Welcome to the Bespoke Traveler podcast. A space where curious explorers can listen to immersive tales connecting nature, culture, and identity.
Come journey with us as we question ideas of home, deepen relationships with place, trouble notions of border, and challenge our perceptions of memory.
In this episode of Bespoke Traveler, we ask questions about the weather and our relationship to it.
Chasing the Rain
Fog enshrouds me as I emerge from the subway station. Through its haze I see little else besides my rubber boots and the slick sidewalk. I hunch against the mist on my way to somewhere indoors, dry and comfortable. The air is grey and damp with stormy possibilities. Distant thunder rumbles as I hurry my steps. The skies open, first spitting, then hissing, until the wetness envelops everything. Little ponds gather on the ground as the rain hastens pace. Drops speak to drops in a language of moisture, their greetings rippling outwards like turtle shells. I stop at an intersection and dip my toe into one of the puddles, spraying my ankles as I dance the tip of my shoe.
I’m not a lover of rain by nature. I like to be indoors catching up on reading while showers pelt my window pane. But, there’s no denying that films have taught us to consider rain essential to any sort of romance: there’s Gene Kelly tapping his umbrella to the rhythm of drizzle, a wedding party sashaying during the climatic tempest of Monsoon Wedding, and Kim Soo-hyun braving a downpour to reach Seo Yea-ji.
These days some of us beg for rain, our scorched lands thirsting for relief that comes fewer and farther apart. It’s made me nostalgic for childhood days when I used to run down my street barefoot during summer squalls or happily pounce into pools after a few days of precipitation. Funny how I’ve regrown my love for wet weather living in drought-ridden terrain. For many years, I regarded sun, wind, rain, and snow in terms of how they affected my body and sabotaged my schedule. Climate revolved around me and my desire for control, my wish to not be inconvenienced.
I’m reminded of an art exhibition I attended called the “Rain Room,” by Stuart Wood, Florian Ortkrass, and Hannes Koch. In this interactive installation water disperses from ceiling sprinklers onto a 150-square meter space equipped with floor drainage. Unseen cameras track visitor movements allowing the falling water to respond to and avoid human presence. It rains all around the guests’ bodies but never on them. A surreal experience as I stood inside the chamber, liquid spattering all around me. Slowly, I extended my arm out and the rain changed direction, falling everywhere just outside my physical presence. What power! I swerved left, I swiveled right, I swung my arms and the precipitation parted for me. The world was wet, yet I remained dry.
In our hunter-gatherer past we traveled with the weather, allowing it to dictate our migration patterns, our ways of being. Then, once we discovered the potential of seed planting, we rooted ourselves, invented deities who dictated meteorological conditions, sacrificed and assuaged their inscrutable demands. Perhaps in the future we will gain command over rain the way we’ve deluded ourselves we mastered nature. What dangers will accompany such a mitigation of our helplessness?
Dew flocks on the branches of a barberry bush. I can see a whole world reflected in those beads — inverted and misaligned. Rain shakes me from my linearity. Tiny universes materialize on leaf surfaces and slither down trunks. I try to mind the droplets, one by one, as they gather. I collect my abstracted thoughts back to the soil drinking in condensation. I try to return myself to the water, gathering. Downpour muddies the path, floods it so that I have to detour. I dither, unsure where to go now I’ve been diverted from my habitual trail. A limb blocks my chosen alternate route. I’m at an impasse. Beyond, grass and bee-kissers bend under moisture’s pressure into a matted carpet. I turn back, leaving rain to weave its wonder over the realm.
Bespoke Traveler Note:
A girl defends one of earth’s sacred entities in author Carole Lindstrom and illustrator Michaela Goade’s book, “We Are Water Protectors,” available at your local bookstore or through the bookshop.org link below:
Thank you for listening. “Chasing the Rain” was written and narrated by Atreyee Gupta. To read this and other travel tales, head to our website at www.bespoketraveler.com.
