rainy day

Sept 6, 2008

I’m trying not to be drowned in the rain storm hanging over DC, the tropical storm named Hanna that we’re delighted to fear, screaming like children being tickled. On Friday night at exactly 7:05 it started to rain. The air smelled of burnt dust, newly thrown from the pavement. I walked through three people in two separate groups being arrested. They sat quietly on their steps, looking at passersby and the Park Police. I had noticed the Park Police cars on my street a few minute earlier. The scene had a calm and quiet that was confusing in that corner of sporadic violence, almost as if they were being arrested for picking flowers in Rock Creek Park. Tuesday, a drive-by occurred one block up from my house. The previous weekend I heard gunfire while walking home late at night, and the weekend before a shoot-up between multiple cars spun around an intersection at the top of the hill. There is still a bullet hole in an electronics box.

By now the rain has made a lake under the spigot of the apartment building out back. I look at their lot, fully three feet higher than our backyard, and wonder where the water goes. Where, in general, the water goes. Walking home with my sopping boxes of cereal at 10 am, I started following the streams. Noticed the drains at 11th and Columbia blocked by a metal guard, watched the leaves at 11th and Sherman. A river moving south along Sherman met the sheets coming east down Columbia, forcing the flow south; only a slim stream clinging to the sidewalk found its way into the drains on the north side. I lifted an election poster from one drain and thought of the autumn days in Toronto when my father would go out into a storm with a rake to remove dead leaves from the sewers.