Jack walks through the puddles, not around them. It has rained 72 inches here in Virginia since his 3rdbirthday, more than the foggy coast of Seattle, more than the jungles of Borneo. Of those 300 days, 200 of them have yielded measurable rainfall, and one of them, a baby sister.
A boy in a climate like this tends to keep moving.
“Untle Dave,” Jack chirps, unable to pronounce his c’s yet, “I tan yell outside.” He pulls on his red boots and hops in the wagon, and we roll out of his backyard and down the trail.
The pitter-patter of rain has faded, and the sun is out for a few minutes, and I explain the plan to him, “We’ll just gather some rocks, haul them in the wagon, and we'll press them into the trail down below where it's muddy. It'll be like armor, but rock, and for the trail."
Smiling back, Jack explains the plan to me. I have a hard time understanding him, but I hear some phrases like “Build a worm house” and “Swim in the forest.”
We carefully step the wagon down the trail through the roots, green and slippery this year where usually they are baked dry by the sun. Jack bails from the wagon with glee, then he holds my hand and leads me up the old logging road, now more like a stream of water flowing against us. He stops to stare at the rush and gush of it all. The road-river pushes up and over the toes of his little red boots.
I have never seen it rain like this, months upon months of downpours and gloom. The trail here has been gutted by storms, a deep red rut running down the center and then veering hard left, downhill, into climate we don’t yet understand. I wonder, as we stand and stare at the flooding, what a young boy makes of this. Is it still climate change if you were born after it already happened?
Jack giggles, and I turn to look at him, and he’s peeing, straight down into the torrent, and it’s washing back over his feet.
