Whoa, Monsoon

 We've had a couple of pathetic monsoon seasons in a row.  One of the most surprising things for me as an Arizona transplant was the idea of a desert even having a monsoon season.  Wasn't that something that happened in places like India?  Not Arizona.  (Of course, I was a teenager before I learned that it snows in Arizona too.  Even though I'd visited Arizona somehow I'd missed that the mountains are really quite tall?)  In any case, after fifteen years I'd cobbled up a list of expectations about monsoon season through experience:

• It starts in July.  I don't care what the weather forecasters say, or that "they" (whoever "they" are) changed the official start date of the season to June 15th.  The rain and humidity never consistently show up until sometime in July.
• There will be thunderstorms nearly every day, usually in the late afternoon.  Plan your summer activities accordingly.
• The storms will not hit the same exact place every day, so though there are regular storms (and some of them are a real doozy) it won't be a constant never-ending barrage.  But everywhere in the valley can pretty much expect at least one big storm per season, where trees come down and power goes out.
• Dust storms (yeah, I was here for the change to "haboob" but I'm not a fifth grader so I don't get a kick out saying words with "boob" in it) are a regular occurrence.  They usually come from the south/southeast direction, and sometimes they are mild and sometimes they cause forty car pileups with dozens of fatalities on the I-10.  Drive through one at your own risk.
• Toads and swarms of mosquitoes will pop into existence with the first good rainfall that fills up the retention basins.  Don't let your dogs near the toads.  If your dog is stupid enough to eat one (apparently toads are tempting) your dog will get very, very sick.
• Monsoon season will last until sometime in October. (Again, I'm not sure why "they" set the date as September 15th.  It's as ridiculous as saying autumn starts September 22nd. No way on earth.  It's still going to be brutally hot until November.)

Just after I thought I had it figured out, the weather had to go a throw a wrench in things.  We barely had a monsoon season of any kind in 2019 or 2020.  Not many storms, and almost no rain.  Yes, we live in the desert, and rain is not a huge thing here, but generally we get most of our year's rain during monsoon season and we desperately need it.  It fills up our reservoirs, greens up our mountains and protects us from fires, and in general provides for all the desert life to keep going the rest of the dry time.

This summer did not start out well.  We were so dry and our reservoirs were so low that we were in a fire emergency.  It's not California, but we do get fires every spring, which peak in June, when it's driest and hottest.  This year our state was really suffering.  We've had bad fires before of course (worse ones than this year) but there were just so many.  The smoky skies were a constant.  In our house we were daily praying for rain, both to help control the fires and also to help end our drought.

Well, those prayers were answered rather dramatically this last week.

First, go back about eight days til Friday night.  That was the first night.  Our community got pounded by a violent monsoon storm.  Trees came down everywhere.  (Our stubborn palo verde lost one major branch, but it didn't land on anything so thank goodness for that.)  The worst part was that we lost power for six hours.  Losing power in AZ sucks worse than anywhere else I've lived.  You just get so hot, so fast without the A/C.  It doesn't cool down at night.  The house is an oven and everyone swelters miserably without any relief or the ability to sleep.  But we got through it, and I thought for sure, well, there's our major storm for the summer, we got it over with early.  And hey, we got some rain.

Heh.

Saturday afternoon we went swimming at my parents' house, and as we were leaving the standard dark monsoon clouds were forming to the east.  I had high hopes to get home before the storm broke, but honestly, I was a little too overconfident (thinking that we'd just had a big storm the night before, so surely our area was not in the storm sights).  I had a van full of kids-- B, K, & S, as well as Amy's two girls and two of Kristi's kids.    Before we left, Kristi's son got a dust storm alert on his phone (I didn't).  He made a production of asking "Siri, where are the dust storms in Arizona?" to which she responded, "I don't see any storms in Arizona" or something similar.  The kids had fun mocking that all the way to Amy's house, as we could see the storm near the mountains in the east.  When we got the kids to Amy's house, things were still clear and hot and normal-- I noticed our temp gauge said it was 112.  Still no wind, let alone any sign of dust or rain.  We headed blithely back onto the road, to make the thirty minute drive to our house.

Not long after we left Amy's the eastern sky suddenly, dramatically turned purple.  It was baffling, and startling.  (Cool colors for sunset happen in the west, not the east.)  It was ominous looking, big electric purple clouds.  Then we started to see flashes of lightning.  B made some joke about how it was a major protagonist fight going on, like Harry Potter, and all we could see were the weird colors and flashes of light.  I still didn't worry though.  It looked more north than the direction we were heading, and I figured it would miss us.

About halfway to our house I started to grumble about how I needed to use the bathroom, and B tried to persuade me to stop at QT so we could get pretzels.  I was not going to be bamboozled into taking five kids into QT for snacks, so I refused.  We only had about fifteen minutes until we reached home.  Two minutes later I was wondering if I should have listened to her.  The storm was right in front of us.  We hit the wall of dust but it wasn't that bad so I just dropped my speed and kept going.  There were lots of cars on the road; a few pulled off, but for the most part traffic was still moving, just slowly and more spaced apart.  The kids were starting to getting really nervous, but I reassured them everything was fine.

We had one moment when visibility dropped to zero.  The car ahead of me, which was mostly visible because of its tailights, suddenly vanished.  I knew they hadn't teleported off the road, so I dropped my speed down to almost nothing, preparing to pull off the road.  Luckily, we moved through the dust in that instant, and most of my visibility came back.  I should have taken that as a warning, and pulled into the parking lot of the nearby church to wait out the rest of the storm.

But I really, really had to pee.  So I kept going.

About five miles from home, the rain started.  Rain is good, it wets all the dust, and it's easier to see.  Two minutes after that, and the rain turned into hail.  Large hail.  The largest hailstones I'd ever seen while driving.  Our van just got pounded.  I was terrified the windshield was going to break,  I had screaming kids in the back seat, and no shelter anywhere around.  I also knew that I could not pull off the road here.  (Anyone who has lived in our area for any length of time knows that rain turns the sides of our rural farm roads into serious mudholes.)  I did not want to be stuck in mud and getting pounded by hail storms.  There is not much out here though.  I finally made it to the driveway to our local community college campus (it is a tiny one) and pulled in, but that made things worse.  The driveway is blocked by a gate, and we were facing north, with the full brunt of the hailstorm hitting the side of the van.  Terence called about this time, wondering if we were OK.  He was not happy to hear our position-- though he could barely make out my words between the thundering hail and the crying girls.  He asked if I couldn't drive to a more sheltered position, but another car had pulled off nearly blocking me, and I was afraid to try backing out onto the road. He got off the phone, saying he would come down and try to lead us out.  (He was working at the time.)

This is when I realized that our situation was quite precarious.  Kristi texted saying the power was out in our neighborhood, and I looked up and we were sitting right under power lines.  The wind and hail were still pummeling us.  Choosing the lesser of two evils, I carefully backed out onto the road, and made it a short distance farther down.  It was nearly impossible to see, but I was able to turn off on a side road that leads to a county complex.  There were no lights or reflectors on the road, and I couldn't see, so we went off the road a couple of times but fortunately, did not get stuck.  Eventually, we made it to the building.  It was empty and closed, but we parked right next to it and it sheltered us from the worst of the storm.  I jumped out to pee right next to the van (emergency, who cares) and was immediately pelted and drenched in freezing rain.  (The temp gauge said it had dropped to 76 degrees.  It felt way colder than that.)  We waited there for awhile, B calmed the two youngest down from their hysterics, and eventually, when the hail stopped, we carefully made our way back home (passing at least six cars stuck in the mud on the side of the road).  Once we got home, we had the joy of experiencing another night without power.  Yay.  But at least we safely made it home!

I think our neighborhood was traumatized from back to back storms like that.  But I reassured my kids that we'd certainly had our share of severe monsoon weather so they didn't need to worry.

Famous last words.  A picture tells it best-- this was Wednesday morning in front of our house:

Well, we did pray for rain! 😁