Deep Roots: What’s Wrong With the Weatherman?
Some of us actually want rain!
For 6 weeks, it’s been over 85 degrees. In all that time, it hasn’t rained a drop. The sky is blue, horizon to horizon. I turn on the news in time to catch the forecast; the 10-day reads like it belongs to the Sahara or the Sonora or some similarly sunbaked place. Gardeners everywhere are in the deepest of despair, and what is Todd, the TV weather guy, doing?
He’s acting like a buffoon. He’s dressed in a Hawaiian shirt with a pair of snorkeling goggles dangling from his neck. Someone off-camera hands him an umbrella.
“What the heck is this?” he asks, before tossing it into a garbage can. Then he delivers his punch line: “Keep sending gifts and I’ll keep sending you all this perfect weather.”
“Yeah,” I snap. “I know. I’ll send you flowers. Dead ones, you—” Angrily I change the channel to where another forecaster scientifically babbles her way through a soliloquy of stuff about jet streams and warm fronts, El Ninos and La Ninas, before finally tumbling out a clause I can understand:
“No rain ever again.” She says this without the slightest hint of terror or remorse.
Dammit!
I switch to the third and final channel. This meteorologist shows a list of outside activities we all can enjoy: Go fishing! Grill hotdogs. Play with a hula hoop. Play putt-putt. Whittle. Chew on a straw.
“How helpful,” I think. “What a gem he is. Nowhere does that list say anything about dragging hoses around like a crazy person.”
Why do all TV-news talking heads have this simple mindset that, der, “Sun, good. Rain, bad.”? I don’t know, but I’m totally not cool with it. Don’t they know that garden plants (and, by the way, all life on Earth) depends on it raining at least once in a while?
We gardeners should protest! We should boycott all news programs that are so oblivious to the needs of the gardening community that it borders on cruelty. Or, you know what they need? I just thought of this: They need another “cam.”
They’ve already got a gazillion traffic cams and a slew of weather cams. They’ve got a sunset cam and a sunrise cam, too. So why not a petunia cam?
Then, during every newscast, one of the anchors can say, “It’s time for the petunia-cam report. Jim, how’s the petunia?” For a while he replies, “Doing fine, Nancy.” Until one day, it isn’t.
“Nancy,” Jim shouts. “The petunia is dying! They’re telling me—Apparently, it needs rain.”
“This is terrible news!” Nancy responds. With urgency in her voice, she turns to the weatherman: “Todd, any rain in the forecast?”
Imagine, at that moment, just how incredibly jerk-faced Todd looks, standing there in his Hawaiian shirt, forehead streaked with sunscreen, 1970s snorkeling gear hanging from his neck.
Yep. Petunia cam. Problem solved.
Illustration by Tom Beuerlein
