Opinion: As rain falls, take advice of Hank Williams Jr.

When I was a kid, I thought it was ridiculous that all the adults around me were so concerned about the weather. I found humor in the knowledge that so many people were so concerned about something they had absolutely no control over.

I realized, of course, that many of the adults I knew in Wessington Springs and then in Kimball were directly or indirectly involved in agriculture, and because of that, they had a very good reason to be weather-watchers. But even farmers can’t control what falls from the sky. So why worry?

My youthful attitude about the weather was summed up well in the lyrics of a Hank Williams Jr. song from that era: “If it will, it will, and if it won’t, it won’t.”

As is the case with so many of the smug notions we harbor as children, my thoughts about the weather changed dramatically when I became an adult.

These days, every raindrop that falls beyond an inch or two puts visions of a flooded basement in my head. Every bit of winter ice that forms on the roads makes me anxious about my wife and children traveling somewhere in a car. Even the tiniest particles of hail make me fearful of a damaged roof.

The responsibilities that come with adulthood will do that to you. When you acquire a house, cars and children, they can quickly transform you into a sniveling, overanxious worrywart. You find yourself living in fear of every calamity that could befall your family and property.

In South Dakota and elsewhere on the Great Plains, we’re especially prone to that kind of debilitating worry. Not only does our ag-based economy depend hugely upon the weather, but our weather is also more volatile than most other places in the country. Out here in the nation’s vast midsection, storms can roll up in an instant, temperatures can swing wildly up and down in minutes, and a simple trip for work or play can turn into a life-or-death situation with little or no advance notice.

For those of us in the journalism business, the worry is compounded by the responsibility that comes with chronicling the news of the day. We worry not only about the weather’s impact on us, but also about the impact on our readers, and about the speed with which we need to report on that impact in order to avoid getting scooped.

Saturday, I received a phone call at home every hour or so from people tipping me about water over a road, water approaching somebody’s house, water this, water that. I passed each tip along to our weekend reporter, and I worried about whether we were covering everything that needed covering.

Between those phone calls, I was running downstairs every so often to check my sump pump. It sounded all day as though somebody was standing over the sump hole with a hose running at a trickle, but the pump faithfully performed its duty. Still, I worried.

Amid all that angst, I thought about my childhood attitude toward the weather. The words of that old Hank Williams Jr. song came back to me.

“If it will, it will, and if it won’t, it won’t;

“If it does, it does, yeah if it don’t it don’t;

“Some days are good some bad you know;

“That’s the way it goes.”

Maybe I had the right idea as a kid. Maybe it’s silly to spend so much time worrying about something you can’t control. After all, what can I do about the weather? Absolutely nothing.

But I can check my sump pump. I can check the forecast. I can send reporters here and there to get the story. And I should do all of those things, because that’s what responsible adults do.

So I guess I can’t return completely to the blissful detachment of my youth, but I can try to focus on the few things over which I have power and stop worrying about the things that are out of my hands. That sentiment probably isn’t much help to the people in our readership area who are dealing with wet basements, washed-out roads and mushy fields from nearly 7 inches of rain in four days’ time, but it’s something to consider.

As Hank Williams Jr. sang,

“You know the river’s gonna flow, wherever it wants to go;

“And if the rain wants to fall, you can’t stop it at all;

“No one has ever had control over this world, don’t you know?”

Tags: seth tupper, opinion