Essays

Moseying: Exploring the Natural World

Heavy rain
July 7, 2004

“I think we should call 911.” Deborah picked up my cell phone from the console of our car and handed it to me. In front of us, only a hundred feet away, a car had floated off the roadway and was slowly drifting towards a drainage canal. We were out daytripping –we wanted to see how much rain had just fallen in the thunderstorm just passed – it was a crazy whim of the moment sort of drive. The rain cooled air, the dynamic cloud formations, and other indefinable influences had magically pulled us to the car, ready for adventure. As we watched the car float slowly off the road, we got out of the vehicle, and as we did, another car stopped behind us. A young man walked up to us and said, “Can you imagine the conversation in that car right now? The man will be sleeping on the couch for a month!”

As I stepped away, punching numbers, I heard Deborah say, “Maybe it was her idea to drive through – we saw her open the door to see how deep the water was just before they started floating.” The dispatcher had me repeat the location of the emergency twice, and commented that every available wrecker and police unit was already working other similar situations.

We stood watching as the floating car hung up on shallower ground. The man wiggled out through the driver’s seat window, sat on the roof of the vehicle, then slid to the hood, and then into the water. In waist deep water he cautiously waded away from us. When he emerged from the water, he quickly disappeared down a side road. The woman slid out the other window and sat on the roof of the car. “There must be kids in the car, she is not trying to leave. Why didn’t he come out on our side?” Deborah shook her head. “Why did he disappear?”

In answer, a huge forklift emerged from the side road and plowed directly into the water, the forks right above the level of the water. When it reached the car, the woman slid down on the hood and attempted to step on to the forks. She slipped and fell into the water. Her husband, on the forks, held onto her arm, and yanked her up. The forklift backed out of the water, and the couple stood at the edge of the water, talking with the operator.

Another car pulled up behind us, and a gentleman purposefully strode up to our side. “I was listening on the police channels.” The gentleman, in his forties, a bit of stubble on his face, who had a competent sureness about his self-perceived role as an emergency responder, flipped up the top to his cell phone. “I’m calling TxDot to bring some barriers to block off this crossing.” The forklift plowed back into the water, and attempted to lift the car to haul it out, but before he figured out ho, a wrecker showed up. The wrecker driver hooked a chain on to the stalled car and pulled it right out, and we left.

The rainy days of late June were exciting. I had to travel to Lubbock for a meeting, and drove through 3 blinding rainstorms on the way. During the first, the car hydroplaned, slipping sideways, and when hydroplaning at 70 miles an hour “you pucker up” as an old cowboy once said to me when talking about a scary situation. I played it safe and pulled it down to 50 miles an hour. The next two storms were tropically torrential, and I had to slow down even slower, just to be able to see past the wipers set on high speed.

On another evening, Deborah and I had been working in the garden, enjoying the distant rumble of thunder and the cool breeze oozing out of a nearby thunderstorm. Near sundown, we got hungry, but did not feel like going in and cooking, so we headed to the nearest burger joint. Less than a mile from the house, heavy rain hit us. Sitting at the order kiosk at the fastfood place, a bolt of lightning struck a streetlight. Sparks flew, the light went out, the thunder was so deafening that it hurt, and all the lights went out in the burger joint. So did their computers. The place evidently had a backup generator, so the lights came back on, but the computers had to reboot. It took the employees a few minutes to realize they could still calculate the old fashioned way with pencil and paper, and still serve the burgers.

We headed home, driving the speed limit, but hit a low place. The water shot up all around us, and worried about drowning out in other low places, we crept home at ten miles an hour. Our car was the only one on the road. We had noticed that traffic had almost completely stopped on the interstate – where only semis were moving. “Is this the craziest thing we’ve ever done?” Deborah’s knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “This is incredible! The wind, the lightning, the tremendous amount of rain – look at that cotton field – it is standing in water – look at the barditch, it is running over and going into the road!”

The mixture of fear and fascinating is addictive. When I was in high school I used to go chase storms, just to be in the heart of energy far grander than that of any human construction (except maybe a nuclear explosion!) Back then, I wanted to see St. Elmo’s fire and ball lightning. My grandfather had told stories of ball lightning jumping between his horse’s ears on cattle drives – and I so wanted to see that!