Rainy days in the mining camp are cherished memories and I suspect they are so for many of my contemporaries. Put another way, rainy days did not get me down. (Although, every once in a while, Mondays did.)

Of course, the rains I witnessed in Hurricanes Donna, Cleo, Maria, and others were extraordinary and Texas rains that come with some spring seasons are dangerously intense. Nevertheless, the curtains of water that fell during every rainy season in El Pao made a lifelong impression on the memory banks of my childhood (Memory).

The rainy season ran roughly from May through November, with crashing rains especially concentrated in June, July, and August, which overwhelmed more than half the days of the month. I’ve been told that El Pao’s rainy season more or less paralleled that of South Vietnam’s monsoon season. If so, that explains how landscape photos or films of that part of Venezuela can be easily confused with similar scenes of Southeast Asia.

For example, after watching The Ugly American, my father’s first comment was how much the landscape in the movie looked like our area of Venezuela. Of course, this was a Hollywood film; however, Thailand landscape around Bangkok provided the background sceneries and some scenes were actually shot there, because they very much looked like South Vietnam.

A former colleague had served in the Vietnam War and when he visited our property in Puerto Rico, which looks like the regions around El Pao, he walked to the edge of our ridge and stood silently for several minutes. Later, as we drove back to town, he merely said, “This looks like South Vietnam.” 

This might explain why I became so attracted to Singapore whenever I visited on business less than a decade ago. Unlike southern Vietnam and El Pao, Singapore has two monsoon seasons. One of them runs from June to September, which is roughly parallel to El Pao’s. The rains, her lush, abundant jungle foliage, the green which predominates, and the tropical climate surely were major factors for my remembering my visits there with fondness.

Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, Puerto Rico, El Pao. In my child’s memory, I do not think of war and devastation. Just rains and green and beauty.