August Sweeps - Day 547

This blog post is a few days late in coming.  It ended up being a fairly eventful night, and instead of typing up the usual report, I recorded my thoughts and shared them with my Patreon supporters.  You can be one, if you'd like to help me out.

The day was fine, out shopping, recording for a podcast, lunch with my mom and family, a little bit of editing.  And then I started to hear thunder, and decided it was time to go on my run if I wanted to beat the rain.  I barely did (turning around a couple of blocks early as the raindrops started to come).

The rain began to fall hard, and then it fell harder.  It was remarkable, kind of like rain falls (I would assume) in the rain forest or in Peru.  And then . . . to my surprise, it fell harder than any rain should ever fall, pounding on the roof and filling up the gutter on the street.  Now, it was like it rains in the movies (bullshit-levels of rain, I'm talking about--the sort of torrent that belongs on the swamp planet of Dagobah*).  I started to worry.

A few years ago, I was out of town, and the rain fell crazy hard, and our entire basement was flooded.  The carpet was ruined, the walls were damaged, cardboard boxes fell apart, one of the CHUDs drowned, and there was a mark about ten inches off the floor where the water level had reached.  A box of my comics was ruined, several boxes of toys, and my poster collection, including that awesome signed INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS poster I was so proud of.**

Well, here came the rain again, as the Eurythmics taught us, and the amount of water that poured down from the roof alone was alarming.  My nephews ran out into the street with brooms and attempted to clear the two sewer grate openings of leaves and branches, so there would be no repeat of the last flood, where the water couldn't get where it was supposed to go, so it went into our house.

Nevertheless, the puddle in front of the driveway rapidly became a pool, and that pool was now becoming a pond.  Neighbors began to arrive--some with buckets, some with brooms, one with a squeegie on a stick--and they began to scoop up water and toss it into the street, where gravity would take it away from our driveway.  In mere minutes, the danger was gone, and we were back to a pool, then a puddle.  Very little water actually got into the house, and as far as I know, nothing was ruined here.

The neighbor's house was another story.  I ran over there, to see if they were getting it as bad or worse than us, and discovered that their backyard swimming pool was overflowing, and the excess water was going down their stairs and into their basement.  They were already down there, trying to get things out of the way and minimize the damage (I presume, I didn't actually get to go into their house, though some neighbors did).

Two firetrucks arrived, called by my mother, and I told them our house was safe, but did they have a machine to suck out water and spray it someplace else (like I had seen in front of my brother's house just last week).  The fireman was big and muscular, probably handsome, and he smelled nice, but he didn't know what kind of machine I was talking about, but did have equipment that would put out a fire.

Our attention was called by the neighbors two houses down, where they too have a stupidly-designed driveway that also goes down from the road, and water was running down it and into their garage.  I grabbed my bucket and ran over there, where three or four others were already scooping up water, running up the driveway, and tossing it into the road.  I joined in, and soon, I'd say ten more people (maybe it was twice that) joined in, scooping and carrying and dumping and running back, until there were too many people to get to the water at the base of their garage door.

After we'd gotten almost all that water, the house's owner opened the garage door, and a wave of water came back at us from inside the garage.  Luckily, they had just moved in, so all the garage held was some tools and their car.  We were able to scoop up that water too, and the neighbor with the squeegie was able to perform miracles with it (his wife says so, at least).  Before long, this house too was out of the woods.

But the next block over, apparently, there was a house that was not doing so well, so I and a couple others went over there, to see if we could help.  They too had had water enter through the garage, and it had risen so high that it entered the house through the door to the garage (which I would not have believed had I not seen it).  Their backyard was completely afloat with muddy brown water, and that had gone THROUGH the back wall of the garage, filling it from both sides.

My bucket (as well as the two others I had bought in June, so the kids and I would always have extras to clean the fish and turtle tanks) had disappeared, and there were no brooms that weren't in use.  But somebody handed me a snowshovel, and I used it to scoot water from the back of the garage to the lady in the middle of the garage who used her broom to scoot water to the man at the front of the garage who used his broom to push it up the driveway and into the street.  More folks joined us, and I gotta say, this was the worst bit of the night (not counting the worry as the water level grew early on), because the sound of the screeching shovel was pretty bad, but the condition of the garage was worse.  They had been using it as a game room or something, because it had carpet in it and lawn mowers and a mattress and box spring, a foosball table, racks of bottled water and food storage that had collapsed, and big bags of dog food that had flooded and expanded and torn open.  There was so much stuff in the garage that it was impossible to get the water out from under it.***

I kept working, though, and saw people coming out of the house with buckets of filthy water to dump outside (at first they were dumping it in the backyard, but it was just going back into the garage, so they took it out the other way).  I didn't know any of these people, but lemmee tell you, there was a sense of purpose and comraderie that felt new and inspiring and pretty unfamiliar.  Big Anklevich told a similar story when that hurricane hit in his town, but the only part of the story I held onto was the Texans wishing that their misfortune had befallen California instead.  This was kind of amazing, and showing the best of people, when they put aside their differences and work toward a common goal.

And I got to be a part of it.  A couple of my Patreon pals suggested that I was able to do so much because of all the exercise I've been getting over the past year, and I don't disagree with that.  I was tired (and very, very wet) afterward, but none the worse for wear.  My thirteen year old nephew had twisted his ankle, but was willing to continue looking for people to help, which made me proud to know him.  

Sit-ups Today: 100

My nephew had spent most of the flood running around barefoot, and when I caught him doing it, I told him to run back to the house and put on some shoes, any shoes, in case there were sharp things underneath the muddy water.  He ended up wearing a pair of my shoes, which he's been doing more and more lately, and when I asked why, he said he had ruined a pair while camping, and seemed to have lost his other pair.

Before all the rain came, we had talked about going to Walmart to pick him up another pair of cheap shoes (at the rate he's growing, he won't have time to wear this pair out), but now that it was ten-something, I didn't figure he'd want to go out again.

But he did. So, after we had changed into dry clothes, we jumped in a car and drove to the next town, where we got him some shoes (he didn't know what size he wears, but I don't know if that's because he's a clueless teenager, or because his feet have gotten bigger since his mom last took him shoe shopping), and scooped up the last of the Shang-Chi Marvel Legends figures, which were on deep clearance, despite the movie still not having come out yet.

Afterward, he really wanted to go to Del Taco, our favorite fast food place, and after his selfless and tireless actions tonight, I went ahead and took him.  There were only two people working there, one taking orders and one cooking food, so the wait was really long (they always help the drive-thru customers first, which I normally hate with a white-hot passion, but didn't care about tonight).

Push-ups Today: 55

So, after all that, with absolutely no words and being tired enough that I thought I'd just retire early, this very nearly became the first day without writing--hey, it was a new month, I hadn't set the goal of writing everyday in it, and it would be so easy to just let it slip away, to finally say I was done and be fine with that, be proud of what I did accomplish all these many days.

But no, I couldn't go through with it.  I ended up jotting down a few words in an email to myself, just enough to not technically have written nothing.  And then, before I sent the email, I thought I'd do a word count on them, and when I was a bit revolted by how small the number was, I sat down for another ten minutes until I'd doubled it.

So, I did write, and though it wasn't a lot, it spared the executioner's block for one more day.  Fun.

Words Today: 449

*According to Big Anklevich, in Houston they call this kind of rain "What we get every year, y'all."

**And it would've been even worse, had my sister not run into my room and started piling up my things that had not yet been destroyed.

***I'm not criticizing.  If the water had entered our basement again, there are about sixty storage containers and cardboard boxes, holding everything from winter clothes to action figures, Halloween costumes to extention cords, craft supplies to school books.  Imagine the final scene of RAIDERS, but there's nothing of value in any of the crates.