Outside magazine, December 1997

El Niño Has a Headache

He's not simply an omnipotent and recurring global weather pattern. He's anger and angst, caprice and compassion, fury and fun. And he wants to be understood.
By David Rakoff

"Mr. Niño's gonna be late ... headache," says one of his functionaries, a compact squall of warm Gulf Coast rain who blew in to tell me this and disappeared just as quickly. I'm sitting in the Bar Marmont, drinking one of the blueberry vodka infusions for which the bar is deservedly famous — blueberries whose extra-mild New England winter resulted, in large part, from the efforts of my delayed interviewee.

Indeed, the entire bar is permeated with El Niño's influence. The grain bases of the spirits, the Costa Rican hardwood marquetry, the bamboo of the basket holding my shrimp dumplings (ordered since they were out of the gravlax, because of the dearth of Pacific salmon), even the windswept hair of my suspiciously thin, pillow-lipped, neurasthenic waitress can be traced back to him.

No wonder El Niño has a headache. On his third worldwide tour this decade alone, he has become Chairman of the Board of the climate trade. His global reach has transcended his rather modest beginnings as a meteorological bit player to the point where nowadays, when people say "weather," what they mean is El Niño.

"Niño," says Hollywood mogul and ëminence grise Lew Wasserman (who pronounces Niño's name to rhyme with "Reno"), "is a force of nature. He's responsible for everything. Literally. Your opening weekend grosses bottom out because of unexpectedly nice weather? Nino. A plane goes down in Southeast Asia because of brush fires caused by years-long drought? Nino."