ANOTHER LIFE/Michael Viney: 'The rain here," wrote Heinrich Böll in his Irish Journal, is absolute, magnificent and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fine weather . . .
"It reminds us forcibly that its element is water, falling water. And water is hard." Böll's rain was falling on Achill, where part of its magnificence lies in the theatre of watching it arrive. There are days when lashing showers queue up in the west, each advancing from the horizon in its own squall of wind, the rain-blasted waves boiling grey in a slow-moving line across the sea.
Sharing in this scene a bit further south, we can add to the stage directions. The fiord of Killary Harbour beside us, steeply walled with mountains, can seem to act as a funnel, drawing in the showers one by one: they exit left, so to speak, wetting us with just a swish of raindrops from their hem.
Watching the weather maps, it has seemed to me this past year or two that the really wet depressions take a path across the Celtic Sea and up the east coast - almost as if they, too, were sucked that way by some inward breath shaped by topography. Nonsense, I'm sure, but enough to distance us from apprehension: just as we say, if there's washing on the line: "It's all right, it's going up Killary". When the rain does hit hard (and the drops themselves are getting heavier), we have some slight consolation in long and close acquaintance. We not only watch it come: we know where it is going.
It fills the bog beneath the ridge and all the little, half-buried runnels that seam the open hill; it starts skipping and leaping down the streams, snatching stones from the banks and foaming through the pools. At the bridge beside our gate it roars beneath the road and fills The Hollow with the ominous thock! of colliding boulders, then swerves out beneath the fuchsia to gather up another stream in its roller-coaster rush to the sea.
I may have to venture out, wellied and anoraked, to take a spade to our hedge-bank where a lake builds up on the road.
And a big flood is quite likely to toss aside our water-pipe from its niche beneath a rock up the hill. But we do not have to fear the appalling unknowns of the city, where rivers arrive from unimaginable sources, where natural contours of the land have lost all meaning, masked as they are in artificial rock.
Not only does rain arrive as some anonymous condensation of the air, its disappearance through holes, culverts and canals is a cumulative measure of urban adaptation, first of men with spades and now with massive machinery.
As the city sprawls, decisions on drainage become further and further removed from any personal sense of acquaintance with the behaviour of naturally falling water on naturally contoured land. Where on the map is the land that is "Liable to Flood"? And there, of course, we come up against the real difficulty: the way we have changed the rain.
It is 12 years this month since I first wrote about Bill McKibben's book, The End of Nature, first published as an entire issue of the New Yorker. Just as that magazine thought it worthwhile to carry the whole of John Hersey's documentary on Hiroshima, the implications of man-made global warming seemed to merit something special.
After his round of the atmospheric scientists, McKibben's appalling thesis was this: that the climate changes already in train have compromised what is essential to the meaning of nature - its independence from man.
Looking out to the woods and mountains, he sensed that the world outdoors was no longer distinct in kind from the world indoors.
"The hill and the room," he wrote, "are all the one thing . . . the temperature and the rainfall are no longer entirely the work of some uncivilizable force, but instead are in part a product of our habits, our economies, our ways of life." His desperate conclusion: "There is no future to loving nature". The realisation that we no longer know how nature is going to behave, that we have pushed it into cycles and extremes unfamiliar to human experience, is so deeply disquieting that we cannot bear to talk much about it, except in falsely precise and manageable terms of the problems created for the insurance industry.
The United Nations Environment Programme has just published a preliminary report on weather-related natural disasters prepared for it by Munich Re, the leading German reinsurance company (read it at http://www.munichre.com).
A 50-year graph of catastrophes, mounting decade by decade, concludes with details of 526 "significant natural disasters" in the first nine months of this year, costing Europe alone some $33 billion. The global bill for 2002 is expected to top $70 billion.
A third of these disasters, killing most people and costing the most money, were floods. Rain set all-time records of intensity in the statistics of meteorologists and climate scientists. There were floods in Chile, Jamaica and Nepal along with those in Europe, and in Germany a whole year's rain fell in a couple of summer days.
America had severe storms, tornadoes and droughts, all hugely costly to insurance companies - but not costly enough yet, apparently, to change the minds of Bush and his oil baron friends on Kyoto.
Leinster, alas, must endure the floods next time, and probably for many lifetimes after that.