Water, Water Everywhere

Friday, January 14, 2005

Page 15

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

Water, Water Everywhere

By J’AMY PACHECO

Hey, has anybody seen a guy building an ark around here?

I can’t remember the last time I saw as much rain as we’ve recently experienced in Southern California. The windshield wipers on my car are nearly worn through. In the mall a few days ago, I saw a shop owner mopping up water that had apparently overflowed the buckets under his leaking ceiling.

My shoes are thoroughly waterlogged, and my feet are permanently wrinkled from being wet. My little girl has gone through our entire supply of umbrellas, all of which have disappeared at school.

My backyard is so saturated the grass will no longer absorb water, and my lawn is now a lake. If we had a good freeze, I’d invite you all over for some ice skating.

All this rain falls into the good news-bad news category. The good news is we probably won’t have a drought this summer. While I don’t recall having witnessed this much rain falling before, I vividly remember several drought summers, when watering the lawn and washing the car became crimes. Or something like that.

Rainy weather is also good for the ground in areas like the one in which I live. After a rainy winter, my High Desert community is always filled with beautiful wildflowers that we don’t otherwise get to see.

That leads to the bad news—allergy season. Beautiful wildflowers usually mean awful allergies, and I expect to have to stock up on Kleenex and Claritin long before we get to the “g” in Spring.

Of course, that pales in comparison to the immediate bad news, which should be obvious to anybody who reads a newspaper and knows about all the people trapped in homes and vehicles by raging floodwaters and sliding mud.

The water levels have been downright scary, even in my community of tract homes. I don’t know who planned the storm drain route in my neighborhood, but they should be required to walk my block barefoot as punishment.

Just getting out of my cul-de-sac every morning requires that I cross a rushing river about four feet wide. When the rain is really coming down, I have to drive through the small pond that covers two lanes of the street, forcing me to navigate my little Toyota down the center turn lane to avoid becoming submerged.

It’s enough to make me think of buying one of those oversized pickup trucks with the enormous knobby tires, like the one my friend Lindsay drives. (Not only would it be handy in the rainy season, but it would provide me with the means for driving over other things, like small cars piloted by annoying drivers. Hmmm…)

I don’t mind a lot of rain—if I can stay home to read books and make soup. But I hate being out in it. Being cold and wet for a week at a time becomes downright wearisome.

A few days ago, I used our last umbrella to walk my daughter to her homeroom at school. It was an enormous umbrella, perfect for sheltering a mother and daughter from pelting rain on a miserably wet, windy day.

Unfortunately, big umbrellas present attractive targets for wind, and ours quickly fell victim to the gusts that whipped the rain around us. The umbrella turned completely inside out, forming a bowl that would have been ideal for collecting water, had we actually wanted any more of the wet stuff.

(Ironically, the umbrella was covered with images of Winnie-the-Pooh’s unlucky friend, Eeyore, being swept about on a blustery day. I can’t believe I didn’t see that one coming.)

A friend of mine who was transplanted here from the East Coast remarked recently that she’d heard “it never rains in Southern California.”

Apparently she missed the rest of that old Albert Hammond song in which he pointed out that “it pours, man it pours.”

And pour it does. I keep hoping the powers that be will cancel school and everything else so we can all just stay home, stay dry and read books while soup bubbles on the stove. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that is going to happen.

So I’ll buy some new umbrellas, and see if I can find a raincoat and some rubber boots to go with them. Unlike some of the people I’ve been reading about, I’ll stay away from roads closed due to flooding, the mountains and away from riverbanks.

And if I see one of my neighbors building a big boat, I’m going to lend him or her the nails and offer my goldfish and my family as passengers.

You never can be too careful.