This episode of the Outside Podcast is brought to you by the North Face and its brand new Apex Flex GTX

a Gorex jacket so comfortable and well designed that you'll want it to rain.

And in that spirit we're profiling people who really love the rain. And in that spirit, we're profiling people who really love the rain for really interesting reasons.

Today it's John Hull, a college professor in the UK who, when he started going blind in 1983 began

recording an audio diary about what that was like. John's appreciation for the

rain came out of the fact that as he went blind, if something was silent, it disappeared.

His mental picture of the world was physically empty much of the time,

but rain falls on everything and rain drops make noise.

Suddenly he could hear leaves on the trees, the roof of the shed out back, the difference

between the stone pathway and the grass. The pitter-Patter filled in the world around him.

Here's a passage from John's diary.

Ryan brings out the contours of what's around you in that it introduces a continuous

blanket of differentiated and specialized sound, uninterrupted.

The usual reaction to the rain is to let it shut you in and limit your world.

For John Hull, the rain made the world more real, more present.

Sometimes he wrote, he wished it could rain inside.

The book based on John Hole's diary is called Touching the Rock.

And there's a new documentary about it called Notes on Blindness.

Thanks to the North Face for letting us tell this tiny story.

You really should check out their new jacket, the Apex Flex GTX.

It's an ultra soft, impossibly dry Gore-Tec soft shell,

and it might very well make you look at the rain differently.

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