Ruth, my fair weather friend

I first met my close, personal friend Ruth Hersey in August 1993, when we were both new hires at an English-speaking school in Haiti.

The island had just been through some pounding rain that had let up only two days earlier. Route de Delmas, the main road down to Port-au-Prince in our area, was still streaked with drying mud that had washed out of the ravines during the storms, and everywhere you looked, people had strung up clothes to dry in the warm sunlight.

At the school, where new staff had gathered for orientation, someone remarked on what a nice change the warm weather was. Ruth wasn’t impressed.

“It’s not so special,” she said.

“Not so special?” someone asked. “What are you talking about? It was pouring rain on Monday like it would never stop.”

“Not in Kentucky,” Ruth said, and with that the school nurse, a Haitian national, began introducing us to the basics of Kreyol and its points of commonality with French and English.

We all talked more over lunch. While Ruth’s husband, Steve, gave her the side eye and refused to be drawn into the discussion, Ruth explained how over the years she had developed a complex system for categorizing weather. Today was Type 7-Alpha.2(a), 90-degree heat with enough humidity to make you sweat with light to moderate exercise, and air pressure dropping enough to bring in a light, cooling breeze by the late afternoon.

Ruth broke out her notebook and, while her husband excused himself to mingle with the other high school teachers , Ruth showed us rows of accumulated data and how she had derived the categories for the weather.

“Wait a moment,” said Ginny, our new sixth-grade teacher. “You don’t have anything in your categories for temperatures in the 30s.”

“It never gets that cold,” Ruth said evenly. This wasn’t a joke; she was complely serious.

“Oh come on, what about Zurich, Switzerland, in the middle of February?” I asked.

“I was there for a week in February this year,” she said, and she flipped through her records to show us. Daytime temperatures in the 80s the whole time, dropping no lower than 76 degrees at night.

“Jinnah Research Station, Antarctica?”

She flipped through her records. She’d been there for two days with a cousin in July midway through college. Little sunlight, but a brutal thaw nonetheless. One hundred degrees. She actually had a photo of herself wearing a sundress and a matching hat while she worked with the team of zoologists treating penguins for heatstroke.

“What about Siberia — no, never mind,” I said. “Steve, what do you think about these claims your wife is making?”

“Her data speak for themselves. Leave me out of this,” Steve said in that calm, no-nonsense voice of his that would in years to come break students and visiting dignitaries alike. I could swear I heard him start to cry as he said something about how much he missed the rain, but no one else commented on it, and he had asked to be left alone, so I never followed through. In a moment lunch break was over, and it was time to discuss the challenges of teaching at a multilingual school.

Now some people claim that Ruth is an undocumented weather deity without a pantheon, like Rob McKenna; and other people claim that, similar to Douglass Adams’ literary creation, Ruth is just someone whom sunny skies and warm weather love and follow wherever she goes. A few others. more sensibly perhaps, say that I just enjoy making up weird things to say about her on Facebook.

All I cam tell you is that, while Ruth still lived in Haiti, when the ground grew too dry and the crops wouldn’t grow, the farmers would send an ambassador to her home, with travel brochures for nice places to go on vacation, sometimes for a personal getaway in Kenscoff, Jacmel or one of the other attractions in Haiti; and sometimes out of the country entirely. Once, during a particularly dry season, when the dust lay so thick that the plants wouldn’t come clean with a wet sponge, the community went all-in to buy Ruth’s family a two-week holiday in DisneyLand, and then turned an anxious eye to the sky as soon as the plane left the tarmac

Coincidence? Who can say? But when Ruth returned, the entire country of Haiti had been washed clean,as though God had dropped it in the tub, turned on the water, and wouldn’t turn it off until every square inch had had a good scrubbing.

Ruth lives in Uganda these days. :Local temperature today is 81 degrees. Lake Victoria already has dropped 12 inches since she arrived, and officials in several African nations are discussing emergency water measures.

Save your money, folks. Just buy a ticket to Euro Disney.