Dick Hagerty: While we’re dry, others are soaked

“Rain, rain, go away!”

Did you ever think you would hear that old refrain sung in earnest?

I just returned from a three-day meeting in Indiana and let me tell you the other side of the drought story. It has rained virtually non-stop all summer in the midwest and shows no signs of letting up.

The afternoon I arrived it was torrential, and driving from the airport to our hotel we passed miles of fields, all knee-deep in water, flooded intersections and entire subdivisions being flooded. All in all, the official tally for rainfall for that particular week was 10 inches! That was in one week.

A week later my friend called to say that it had rained 4 inches in four hours during the night and he was not able to leave his home due to flooded streets.

Farmers cannot harvest. Many never even got a crop in the ground as the seeds simply rotted in boggy fields.

It brought to mind the floods we had over New Years in 1997. Our entire Central Valley was underwater – the Tuolumne River, filled with premature snowmelt, had nearly topped Don Pedro Dam and flood waters came down through Modesto in Biblical proportions. We housed hundreds in the gym at the Salvation Army Red Shield Center off Crows Landing Road where some of the worst subdivision flooding occurred.

Another friend who lives in Boston emailed the news that the last snow piled into vacant city lots called “snow farms” had just finished melting. That was last week. In some of those lots, the public works staff had piled snow to a height of 75 feet and the mayor actually sponsored a contest to see who could get the closest prediction to final melt. Who would believe it would be mid-July before this immense snowbank disappeared.

Meanwhile, here in California, our mountains have been brown and bare since early springtime.

On top of the rain misery in Indiana there is a serious shortage of fresh fruit and vegetables, due to rain-soaked fields.

We take our local bounty very much for granted, given the wonderful fresh fruit we find in stands and at the various farmers markets throughout our valley.

I carefully wrapped a dozen peaches and nectarines, stowed them in my carry-on and delivered them to my Indiana friends. They were astonished at the sweetness and quality of the fruit. Fresh summer fruit can be hard to find even in the best years in the central portion of the nation. Their frequent summer rains and high humidity can kill a peach crop. For many varieties, brown rot would set in long before the crop ripened.

The reason they do not get such great quality peaches from California is because our soft “stone-fruits” are so difficult to ship long distances. A great peach needs three attributes – taste, appearance and the ability to withstand shipping. It’s very hard to achieve the latter and keep the first two intact.

So, as you yearn for rain just give a nod to our friends in other parts of the country, suffering from the very thing we lack, and not having good fruit as well.

Yes, I too hope for rain, lots of it. But be careful what you ask for. You might just get more of the wet stuff than you can handle.

This story was originally published July 27, 2015 at 12:33 PM with the headline "Dick Hagerty: While we’re dry, others are soaked."