It fell from on high, hit me right on the top of the head, splat. Damn geese. Damn Victoria. Anywhere else they'd solve this airborne infestation with a couple of shotguns, but here it takes five years of study, four years of protest and three of palliative care.
"It was a rain drop," she said.
"Pardon?"
"It wasn't a goose letting loose. It was rain."
Rain? If the word rang a bell, it did so only faintly - an echo from the past, like pogs, or Tammy Faye Bakker, or Toronto making the playoffs. It was hard to remember the last time the skies opened here in the City of Gasping Gardens.
But she was right. Plop, plop, plop. It was raining. I gaped upward.
"You know turkeys drown when they do that, right?"
This was Thursday. Prior to that it hadn't rained - umbrella rained - in Victoria since April 24. After that came the driest May on record, just two millimetres all month, compared to the normal 38.
June is heading for a record, too, with forecasters seeing no more wetness on the horizon leading into our two driest months, July and August.
Compounding our drought is the lack of snowpack. Vancouver Island actually saw close to the usual amount of precipitation this winter, but because it was so warm - three degrees above average, which is a lot - it all fell as rain, not snow, and ran straight downhill and into the chuck. There's nothing left up top to feed the rivers and streams over the summer.
"It's pretty significant and exceptional," says Environment Canada meteorologist Matt MacDonald, describing the dry spell. He was on the phone from Vancouver, but had to break away to join a conference call of agencies worrying about the drought.
The potential implications are ghastly: drinking sources drying up, crops failing, fish habitat gone, forest fires raging, skinny yoga girls falling down cracks in the earth while wexting (walking and texting), never to be seen again. Picture a plague of locusts darkening the sky as desiccated marijuana plants tumbleweed across the parched desolation of once-vibrant grow-ops.
Meanwhile, analysis shows Vancouver Island's glaciers shrank by 20 per cent between 1985 and 2005. "Most glaciers on the Island will be gone by 2050, even under the best-case scenario," says Brian Menounos, a professor of Earth sciences at the University of Northern B.C.
As the freezing level rises, as it is expected to do by another 50 to 250 metres, the glaciers disappear. "They're all essentially doomed," Menounos said Friday. Not that glaciers give Vancouver Island much drinking water, but it's an indication of what's happening high up.
You would think all this would have Victorians freaking out, digging backyard cisterns/survivalist bunkers in anticipation of the dystopian Mad Max water war to come.
But no, no, no, we love our drought, because A) the strawberries are AWESOME this year, B) you can sit on the deck without lighting a burn barrel for warmth and C), as Bill Cleverley pointed out in Thursday's Victoria Times Colonist, our reservoir holds two years worth of water and this is only year one.
So we continue to pour water down the drain like sewage-treatment funding. We soak our lawns, soak our driveways, shower three times a day and flush twice for good luck. A camel can survive two weeks on what you use while brushing your teeth. Our profligacy might catch up to us eventually, but not today.
This is the same approach we take to climate change: Ignore it until the waves are lapping over the legislature lawn.
The conspiracy theorists think Big Oil and Big Stephen have manipulated the media into not sounding a continuous alarm about the climate change threat, but as I explained to Conrad Black while we were playing cognac pong at the Bilderberg Group picnic recently, people just tune you out if you yell "Fire!" every day.
Climate change is like death: It's looming, it's inevitable, and it's too big and scary to think about while waiting, so we might as well watch the Canucks or The Bachelor instead.
Unless you're Pope Francis. "Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain," he declared last week. He described a crisis that is not only coming, but here. His encyclical was a scalding condemnation of what mankind has done: "The Earth, our home, is beginning to look like an immense pile of filth."
Don't look up. The sky is falling.
