The rain arrives shortly after we do.
For days it falls, off and on, the sky clouding up, the water falling and then it stops, the sun appears between the large black clouds that still linger, before the clouds come together again and the rain starts once more.
Montreal is wet and hot.
You don’t think about rain until you don’t have it.
In Montreal, you are more likely to go a month where it rains almost every day than to go a month without rain.
Any day of the year, it could rain.
We have more water than we know what to do with. It spills out everywhere. There is a steady drip from the kitchen sink, no one has thought to fix it. In Montreal, water is free, how could you put a price on something so abundant?
Even Winnipeg, a dry city, especially in winter, is never really short of water. Your sheets are staticy, the dry air, electric heat and sealed houses get to you, in a way, but your hair does not get so thick with static that it clicks like an electric fence when you run your hand through it.
Joburg is a dry city.
We have had more rain in Montreal in the first five days after we return than I have seen in months.
When it rains in Joburg, on those rare occasions, the sky goes black and it dumps the rain quickly.
Here it keeps going.
In the long term. Joburg is more water insecure than Cape Town. Cape Town’s water problems are famous. The city nearly ran out. Rich and poor alike were forced to line up to draw water from public taps. The rich had to stop watering their gardens and filling their swimming pools, informal traders could no longer operate car washes.
For the wealthy, it was an inconvenience, for the poor it could mean a loss of income.
Isn’t that the way it always goes in this country?
But Cape Town gets rain. Cape Town is a wet city. Perhaps drought is more common these days on the Cape of Good Hope, but so is flooding, it is now a city of instability, not a dry city.
Up on the Witswatersrand, despite the name, water is a scarce commodity, at least in winter.
The city turns brown, yellow and orange, the grass dies out, the winter flowers are strange things out of a Doctor Seuss book. Even in the city it dusty.
The sky is blue, not a cloud, for weeks. Sometimes you feel a slight humidity in the air, cold, wet, clouds dot the sky but rarely, very rarely, does it rain, most often it just means cold weather is coming.
I hope for snow, purely for novelty purposes. It has not snowed in Joburg since 2012.
In the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains, we come across the dams, the massive reservoirs that capture water flowing down from the mountains for the city. Water that will then be pumped back uphill to the Rand more than 300 kilometers to the north. So far, so fragile.