The Pukui and Elbert Hawaiian Dictionary listing of Hawaiian words for “rain” covers nearly half a page. There are different words that describe nuances of color, intensity, geographic location and emotional connotation of different rains; poetic terms, precise terms, beautiful terms.
In English it seems like all we have are “drizzling,” “pouring,” “dumping,”
“really dumping” and “call the roofer.”
But maybe some of
the keen observations of Hawaii’s many variations of rain do register for
contemporary island
residents.
For example, if you’ve lived here for a while, you can tell whether it’s just a passing shower or something more serious, whether you should turn around and go home or just wait five minutes in the car.
You come to know the morning rain by its approximate starting time: “Oh, that’s the 6:35 rain. Pau in 12 minutes,” or sometimes, “Hmm, almost 7 o’clock. Little bit late today, yeah?”
If you’ve been in the same house for years, you can tell which kind of rain is going to make the roof leak in the parlor and which kind won’t be a problem. You can tell if
it’s a rain that will make everything feel clean and sparkling afterward or if it’s a more sustained slopfest that will leave mud in places you never thought could get muddy.
There’s the rain that
requires rubber boots
and the kind that is better with slippers. There’s the kind of rain where a plastic raincoat is a good idea and the kind where, nah, you’d just steam in all that waterproofing like a 7-Eleven pork hash, so you’re better off getting wet and then air-drying later.
Then there’s the “I wore white pants and have to park in the grass and so of course it’s raining” rain. For kids there’s a “we have PE today, and I
don’t really want to run
in the rain” rain that the coach makes you run in anyway. And the “I just washed and waxed my car” rain, which is, perhaps, universal.
There’s the straight-down rain that starts abruptly, like someone turned on a huge shower. There’s a slant rain that sweeps down the mountain that you can hear coming 20, 30 seconds before it arrives. There’s the fine five-minute dusting of
afternoon rain lit up in gold by the setting sun.
There’s the rain you know makes the yellow ginger so happy and the one that makes the flowers look bruised by the fat, furious drops.
There’s the rain that is the perfect intensity and tempo for good sleeping, the kind that makes you want to hurry up and take a shower and get into bed so you can fall asleep while it’s still gently plunking against the old air conditioner unit like a
Tibetan rain drum.
We might not use precise words to describe rain, but there seems to be a shared understanding in Hawaii that rain isn’t just rain, that it comes in many forms, so that when you hear it might rain, you wonder, “OK, but what kind?”
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
