OK, OK, Mother Nature, you win.
Stop, just stop, already.
What a bizarre April this has been. It’s almost as if the climate is changing or something.
On Saturday, we expected to cover a Port Angeles baseball game. Looking out the window at 10 a.m. and seeing sleet and freezing rain — at sea level on April 16 — we knew there would be no baseball.
So, no problem, there was still a Port Angeles soccer game scheduled at Peninsula College. We made arrangements to cover that game. I even saw a Bremerton bus drive by my place on its way to the college.
I showed up at Wally Sigmar Field at 1 p.m. Saturday …
… and found 3 inches of slush on the field.
As people pointed out to me later, they play soccer in the snow all the time. Yeah, not this stuff. This wasn’t fluffy, normal snow full of air pockets. This was some weird hybrid of hail and popcorn snow.
I dropped by Civic Field to see if the game might have been moved there at the last minute. No game there.
The poor Bremerton kids came all this way, too, only to turn around. I later learned they survived an absolute nightmare of slush on the road at the Morse Creek S curves.
I believe there were some girls’ soccer matches snowed out in November a few years ago, but soccer snowed out in April. That was a first. Soccer is one of those sports like football in which they play in virtually any kind of nasty, brutal weather. We still talk in the office about a girls’ soccer playoff game in November a few years ago that was so cold that my feet remained numb for two days. I bundled up everywhere but my feet. One pair of wool socks was not enough.
That was straight-up the coldest sporting event I ever covered. As cold as it was, they still played.
So to have weather so foul in April that no sport could be played other than the OAT run — and those people are a bit extreme running 50k in the first place — is something to remember. I’ve seen it all on the Olympic Peninsula now.
I have family visiting in June. Some of them have never been to the Olympic Peninsula. I’m already warning them that with the April dump of snow this year, they might just be hanging out in the parking lot at Hurricane Ridge.
One of the things I look forward to in spring is no longer having to deal with the weather. We’ve had some springs in which not a single baseball or softball game got played in all of March. This year, April has been the interesting month so far.
I made a joke above about climate change, but we’re entering a time of year in which it has stopped being a joke — summer. It’s been less than a year since that horrific heat wave last June. When Port Angeles was the coolest place in the entire Pacific Northwest at 100 degrees. Let’s hope we never see anything like that ever again.
But, we will likely continue to see smoke events, utterly unheard of when I lived in the San Juan Islands for eight years in the 1990s. It really dawned on me this week that we actually expect to have some smoke in the summer now.
Times have changed. It’s still not too late to turn the clock back to more normal smokefree summers.
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Sports Editor Pierre LaBossiere can be contacted at plabossiere@peninsuladailynews.com.
