Desperately Seeking Noah

It is pouring outside. It poured yesterday and the day before that and the day before that. It is scheduled to rain until Wednesday. I have lost my sense of humor, there is moss growing between my toes and I don’t like anything.

And I have no real room to complain either. My basement has not flooded, my roof is not leaking. I drove through some standing water yesterday and it got into my car. I bailed as much as I could and tried to soak up the rest with towels but, until the rain stops, there is not much I can do. My car tends to leak a bit anyway — nothing major — a common problem with older convertibles. I can’t locate the source of the leak but I stuffed plastic bags into every nook and cranny I could find and am keeping my fingers crossed today. I hate this.

Then I remind myself that there are people sleeping in the high school because they had to evacuate their homes. There are businesses along Poplar Street, including a car repair garage that have several feet of water in them, schools are closed today because of flooding and people have to commute through virtual canals to get to work and I tell myself to just shut up and be grateful.

The governor has declared a state of emergency here and I am worrying about wet carpet in my car. What a baby! Remember New Orleans.

Weather! Mark Twain once said that everybody talks about the weather but no one does anything about it. That comment always makes me smile. Sometimes I think we need these big “weather events”, as the weather folks call them, just to remind us that we are not in charge. No matter what we think.

I’ve started thinking about this a lot in the last couple years when our world has seen a lot of huge weather events — tsunamis, hurricanes — one after another after another, earthquakes and blizzards. There was a time when people were constantly aware of the natural world and its power over us but these days we seem to have forgotten a lot of that. We think with our affluence and our big machines, we are superior to the weather and I sometimes think the weather is intensifying to put us in our place.

Yesterday I had to run a quick errand and was stunned at the number of cars — mostly SUVs out flying around sending huge waves of water into people’s lawns as they went flying past on whatever important mission they were on. It always makes me think of an accident I witnessed a few years back. I was driving through a particularly mountainous section of Interstate 80 in Pennsylvania. Traffic was creeping along because there was ice on the road. Suddenly an SUV driven by a young woman came flying down the emergency lane. I don’t know what her emergency was but it wasn’t worth the means she took because she lost control on the ice, went flying through a guard rail and down an embankment out of site. I have thought of her often wondering if she survived and what in the world ever caused her to be so reckless.

There are times when we need to stay put. Emergencies do arise but taking chances just for the excitement of it scares me. I guess I did that when I was younger but these days I’m more careful. If the governor says to stay home, I try to stay home.

In his book, Mark has a rather blistering condemnation of thrill-seeking pleasure boaters who go off into hurricanes for excitement, get into trouble and then necessitate the poor, over-worked Coast Guard guys to go out after them. That’s what I think about now — taking dumb chances that wind up endangering others. So it is raining and I am staying home working — I’ll check on my car when the rain dies down and be ready to bail.

Thanks for reading.