Monsoon Season Always Wins

People who’ve never lived in the desert assume it just doesn’t rain here, and for most of the year that’s basically true, but nobody warns you about monsoon season until you’ve lived through one. Late June through September, the sky builds these towering, genuinely biblical looking storm cells out of nowhere on a clear afternoon, and within twenty minutes you can go from a hundred and five degrees and not a cloud in sight to a wall of dust rolling down the street followed by rain hard enough to flood a street that has no business flooding.

The dust part comes first, always. A haboob, if you want the actual word for it, a wall of dust sometimes a mile high that rolls in ahead of the storm and turns the sky the color of an old photograph before the rain even starts. I’ve learned to recognize the specific quality of light that means one’s coming, a kind of yellow-brown dimming that doesn’t look like anything else, and I’ve gotten decent at getting the windows shut in time. What I have never once gotten good at, in the several years I’ve lived through this now, is remembering that the power goes out.

It happens almost every summer, usually mid-game, usually at the worst possible moment. We were three factions deep into a game, past the point where anyone wants to pack it up, when the lights cut out and the ceiling fan wound down to nothing and Priya and I just sat there in the sudden quiet for a second before both reaching for our phones. No candles ready. No flashlight within reach. Every single year I tell myself I’m going to keep a small backup light source in the game room specifically for this, and every single year the first storm of the season catches me exactly as unprepared as the year before.

There’s something almost funny about how predictable my own unpreparedness is. I test systems for a living, I’m supposed to be the person who plans for the failure case, and yet an entirely predictable, calendar-scheduled weather event still manages to surprise me every July like it’s the first time I’ve ever heard of monsoon season. Priya’s stopped even being annoyed about it at this point, she just laughs and says something about how I’ll test edge cases in a rulebook for three hours but somehow never test my own house for a power outage.

The storms do pass fast, usually. Twenty minutes, sometimes forty, and then the desert smell afterward, that specific wet-creosote scent everyone who’s lived here talks about, drifts in through the window we forgot to reopen. We finish the game by phone flashlight more often than I’d like to admit.