The Rains of Ranchipur Recalled

For the last month central Oklahoma has received 12.5 " of rain, the most rain recorded in April since 1942 and May is by all accounts our rainiest month!  (Update: May 6 between midnight and noon we've received another 1 1/2" of rain.) All records have been broken and ten of those inches fell during my flower planting season. Our home sits on a slight decline, not a mountain which slides into the river, which translates to our famous clay soil sucking up the rain and keeping the ground squishy.  It also causes plants to wilt and drown from too much water, but it does not cause earthquakes.

Wilted perennials sitting in rain soaked clay, mud. 

 

Only droughts in Oklahoma cause the ground to split wide open, revealing baked red clay. 

Two weeks ago, with my never call it quits attitude I dug my first hole for the Purple Salvia. Water, not black oil, bubbled up and laughed at me.  Then it began to rain for days on end.

1900 spring rains in Norman, Ok before University Blvd was paved. 

My sister and I share a memory that we often recall during stormy seasons and heavy rains. Only a phone call away we recount the color of the skies before the storms, how high did the water rise, how many minutes or hours have we been hovered under a storm, what yard furniture was destroyed, windows broken, trees fallen or roofs peeled back. We talk in descriptions like yellowish green skies before the storm, howling winds, thunderous booms from lightning and pelting rains, but we didn't laugh when we were little children. 

One dreary winter day back in the last century when the Ford Thunderbird owned the road, when families watched black and white TV shows like "Gunsmoke", Alfred Hitchcock Presents", "I Love Lucy", and "The $64,000 Question" two little girls walked to the Coleman Theatre in Miami, Oklahoma to watch a movie called "The Rains of Ranchipur." 

With money enough to buy a large dill pickle each, we found cushioned seats toward the front of the grand theatre. Sitting under the large chandelier imagining royalty sitting in the two balcony wings we felt rich.

It didn't take long for the movie to go from a boring romance to torrents of rain upon rain until the earth began to move and shake causing massive craters in the earth's surface right in front of us. We screamed when we saw people running and falling into the abyss. The cracks became crevices and then ravines of raging water and death traps. We tried to stop the people in the movie with our directions, "No, don't go across the bridge. No, don't run blindly down the streets, they might open and swallow you!"  

Then suddenly the  mountains gave way, the dam broke, trees and buildings all washed in violent waves down the river busting the bridge wide open and sending people to their deaths. Someone in the movie we liked must have fallen into the river at that point, because I remember us crying. 

When we stepped out into the Saturday afternoon daylight cold rains just shy of icy pellets were pouring down,.  We stood under the Marquee in hopes that our mother may have paid attention to the weather and rescue her little girls from the long walk home.  With the blaring moo cow horn we saw our mother parked up the street waiting to take her girls home and any neighbors we saw along the way. Our bodies crawled into the station wagon and held each others hand. 

To this day I don't recall any of the plot even though great names like Lana Turner, Michael Rennie, and Fred McMurray starred in the show. If anything, the movie has sealed the relationship between two sisters. It has been our benchmark on a deluge of rain, and it does rain in Oklahoma most often in dramatic fashion. 

The security for us was that we didn't live in India, so of course, what happened in the movie wouldn't happen in Oklahoma.  For years the term earthquake brought brought back visuals in black and white of people screaming as they fell into the earth's innards.

When our family bought a set of 1959 World Book Encyclopedia's I earmarked page 2168 on earthquakes. It reads: Earthquakes are among the most terrible things that can happen on earth. They have toppled huge cities and started great first, killing thousands of persons. They have started tidal waves that have swept up cities on seacoasts. Sometimes the earth itself splits open. (I think perhaps that statement created more fear than the movie.) 

Seventy years later an internet description reads: An earthquake is a sudden shaking of the Earth's surface caused by the release of energy in the Earth's crust. Not nearly as terrifying as the WBE in the 1950's.  

This weekend the sun is shining. I will gather my tools and my flat of flowers to plant before more rain returns on Tuesday. For two older and wiser women we will not drive into water on the roads, nor do we worry about earthquakes, but we do take cover from tornadoes.