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I have the text:

She drove slowly on the narrow road. Her car dipped and rocked through washed-out sections, though I couldn't remember rains hard enough to cause all the damage.

I can't understand fully what the text in bold is meaning, because of ambiguity of sense in my brains. Can you tell me which is correct?

1) rains were hard enough to cause all the damage.

2) any hard enough rains causing all the damage.

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  • It is rather oddly expressed. The narrator couldn't remember any recent rainstorms hard enough to cause such damage to the road.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Nov 12, 2019 at 16:31
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    It's a relative clause reduced by Whiz-deletion: I couldn't remember rains which were hard enough to cause all the damage.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Nov 12, 2019 at 17:10
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    I think this question belongs on English Language Learners. But I would just say that stereotypically we Brits speak of little else apart from the weather, so my opinion on "idiomacy" here should count for something. And in the cited context, I'd always expect singular rain (to me, plural rains implies a reference to the monsoon season in the Far East, which I think isn't relevant to the US-based narrative context here).
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Nov 12, 2019 at 17:34
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    @FumbleFingers - I've seen rains (plural) used in AmE to indicate multiple instances - semantically, it would be equivalent to rainstorms - "...I couldn't remember rain[storm]s hard enough to cause all the damage."
    – Jeff Zeitlin
    Commented Nov 12, 2019 at 17:40
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    @FF I'm not unhappy with the plural usage here; it's literary, and is fine to my mind for 'bouts of rain'.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Nov 12, 2019 at 17:46

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though I couldn't remember rains hard enough to cause all the damage.

"Rains" here is not a verb but rather a noun. A "rain" is a noticeable event of precipitation. So the writer could not remember events of rainfall that were severe enough to wash out places in the road (which was presumably constructed of gravel or dirt).

I've seen some rains here in southern Minnesota this summer which severely rutted gravel driveways (and probably some rural gravel roads).

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