I had not pondered the benefits of equipping my lawnmower with shock absorbers until spring came to Baker County, as dry and blustery as a black-and-white photo of the Oklahoma Panhandle in the early 1930s.

This epiphany happened on an afternoon in early May.

I was pushing the mower on the north side of my house when the plastic wheels rolled over a particularly rough patch that left the nerves in my forearms tingling, as though I had banged both elbows simultaneously on an unyielding object.

I let up on the bar to kill the electric motor that spins the blade.

(I replaced my faithful mower, powered by a Briggs & Stratton gas engine that I suspect could run for years without an ounce of oil, with an electric model two years ago. I wish only that I had made the swap sooner. The mower powered by kilowatts rather than petroleum is lighter and quieter, and capable of trimming my modest 9,000-square-foot lot without depleting the battery even by half.)

I knelt beside the mower’s plastic deck, searching for obstacles.

I wondered if, after nearly 30 years on the place, I had at last been infested by gophers.

But I quickly realized the culprit was weather, not burrowing rodents.

The ground was nearly as hard as blacktop.

The grass, which was greening nicely despite the scarcity of rain, offered about as much cushion as a pair of worn out flip-flops that had been left too long in the sun.

I pined for precipitation.

I felt a trifle guilty about this yearning.

My daughter, Olivia, plays tennis, and like the other spring sports, all of which happen outdoors, tennis is ill-suited for moist conditions.

I can empathize.

I was a light-hitting second baseman in my high school days and I can recall, with unusual clarity for events nearly four decades in the past, the uniquely unpleasant gritty feeling of a baseball that slogged through a mud bog on its way across the infield to my waiting glove.

Still and all, I’ve become increasingly displeased with the weather as we pass two months without anything but an occasional smattering of rain that barely laid the dust.

We get plenty of that in our arid valley during the summer. I treat its early arrival with the same disdain I have for snow flurries in September, or a mosquito in March.

The rain gauge at the Baker City Airport tells the dismal tale.

After four straight months that were wetter than usual (a relative term, to be sure, in a place where the annual average is a desert-adjacent 10 inches or so) — November, December, January and February — the spigot in the sky has turned stingy.

March wasn’t abnormally desiccated. The monthly total at the airport was 0.68 of an inch, compared with an average (dating to 1943) of 0.78.

April, by comparison, was pathetic.

Its total of 0.19 of an inch — little more than a moderate rainfall over a few hours — was the least in April since 1977 and less than a quarter of the average of 0.80.

May has been worse still so far.

Through 13 days (and with no rain forecast through the 15th), the airport gauge has collected just 0.04 of an inch.

May is supposed to be soggy — or as close to soggy as it’s likely to get here, deep in the double rain shadow of the Elkhorns and the Cascades.

The average rainfall for the month at the airport is 1.43 inches. Only June, with an average of 1.24 inches, comes relatively close. Those are the only two months with an average of more than 1 inch.

But the concrete consistency of my soil isn’t due solely to a lack of moisture.

Its cohort — what might be called a henchman in a 1940s detective story — is the wind.

The air, like a rambunctious toddler, has rarely been still this spring.

I was talking the other day with Mark Ward, whose family has been growing crops in Baker Valley for well over a century. He said he’s never seen the like the spring wind the past few years.

Wind data aren’t collected as reliably, and thoroughly, as temperatures and precipitation, so long-term comparisons aren’t possible.

But the dust clouds whipped from fallow fields is pretty convincing evidence.

I would submit as my exhibits the dozens of willow limbs strewn across my yard every time the spring northern settles in, whistling in the eaves, an atonal hum that induces a headache if I’m subjected to it for more than an hour or two.

The snow, fortunately, is lingering in the high mountains, and the streams flowing well.

Drought has not yet returned, at least officially.

But time is short. Once July comes the chance of a good soaking will be limited, like as not, to the vagaries of thunderstorms, whose puddle-making paths can be neither predicted nor relied on.

I was counting on a storm earlier this week to soften the ground and smooth the passage of the lawnmower wheels.

But the showers mainly veered off, in the manner of a rock promontory diverting the flow of a stream.

Lacking the mechanical skills to fabricate shock absorbers for my mower, I anticipate a bumpy summer ahead.

I might have to don my thickest pair of gloves, sacrificing sweat to spare my nerves.

Jayson Jacoby is the editor of the Baker City Herald. Contact him at 541-518-2088 or jayson.jacoby @bakercityherald.com.