“Sucker hole” is the inelegant term that Southeast Alaska fisherman use to describe a temporary lull in a life- or investment-threatening storm. In this case, the “sucker” would see the blue sky, load up his creaky old troller to the limit with bait and gear, head out to the fishing grounds and fill his holds to overflowing, only to run into serious trouble when the storm comes shrieking back like an extended family of harpies. Improved weather prediction technology has helped reduce this risk, but still, you wouldn’t be a Southeast Alaska fisherman if you weren’t a lot of stubborn and a little bit of desperate.

But what about us landlubbers, who see that sucker hole and cluck our tongues wisely while staying indoors? Maybe, for those of us whose lives and livelihood are not at risk, there is another way to be a sucker. We first-worlders have an unfortunate habit of considering a minor inconvenience to be a threat to life and limb, and the thought of gearing up to go outside, when it might start raining cats and dogs the moment one reaches aphelion on one’s walk circuit, can bring on an episode of crippling lethargy.

Maybe it all comes down to rain pants.

Allow me a digression in the way of exposition. I have lived mostly in blue jeans since the early 1970’s, probably as a direct result of being obliged to dress like a “young lady” in elementary and middle school. Everybody, including me, knows that denim is fine when dry but utterly wretched when wet, but at the time I couldn’t risk wearing wool pants outdoors because they might make me look fat. Jeans it was, rain or shine.

My sister Laura recently reminded me of that camping trip we took up Big Devil’s Stairs in the Blue Ridge Mountains sometime in the mid-seventies. She may have had some suitable clothing for the trip, but I stubbornly showed up in blue jeans and a rain jacket. We hiked all day in the pouring rain. That night after we set up the tent, I was so cold and wet that I stripped off my jeans and crawled into my sleeping bag in my underwear, which were also wet. I could have at least laid my pants flat in hopes that they would dry out, but no, I hurled them in a sopping wet pile in the corner of the tent.

Laura may have tried to warn me, but I was probably too busy rooting around in her backpack for the last carob bar to listen.

Anyway, the next morning, my jeans were frozen into an icy ball, and I had to hold them by the belt loops and slam them over and over against a tree before I could even think about putting them on.

Ah, rain pants. Imagine what a lovely time of it I would have had on that camping trip, had I only had something to slip over my jeans to keep them dry. . .Laura would have had a better time too, no doubt, because I would have done a great deal less whining.

So here’s the thing. A so-called sucker hole might be something to be treated with caution by fishermen, but as a call to action by the rest of us who live with copious rain. I have trained myself to hang my rain gear, including the pants, near the door, where I can find it. It takes me about twelve seconds to put it all on, and besides keeping me dry I think it makes me look really cool. So let’s do it. Last one out is a rotten egg.