water water nowhere

The title is not quite Coleridge.

His point in the "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" was that the sailors on a becalmed ship were surrounding by water, but none that they could drink. And that is an analogy that would fill a book, let alone the small confines of an essay.

Our problem here is just the reverse. We have no water. Or, at least, we have no water in the form of rain, and our hills are beginning to show it.

There is a spur of the Sierra Madre Occidental that marches off laterally into the sea just west of Melaque. It serves as a perfect rain gauge.

At the close of the rainy season (around October when the northern tourists start drifting back), the hills are decked out in almost every shade of green imaginable. But the next six or seven months will be almost without rain. By June, the hills are a shade somewhere between gray and brown. Taupe or dun, perhaps.

Our skies lately have been teasing us. A couple of days ago at sunset, I went outside to shoot some sky shots. Looking up over the edge of my house's lines, the skies had been drained of all color.

That shot is in color, not black-and-white. The sky looked just like that.

There is a famous photograph of a civilian Frenchman in Marseilles watching the colors being trooped out of France to northern Africa after the Germans invaded in World War Two. It would be easy to imagine the sky I saw was witness to those tears of humiliation. Certainly, they were the harbingers of much-needed rain.

But they weren't.

Last night I woke up to the sound of rain Bojangling on the sky window at the top of the heat chimney in my shower. It must have tapped me to sleep, but when I woke up this morning expecting to see at least a few puddles in the patio, there was nothing.

We get these teases just before the rainy season sets in. I have an acquaintance here who believes the rainy season does not begin until enough rain falls to short out the electricity. When I first came here, that took only a few drops. I suspect that test is not very helpful now that new electric lines have been installed.

So, we wait for our hills to be alive with the sounds of raindrops. Until then we need to keep conjuring up new adjectives to describe the hills.

Dapple-gray, anyone?