis, with many American lives, and their sacred property, in the balance. Fire season 2019 could turn out to be, well, a real national emergency.

That is foreboding, fearful apprehension, but that is facing up to the consequences of living on a planet with over 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Stasis, the old norm, was under 350 ppm.

It is enough to make one long for the old days of gray skies, storm clouds and near constant rains, the old normal.