I can't stand the rain

It was awfully rainy earlier this year, and so very green as a result. It hasn't been nearly so wet for a while now (although we've had some wild storms in the last few days), but I can't help remembering those days as I read the first volume of Philip Pullman's The Book of Dust, La Belle Sauvage, in which an epic flood washes baby Lyra, with new characters Malcolm and Alice, down the swollen Thames toward London.

I'm not entirely sure how to explain my love for books that are driven by (usually catastrophic) weather. I don't think I've written about my cold books yet (although I've certainly thought about it quite a bit) - books that describe long winters and bone-cracking cold, that make you shiver if you read them in the summer and make you deeply grateful for your warm blankets if you read them in the winter. And I wrote ages ago about Seventeenth Summer and the sensual way Maureen Daly talked about the actual season of summer.

La Belle Sauvage is reminding of the good flood stories, the ones that jump into my head when it seems like the rains will never stop, and the ones that remind me of my own floods. The big literary floods that come to mind are all magical, which seems about right; I've experienced a few big floods and they all seem touched by a similar unreality.

The first time our street flooded, I was nine and I woke up to find our house surrounded by water; it felt like a fairy tale. We spent the day wading in the water. I remember it being an otherwise beautiful day that ended in a perfectly golden summer evening, and we gathered with our neighbors for a cookout as the waters receded. (The second time the street flooded, I was older and up all night, minding the downstairs toilet to ensure it didn't back up - less idyllic, but no less unreal and out of time.) When the river flooded in 1997, it was after an historic winter (that's for Malcolm), and downtown Grand Forks burned even while it was surrounded by water. My family was high and dry, but a drive downtown took us to the edge of the flood, where street signs stood above the water. When the river flooded 12 years later, I lived by the river and watched it rise and helped sandbag and worried and fretted, but when the water crested, I was still enchanted by it. Couldn't help myself.

(I didn't mean to go on about my own floods. I meant to talk about the book floods!)

Of course there's The Flood, the Genesis flood (and it's counterparts in all the other mythologies) that all of these other floods hearken back to. But I'm more inclined to think about all the Gabriel Garcia Marquez floods. The one in One Hundred Years of Solitude, where "it rained for four years, eleven months, and two days" after the banana company massacre. And one that I can only kind of remember, though I can't remember which book. And my favorite, in the short story "Light Like Water": "For they had turned on so many lights at the same time that the apartment had flooded."

But maybe more than that, I think of a flooded Gormenghast, a ruined castle filled with water and intrigue and the Bright Carvers, who paddle boats through the flooded rooms on an upper level (the lower levels, of course, being entirely filled with water).

(I don't have a tidy way to end this, I'm afraid. I was reading La Belle Sauvage and was well into the flood part of the story when I found myself overwhelmed by the desire to talk about other floods. And here we are!)