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New York City has more than three times as many rainy days as Los Angeles. Had I bothered to look into all that before moving, I might have stayed put.
But what started foe 12 years ago has more recently turned friend, thanks to running—in which rain is not an inconvenience or blemish. Instead it cools the skin and clears the sidewalks of their more casual users. It is, even in the city, also a cleansing agent, a psychic as well as physical solvent.
There’s a scene in my novel (and the history it’s based on) in which the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith and his acolyte Oliver Cowdery submerge each other in the Susquehanna River in an act of baptism—one of the nascent church’s foundational events. Baptism has an exaggerated solemnity in Mormonism, which eschews infant baptism and insists that the subject be fully immersed—not so much as a toe above water. Famously, Mormons baptize even the dead, by proxy in an ornate font within their cloistered temples; Smith himself pioneered a version of this practice. The church sends missionaries across the globe to baptize new converts, who don white for the moment when they will be dunked in a sort of XL bathtub tucked behind an accordion wall in their local meetinghouse. As I’ve moved on from that system of belief, water and its baptismal properties have retained some mystical currency.
Baptism of a purifying kind is obliterative. Wordsworth’s speaker in The Prelude dreams of an encounter with a mounted courier bounding across a desert. He holds in one hand a stone, representing “Euclid’s Elements,”
that held acquaintance with the stars, And wedded soul to soul in purest bond Of reason, undisturbed by space or time;
In the other, he bears a shell from which blasts an Ode—a stand-in for poetry at large, but this instance of it foretelling the destruction of the earth. After a brief exchange, Wordsworth’s custodian of human knowledge rides away at top speed, “With the fleet waters of a drowning world / In chase of him.”
Earlier this month I found myself running through the hills of Griffith Park, which showed signs of the spring’s torrential rains in Los Angeles. Giant cracks split the switchbacks, and I thought back on the winter of 2010, when I went on daylong training expeditions throughout the county for a charity ride from San Francisco to L.A. That year, too, it seemed everything about the weather was exaggerated, the sky insisting with unusual stridency that we look up—starting a few months earlier with a cartoonish mushroom cloud over the fire-seized Angeles National Forest. Rainstorms in the winter felled trees and collapsed hillsides in Griffith Park, where for a few days I could ride in post-apocalyptic solitude, the basin megalopolis below showing its stealth original beauty through clarified air.
Only in running have I found it enjoyable to be in the rain. It feels like something you’d learn from a seer behind granite walls, this idea that water from the sky is something not to be repelled, hidden from, derided—but embraced as a force for remaking the air. Running effects a remaking of perspective: a shift from A to Z, a transformation possible only outside the cocoon of the familiar.
Kindly send me your thoughts, questions, and provocations: dmichaelowen@gmail.com. And say hi on Instagram, or let’s Peloton together: @leggy_blond.