Rainy Season

From letter dated July 10, 1954

The rainy season really is here.

It began early this year, and it looks as if most of the lumbermen will go broke. They spend the dry season cutting mahogany trees way back in the jungle…working their way through incredible underbrush with bulldozers. It is such an arduous job that they literally wear out a bulldozer in one season and always buy new ones each year. They drag the logs out to the edge of the large rivers or to the highways at the last possible moment.

If, as has happened this year, the rains begin early, the logs still are lying in the forest where they were cut, and the dozers cannot get through the mud to get them out. They stay there till the following season. The lumbermen have to get out eighty percent of their logs just to break even, and make money only on that last twenty percent. Since most of them got out only about half of their logs this year, a lot of them are going under. The big operators probably can stand it, but a lot of the smaller ones will be out for good, particularly since they operate on extremely high overdrafts from the bank as it is, and have nothing with which to cover their losses.

 

Most of the time the rain quite conveniently appears during the night with, characteristically, first about half an hour of stifling, breathless calm, then a sudden cold wind developing almost to gale force and, finally, a deluge which begins and ends with the force of a pail of water being dumped without any slackening, either before or after the downpour. However, last week we had the most amazing rain I ever have seen. For two nights and one entire day it rained steadily without even a momentary let-up…a steady deluge, one solid sheet of water coming down unbroken for approximately forty hours.

 

Aside from the rain, the weather is lovely. We did have one very hot and humid spell about a month ago. It wasn’t quite as bad as some I remember in the States, however. And since then, this rain has kept things cool enough so that even on hot, cloudless days you aren’t particularly uncomfortable. The amazing thing is that it feels as cold as it does. After that first night of severe rain, we all got up half frozen; I pulled out long-sleeved shirts and sweaters for all of us, and then we noticed that the thermometer showed 82 degrees!