It is an early summer morning. The air is still and my left knee is barking. The air temperature has dropped about 10 degrees from the triple-digits we saw this time yesterday. There’s gunna be weather. The TV is on in the background screaming about raised fists and tickets and conventions, but my eyes are on the sky. There’s gunna be weather.
For years, in an earlier version of me, I was in charge of five baseball fields. From March to October, these five plots of land were mine to prepare, drag, chalk, and clean up. Well, I worked for my dad who had the delegation power of the United Nations. He would sit on the four-wheeler and bark out commands. “That chalk line is pretty crooked.” “You missed that candy wrapper over there.” “Better hurry, that game starts in a few hours.”
As an early 20-something, I took delegation like a challenge to avoid. That chalk line is pretty crooked only meant that I’d use my toe to scuff up the crooked spot, not re-do the whole line. Missing a single candy-wrapper only meant that I’d pick it up tomorrow. Hurrying up only meant ejecting the extra stuff to do the bare minimum to get ready. I was a master at, what we’ll call, “teenage efficiency.”
But the real ruler of the park was my dad – especially when it came to summer storms. During the great flood of 1993, when nearly all of Riverside ended up a part of the Missouri River, dad was the last one to relent. “I think the river is gunna go down,” he said as he began sourcing a boat and a canoe to pick up a popcorn machine that had floated out of the concession stand. That whole summer was one episode after another of rain that came down “like a cow pissin’ on a flat rock,” per my dad.
However, save the great flood, where it rained almost the entire month of June, dad had an uncanny way of sensing when it was going to rain and when it wasn’t. He was the rain king.
It was the early days of easily accessible radar – at least on cable television. This allowed my dad to run home to chew on a few more cigarettes while he checked radar. In the meantime, I’d be sweeping out dugouts and mowing the outfield in the 95 degree sauna. But you could tell, there’s gunna be weather. The clouds would billow off to the west and my early 20-something brain began to throttle down. “There’s no way we play tonight,” I thought to myself. Then I’d see Ed’s truck heading into the parking lot. “Why did you slow up? We’re playing tonight.”
“Bull,” I said. There’s not a chance. “It’s gunna go around us.”
Sure enough, through the great spirits of the Tonganoxie split and whatever other ju-ju he had up his sleeve, three hours later, there was baseball at Water Well Park. Forget the Lezaks and the Busbys and all the double-triple-dopplars and the warning systems.
I think about it every time I pull up a radar and it looks like a storm is imminent. Have plans for a doubleheader? Better double check with dad. And, more often than not, the rain king would say, “Play Ball.”
He knew. There’s gunna be weather – just not here.
(Get weather and ball talk from Chris Kamler on Twitter, where you can find him as @TheFakeNed)
