Raindrops fill puddles in Baker City on the morning of July 21, 2025. (Jayson Jacoby/Baker City Herald)

I woke around dawn to the rhythm of rain tapping the elderberry that brushes my bedroom window, and I lingered beneath the covers, enjoying the liquid melody for a few extra moments and relishing the cool and aromatic breeze through the screen.

Such a serenade is quite unusual in July — this was the 21st.

Rarer still is July rain which arrives without the accompanying cacophony of thunder and lightning.

This was no brief dousing.

It was nearly noon before I saw a wedge of blue sky to the west, although the Elkhorns were still veiled by cloud.

Weather is the eternal curiosity, of course, and when we speak of it we tend to accentuate what we perceive to be anomalies.

Sometimes, though, the perception is reality.

The storm that made the morning of the 21st so moist was the second in 17 days. A similar tempest dampened Independence Day. On both days the rainfall total at the Baker City Airport surpassed a third of an inch, a significant amount hereabouts in any season, but especially so during July, when the average for the duration of the 31 days is just half an inch.

Both days conferred noteworthy benefits.

After the most parched spring since World War II, the map depicting drought, a blank slate through the winter, has taken on splotches of color, as though a precocious toddler with burgeoning artistic talent had taken to it with a set of felt markers.

This pair of July soakers isn’t likely to dramatically change the county’s drought rating. But they surely laid the dust for a few days and softened the rangeland grasses that had been baking.

The rain will temper too the risk of wildfire, a particularly welcome respite in this summer after the terrible blazes of 2024.

And although I appreciate these intervals for nourishing our lawn and flowers, I relish it even more for its effect on the temperature.

On both the 4th and the 21st we had no need to turn on the air conditioning — a boon to our budget as well as our fevered brows.

I find each of our four distinct seasons pleasant in their ways, can accept the 10-below morning in January with the same sense of awe as a triple-digit August afternoon when the breeze feels as though it were expelled from a steel forge.

But a stretch of hot weather, if it persists for more than four or five days, induces a sense of lassitude and, often as not, a headache that resists over-the-counter analgesics. I find heat waves more taxing than cold spells, if only because our furnace is quieter than our air conditioners.

And because the furnace’s exhalations can be aided by a thick blanket, a decidedly ineffective tactic in July.

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I was waiting on a recent afternoon for a freight train, one of considerable length but placid pace, and I noticed that nearly all of the several dozen cars bore the work of graffitists.

This was hardly a revelation, of course.

A great number of trains squeak and rumble and whistle through Baker City most days, and the illicit application of paint on their metal flanks are conspicuous.

Surely it is not a coincidence that the taggers — a pungent term I quite like — prefer the sorts of gaudy shades typical of children’s toys and dye-laden breakfast cereals.

Generally when I’m delayed by a train I look at anything but the train — I have on occasion rifled through the car’s owner’s manual to make sure I’m conversant with spark plug replacement intervals and other vital matters.

If I try to focus for more than a few seconds on the cars rushing past I feel a trifle queasy, and my stomach suggests I stop lest I get a chance to see what changes the gastric juices have wrought on my last meal.

But this freight, as I mentioned, was dawdling along, as though out for a stroll on the sunny and hot afternoon, and I could examine the taggers’ handiwork without even a gentle admonition from my digestive system.

The graffiti were eclectic.

Some consisted of a series of squiggles that resembled letters but which I was unable to decipher.

But several seemed to me — admittedly I know nothing of art — creations that bear obvious evidence of a considerable talent.

One depicted the late NBA star Kobe Bryant, clad in his L.A. Lakers jersey, with a realism that struck me as nearly photographic in the fealty of its detail. I could imagine this rendering, in larger scale, as a mural on the outside wall of the Lakers’ arena.

Given the ubiquity of the graffiti, I presume Union Pacific doesn’t expend much effort to dissuade the taggers. And certainly the paint doesn’t affect the solidity of the freight cars (and well that this is so, considering the lethality of some substances that travel by rail).

Yet it seems to me that there are much more appropriate venues for these anonymous artists than someone else’s property.

A gallery, for instance.

Which would be more lucrative, too.

So far as I know, Union Pacific isn’t taking bids.

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