Rain Gauge Nerd

(c) 2013 Trina Lambert
Wrong gauge–no hundredths!

Nothing says Nebraskan like a rain gauge and last year I was an ex-pat Nebraskan (in Colorado) without a rain gauge. My old gauge had broken and no store seemed to have any in stock—didn’t matter much because last year the rain hardly fell. Knowing that was pretty much all we needed to know.

Early last month, I found several gauges at the store, but didn’t put out the one I brought home. Rain gauges aren’t usually that fond of April snows (well, neither am I but at least the snows don’t break me!) With the most recent snowfall just a week ago, (yeah, I know—that was a May snow), I’d forgotten that now might really be the time to break out the rain gauge.

Never mind that some people around here have taken to putting out fake flowers—as if they’ve given up hope on spring. The grocery stores, usually loaded with plants, have no more than some bags of soil stacked outside and the occasional hanging pot—which can be whisked back inside. No doubt, there is no point in rushing to plant annual beds yet, but this morning the skies cracked open and the rains dropped hard and furious, along with pea-sized pellets of hail.

I remembered the rain gauge and—sometime after the hail stopped—ran out into the wet where I plunged it in the first open soil I found: in a pot filled with hen & chicks that had safely overwintered outdoors. Bring it, I thought!

You see, I am neither farmer nor a daughter of a farmer, but am the granddaughter of farmers. The towns in Nebraska are populated by many people who like my parents, left the farm, or like me, had parents who had left the farm. In a place where rain falls in “hundredths” of an inch and where dust once covered the lands, rain is most often a blessing. Yes, people stand around and compare how many hundredths of an inch they got, even if all they are doing is cultivating a bluegrass lawn.

I’ve lived in Colorado for over 28 years and not found many people here worried about hundredths of an inch, even though we have way more reasons (or is that fewer?) to count those hundredths since average rainfall here is much less than further east on the prairies. For many city and suburban dwellers without farming in their family backgrounds, they don’t seem to realize water comes not from faucets and spigots but from aquifers and rivers and streams—until drought restrictions are put in place as they are now, despite the seemingly endless but still too-little, too-late moisture we’ve had this spring, or until a developer is denied a permit.

Yes, it’s time Coloradans take a little more interest in knowing how much is falling from the sky, even if doing so doesn’t sound very sophisticated. With watering limited to twice a week, a little data might be helpful for planning. I got my rain gauge at the local Ace Hardware: the venerable A&A Trading Post.

And please, spare me the tales of how the water is all going downstream to Nebraska where they might need it to grow food. All of us from cities, suburbs, and towns—whether in Colorado or Nebraska or wherever—ought to be thinking more about how water affects the food supply and less about maintaining perfect lawns.

I’m not giving up turf, trees, or flowers—what we grow in our communities aids in producing cleaner air, keeping temperatures lower, and providing bees with pollen—but doing so with an eye on the numbers helps us to work with what we do have.

However, what I don’t have after all is the right rain gauge for the region. While checking my gauge’s numbers after this morning’s precipitation, I discovered the numbers do not break down into hundredths! Why bother? Good thing Ace is the place . . . for nerds of all kinds.