Dear Lorraine,
I just stumbled upon your rainwear club web site and wow, I'm impressed! I've been on the net for a long time and known that there were other rubber rainwear enthusiasts out there, but this is the first I've seen such a concentration of them in one place on the net. Let me share with you and your readers my own history.
Ever since I was a small child I've been fascinated by rain slickers, the sort made from rubberised fabric and having an attached hood. Like all fetishes I think, this fetish of mine relates fundamentally to a preoccupation with control. In the United States in the late 1970s when I was in primary school, children's raincoats in general were these rubberised (or vinyl) slickers. In most cases the rubber or vinyl outer side of the fabric was yellow, and the inner side blue. Girls also had the option of wearing slickers of light green rubber, though for some reason these green ones never appeared on boys. There were other colours too (beige, pink, white, black, &c., though these were much less common.) The girls' slickers also sometimes came with a print pattern on the inside, often of some water-related graphic such as a little spouting whale or a little frog.
When I was just starting school I was very shy and very nervous, and didn't much want to be noticed. This bright yellow, very *visible* raincoat that my mum made me wear was, of course, anathema. Though I couldn't articulate my feelings about it at the time, in retrospect it seems that I felt the raincoat was an extension of my mother's power over me. On the one hand I resented it because it had been imposed on me by force of will, but on the other hand I was perhaps grateful for it since its imposition on me protected me from having to be myself: it protected me from the unpredictable and anxiety-laden social world just as it protected me from the rain. Under that waterproof layer, with the familiar scent of damp and rubber, I felt comforted and safe from the world, as if I were in my mother's arms. (I also have a fetish for uniforms, which seems to stem from the same psychodynamics.)
The students in year six of the primary school that I attended were eligible to become `safety patrols,' students who guarded the street crossings near the school and who would ensure that all of the students walking to and from the school crossed with the signals and so forth. This distinction was coveted since the safety patrols were dismissed from school a few minutes early and, probably more significantly, the safety patrols had the authority to lord it over the other children. The programme was sponsored by the American Automobile Association, and each safety patrol was issued an orange belt with a shoulder strap, on which was pinned a shiny metal badge bearing the initials `AAA'. Of course, when it was raining the safety patrols wore rain slickers; they couldn't have used umbrellas since they needed to keep their arms free to signal when to cross the street. The orange belt was worn on the outside of the slicker, since that was the only way that it would be visible. A girl in my class, Alison, was a safety patrol, and I remember dallying on my way down the street so that I would arrive just as the signal turned and could wait and watch the raindrops bouncing off her green slicker and soaking the fabric of her patrol belt. Though I was still too young to comprehend why, I was thrilled to be given orders by her, in her badge and her drenched belt, the rain pounding down on both of us, insulated and safe beneath our layers of rubber.
Over the years of primary school I would periodically outgrow raincoats and my mum would buy me new ones. It was about the time that I began secondary school, I think -- 1982 -- that the traditional yellow rubberised slicker began to become scarce in shops. I think that the last one that I ever owned as a child was purchased that year. It was oversized so that I could grow into it, but still, by the end of my school years it was rather small and the worse for wear. I took it to university with me and kept it till the year after university -- that would be 1991 -- when it was lost when my luggage came open on an airplane flight.
During my years as a postgraduate student I periodically haunted shops and catalogues, looking for any establishment that might deal in traditional, rubberised fabric slickers. Some came close, but none were right - they were either cheap plastic instead of rubberised fabric, or proper winter coats with thick linings that happened to have a water-resistant layer on the outside, or simply water-resistant fabric instead of rubber. (The thick linings don't work for me, since they prevent my feeling the cool heaviness of the rubberised fabric against my skin.) I spent countless hours on this quest.
Finally, in 1996, a good friend of mine who is one of the few people to whom I've confided this interest spied exactly what I needed, in an Army-Navy store in Massachusetts. (Yeah, okay, I'm now confiding this interest to you and countless readers of your web site, but to you I'm just an email address.) It was a knee-length slicker manufactured by Charles River Apparel, made of blue polyester and cotton fabric with yellow rubber on the outside, and blue stitching. I still have this raincoat, though after several years of regular use (I commute by cycle in all sorts of weather) the seams at the hood and shoulders began to leak and the fabric began to separate from the rubber. Charles River Apparel do not sell directly to the public, and I was never again able to find a shop that sold their slickers in adult sizes. In 2001, though, I found a shop on the web, who actually specialise in rainwear and sell a similar product manufactured by Acadia.
I'd be interested to know of any groups, formal or informal, on either side of the Atlantic (I spend time in both Cambridges), that include young people who share this sort of interest. I hate the noise and shallowness of the club scene. It would be so nice actually to be face-to-face with people who *understand*, and who feel similarly.
Feel free to publish this letter, and the following email address (I don't use it for anything else):
watershed AT mit DOT edu
(The AT and the DOT are just to avoid its being picked up by spammers when it's posted on the web.)
