The Rains Came: Time-Delay Live-Blogging to you Direct from Inside a Flooding Building

I was in the city, in an office at the Ministry of Agriculture, when I overheard someone mention it. "Txuba forte na Fajã!", they said. Phooey, I thought. I piped in, mentioning that I live in Fajã and desperately want to see a downpour there, but that it never seems to happen unless I'm somewhere else. I joked that maybe if stayed in the city for a whole two weeks, we'd actually get a decent rainy season.

As if to prove me peripheral, it started downpouring outside the Ministry that very minute. Across the street, wind whipped white curtains out into the wetness, until rushed hands reached through the windows to pull the shutters shut and fidget with the bolts until they locked. People ran for cover. The air lost its stickiness as raindrops taxied all the heat to the ground.

Satisfied, I went back to work, or whatever it was that I was doing.

In the afternoon I returned to Fajã. The earth was damp, but you couldn't tell how much water had passed through it. Puddles weren't any larger than I'd ever seen them after other rains, though. When I got home I sat for a few minutes, then began to read magazines and other things lying in piles around me. I searched for a graph of supply-and-demand. I looked up a recipe for Sweet 'n' Sour Chicken. Not finding the graph, I sketched my own version, and not having chicken, I started defrosting some pork.

I would have left the house to buy the pineapple juice that I evidently need for the sauce, but it started raining again. By the time it stopped again I was somehow in the middle of frying sweet potatoes, so I couldn't go out. As I finished off the last few crispy, greasy, coma-inducing morsels, the rain picked up once more, this time matching the force that I had seen in the city in the morning.

On my windowsill the BBC was discussing why Africa is poor. The window was closed, but the shutters were open, affording a wonderful view of the weather. And yet, somehow, I missed two strikes of lightning — a rude disappointment, considering that before today I had begun to wonder if thunderstorms ever happen here. Each strike was accompanied by a pop in the radio transmission and a flash in the periphery of my vision. After the first flash, I went straight back to reading, thinking that I'd missed my only chance. After the second, I stared intently into the sky, waiting for the third. But the third never came.

What I saw instead were drops of water beading on the underside of my windows. That probably shouldn't be happening, I thought to myself. Minutes later the rain got even stronger — the strongest I've ever seen here — and the pitter-patter on my windowpanes gave way to sheets of water sloshing down.

     |        |        |         |
man  |        |        |         |  nature
     | window | ###### | shutter |
     |________| ###### |_________|
    ###############################

As you can see, if everything had been closed, the shutter would have protected my kitchen. But let's zoom in and see what happens with the shutter open:

     |            |
     |            |+-- crazy raindrops
     |            |+-- crazy raindrops! 
man  |            ||
     |   window   ||  ############            OMG!!! no
     |            ||  ############           shutter here!!
     |____________||  ############
                   |  ############
  <----------------+  ############
      OMG!!! no       ############
   weather stripping  ############
         here!!       ############
    ##########################################################

It's kind of like those cop movies where the S.W.A.T. team rappels down the side of a building, kicks in the glass, and gracefully arcs their way inside onto the 5th story. That's how the rain surged under my window and started flooding my windowsill.

I began to mop it up with a rag, but there was too much water, so I added a small towel. Two small beetles who had been living in an old 10-kilo margarine tub drowned to death as I wrung out water there, flooding their home to keep mine dry.

I was still losing headway on the windowsill, so I opened the window and reached through the rain to pull the shutters closed. That did the trick, and a minute later, I was at rest.

Oh, I then remembered. The conference room is probably a lake by now.

Let me step back a bit, to a boring but important part of the story: I live in a two-floor building owned by the Ministry. On the second floor are my apartment and a conference room; on the first floor are offices and a classroom. It was gutted and totally renovated last year. Generally this means it's all shiny, bright, new, and up to western standards. Generally.

The conference room floods because … well, we're not entirely sure yet, but it probably has something to do with the fact that they only put one coat of sealant on that half of the [flat] roof. For the last few weeks [of dryness, between the last rain and this one] I've been waiting for the contractor to apply a second coat. But the rain beat him here. Sure enough, when I checked, there was a huge, deep puddle in that room.

I don't own a mop, so I decided there was nothing I could do. But the sight inspired me to check for problems elsewhere. Good thing too, because my bedroom looked more or less the same. Practically the whole floor, under the bed and all, was covered in water. I beamed at my good fortune for having cleared every inch of that space a few weeks back. Had this happened any time between February and July, I would've ended up with a lot of very soppy, smelly clothes and blurry-inked papers.

So I put the rag and the towel on tag-team duty. One went down for the soak while the other got wrung out over the tub. Then they switched. It worked, but eventually I got tired of the rag's measly absorptive powers and I retired it. After a while the towel got smug about its efficacy, so to punish it, I stood on top of it and sashayed my way across the tile while singing MGMT's "Kids".

The problem in my bedroom, by the way, was conceptually the same as in my kitchen. Instead of normal windows I have these door-height shutters that, like doors, go all the way to the floor. The bottom half of the "shutter" can't actually move, so it should be sealed to the floor with something like caulking. But it's not — there's just a gap. So raindrops are free to slide down the outside of the shutter and slingshot theirselves onto my floor.

Anyway, all the hand-mopping put me in the mood to write, so I headed downstairs toward the office. But on my way, I noticed water coming in under the balcony door in the hall. It being the balcony door, I decided I could just sweep the water back outside. So I went to the broom closet, picked the rattier of two available brooms, and started whisking the water back to nature.

Except then the broom snapped in half. Or nearly so — one end now dangles from the other by a thread. (The pole is evidently a hollow tube of the thinnest possible aluminum, made to be bought cheaply and used briefly. I don't have much patience for such products, but all the same, I wish I could post a picture of the way I have it stored now. It's kind of post-modern. It's in a closet leaning against a chair, except the chair has a dark rag draped over it, which hides the break in the pole. So glancing up from the ground you see a perfectly normal broom getting lost in a rag, but then the top half is sticking out sideways at an angle that makes no sense. When the housekeeper sees her broken broom, will she find it as funny as I do? No, sadly, but I can still dream of a universe in which she would.)

Thankfully, the other broom had a solid-wood handle — yeeessss! — and I used that to finish the job. Then I scurried back to the computer and wrote a bit (I jokingly call this "live-blogging" because I'm writing as it happens, but without Internet I can't actually post anything today, so maybe it doesn't really count).

Then I went to check on my bedroom, which turned out to be soaked again. Banishing from my thoughts a certain sense of futility, I hand-mopped it again. Then I had the insight that stuffing paper towels in the gaps under the shutters might convince the water to stay outside (hallelujah, it did!).

Then I noticed water dripping in a new place: the stairway. Turned out to be coming from the rooftop landing, which was flooded edge to edge because of — you guessed it — water ninjas sliding down the outside of the door to the roofstop and throwing themselves inside through the gap at the bottom. I brought the good broom, opened the door, and started casting the water out onto the roof. But I had to ask myself if the roof, wet as it already was, deserved more of a burden. The roof is supposed to drain itself — it has pipes for that — but the slopes are all so meager and sloppy that huge lakes still form before the pipes start doing any good.

I decided to speed up the process. So with bare feet, white shorts, a brown dress shirt, and a broom, I marched out into the rain and the night and started sweeping water towards the drainpipes. Without a proper push-broom, I really couldn't do much, but I enjoyed myself just the same. By the time I stopped skipping around and singing ("Singin' in the Rain", Gene Kelly), I was soaked.

From up there, incidentally, I could see a river of muddy water rushing across my front gate. No exit. And by extension, no Sweet 'n' Sour pork that night.

O, curse ye, flawed house!

Most of the time, mind you, I believe that my housing situation spoils me, but then I remember all these nagging half-measures, and they totally cancel out the benefits. I can accept western comforts and conveniences, but then they should work like western comforts and conveniences. For example, I enjoy having nice clean tile floors instead of the dirt or straw I might've ended up with in mainland Africa. But in the U.S., houses are hermetically sealed, so the only thing that gets tile floors dirty there are spills and footprints. Having to worry about the elements is not part of the gameplan. If I have to worry about the elements, I don't want tile floors. I don't want that responsibility.

A friend of mine named Ryan has embraced the tiny-living (small-living, maybe?) movement. The idea is to have only exactly as much stuff and space as you need. The houses these people build cover less ground than most master bedrooms, but everything is contained in that space — a place to sleep, a place to cook, a place to work, a place to live. And a place for all your stuff.

I kind of like the idea, and I think it's what I found so romantic about the old [tin-roof, concrete-floor] farm house that I once expected to be my home. It wasn't fancy, but I loved that there was nothing to take care of. Nothing to diagnose! If an electrical wire fried (few as there were), I'd see the smoke. A roach could run, but there was nowhere for it to hide, no closets, no cracks. Perhaps today there would have been a leak in the roof there, but if so, I would have seen it and put a bucket under it. None of this seeping-through-the-plaster mysticism. Who knows, maybe the whole house is flooded right now! But who cares? It's just cement, and under that, just earth. If I lived there, I would have just picked up my clothes and papers and feet for the night, and waited to sweep away the water at sunrise.

* * *

A few days have passed in which hardly a soul greeted any other soul without mentioning rain. The shiny new paved road here is, in many parts, still shiny, but in other parts coated with mud, or covered with rocks, or both. In several spots there is so much mud and so many rocks that it looks as if the mountain has reclaimed the notch that was cut out of it. But men don't like their roads to be impassable, so they came with their machines the next morning and started excavating the notches anew.

In other news, the air has been washed, every color on the hills is vibrant, and the corn is about to grow.