In Iowa: It the wettest of times

Certain years stand out in memory not because of weddings, births, deaths or graduations but because of the weather.

Whether it's my peculiar outlook or a more common human tendency, the generally pleasant years - there must have been some - tend to fade and blur while the extremes of deep snow, drought and flood remain vivid.

My late father always talked about the bitter winter and torrid summer of 1936, which to this day sets the Iowa standard for drought, and the Armistice Day blizzard of 1940, which killed scores of unsuspecting duck hunters and lengthened Dad's arms in a daylong effort to capture and carry to safety 400 full-grown turkeys that didn't know enough to come in out of the lethal storm.

While those events were before my time, I have survived seven of the state's 10 snowiest winters and endured several of its most destructive droughts and floods.

I had just turned 13 at the outset of Iowa's snowiest winter (59 inches in 1961-62) and made what seemed like a lot of money repeatedly shoveling Quasqueton merchants' sidewalks at 25 cents a pop.

My lasting impressions of the state's fifth- and sixth-snowiest winters (1978-79, 49.3 inches and 1974-75, 49.2 inches) involve being stuck in drifts, with dissolving confidence in four-wheel-drive technology, in places where a pickup was never intended to go.

My indelible images from Iowa's seventh-snowiest winter (2000-01, 45.8 inches), when more than 25 inches fell in December alone, is of white-knuckle drives on icy blacktops and benumbed, starving pheasants waiting to die of exposure or predation on an ice-glazed expanse of white.

Droughts escaped my notice until 1988 and '89, when back-to-back hot dry summers withered crops and compelled me, in response to my wife's worries that our well would run dry, to haul nightly pickup loads of nutrient-rich water from the Wapsipinicon to keep my tomatoes flourishing.

By 2012, which was equally hot and dry, her dry well fears had been relieved by a hookup to rural water, and I was free to drain the well to water my garden.

As a Gazette reporter, I am practiced in coverage of floods, which dominated the news in 1993, the state's wettest year in 143 years with 48.22 inches of precipitation, and in 2008, the state's fifth-wettest year, when June deluges sent nine Iowa rivers to record crests and caused more than $5 billion in damage in Cedar Rapids alone.

When I recall 1999, the Volga River flood that washed Littleport off the map comes to mind. In 2004, it was the Volga flood that liquidated Elkport, and in 2010, the state's second-wettest year, it was the dam breaching that drained Lake Delhi.

Closer to home, when I think of 2013, which featured the wettest spring in the annals of Iowa weather, I recall geysers shooting up from cracks in my basement floor, threatening tons of stuff too good to throw away but which, if deposited on the street on the eve of the city's cleanup day, would have all still been there a day later, rejected in total by the potential salvagers patrolling the town in pickups.

Which brings us to the recently departed 2015, Iowa's seventh-wettest year with a statewide average of 43.18 inches of precipitation - more than 8 inches above normal.

Notwithstanding that high ranking, last year's precipitation was so evenly distributed among the months that it contributed to record corn and soybean crops and little widespread flooding.

Last month, with a statewide average of 5.04 inches of precipitation, was Iowa's wettest December, exceeding the normal December total by 3.7 inches. With an average temperature of 33.1 degrees, 10.2 degrees warmer than a normal December, it also was the state's seventh warmest December.

Many Iowa farmers will no doubt recall 2015 as that rare year when their crops grew to maturity without the stress of too much or too little rain.

But for me, 2015, colored by its uncommon late-year combination of warmth and wetness, always will be the year of grass so green you could have, if you were the kind of person who does things just to say you did them, mowed it the day before Christmas.