Petoskey — Nobody carries umbrellas anymore, or at least that’s how it feels. It’s as if the anti-rain technology developed all those years ago was lost like the Library of Alexandria. We don’t know how to do it anymore.
Did the umbrella trend fade because the rain stopped? No. People, for some reason, have resigned themselves to looking like doofuses while getting unnecessarily wet as they scurry through the rain like rats on a train track.
We’ve all been there. Sitting in the car, rain pelting the windshield, looking up at the dark sky hoping that maybe it will let up in the next two minutes. We swear that it’s getting lighter. But we are late already, and we can’t wait any longer. So we jump out of the car and run through the puddles, thinking that will somehow make the whole situation better.
We pray that shaving off four seconds by sprinting through the rain will result in some drier arrival. We hope that if we get up on our toes and do some kind of half-sprint, half-hop jog we might avoid splashing too much. We hope this convoluted exercise will keep us drier as we run the gauntlet through the Meijer parking lot. We look idiotic.
We’ve all tried the other way too. The slow trudge. The resigned march.
“Perhaps I will be less sopping wet if I just trudge forward determined through the torrential downpour.”
That’s what goes through our mind as we walk down the sidewalk, with the rain soaking our hair, dripping down our foreheads, and sloshing into the bottom of our shoes. We accept our fate of drenched clothing. It appears that there is nothing we can do about the rain. Defeated and dour. Like some homeless pauper in the late 18th century, we walk along the road sullen and helpless. We don’t even have newspapers to shield us anymore.
Why do we insist on suffering like imbeciles in the rain when a perfect solution has been around for millennia? The earliest known umbrellas are found in ancient Egyptian art, dating back to 2450 B.C. They were found in ancient China and Persia too. There’s a whole canon of 19th-century European art prominently featuring umbrellas. America’s first umbrella factory—the Beehler Umbrella Factory—opened nearly 200 years ago in Baltimore.
There is no reason to be sopping wet in 2025. It’s a choice to suffer in the rain. We’ve got the technology to stay dry, and it comes in the form of a thin retractable dome sprouting from a small metal pole attached to a wooden handle.
The umbrella is elegant, or at least dignified. The aesthetics of the thing itself are pleasing to the eye. It’s especially true when looking at a large, classic umbrella. A beautiful handle, a broad black tent, and a long stem. A woman in a dress, a man in decent clothes, walking slowly in the rain. Composed, proper, an umbrella above their heads.
It’s the right tool for the job. The cure to looking like an idiot running in the rain.
“There is no bad weather, only bad clothing.” It’s an old adage, and it really is true. The rain can be annoying, but so often we make things worse than they already are. We don’t need to be sopping wet.
Believe it or not, we can even enjoy a walk in the rain, the sound of the drops on the pavement, that fresh spring smell in the air. That’s life with an umbrella. We’ve had the answer for thousands of years.
O.W. Root is a writer based in Northern Michigan, with a focus on nature, food, style, and culture. Follow him on X at @NecktieSalvage.
