Saturday, September 19, 2009
Storm Surges, Part 5, finally: The Big Grey Toy
It was one of those days I can’t imagine having again: we were home from college, unemployed, living with parents and completely at liberty. The world lay pregnant and generous before us, Barry’s decrepit but reliable vee-dub bus was at our beck and call, and nothing but a total lack of funds inhibited our plunder of the glistening satsuma that is the Los Angeles basin. The only question we really had to confront was, exactly where would this freedom lead us?
On, and there was the gullywasher. It was coming in from the north, inland over the Grapevine, then the San Gabriels, and then the Santa Susana mountains and on into L..A. proper. These storms rolled through town at least a couple times a year. They snarled traffic and filled up the network of arroyo seco flood channels that trace ancient riverbeds through the city’s concrete matrix. It was going to make getting around in town rather a bother. We’d have to take the heavy weather into account in any plans we made.
How it happened, how we decided, I wish I recalled. I’m imagining that imp-on-steroids grin Barry used to have, the flash in his eye when a plan came together. Maybe it was all my harebrained scheme after all. But one way or another we loaded out in that rickety bus and headed north on I-5 up past Pyramid Lake.
We were out near Gorman, I think, when the first raindrops hit our dusty windshield. Barry pulled over as several more struck their targets. Then the sky yawned and tumbled down on us in fat froglike drops that fell thick and fast, a cavalcade of percussive pings hurtling down from the stratosphere to smack with clear sharp sounds off the roof of the bus. Rain blotted the light from the air and drowned out conversation. We weren’t talking anyway. We were listening to the storm, windows cracked an inch or two, our skin tingling with the hydroionic flux.
Within ten minutes it was over; the furious front of the storm had passed us to the south. Only desultory trailing cells remained to rain on us. It was as if a physical pressure had been removed from the atmosphere, like coming back up to the surface after spelunking. It was time to move on. We strapped back in, revved up the hamster wheel, and started back whence we had come.
In no time at all, we found the rain coming down hard again, as we drove just a little faster than the storm and rode on up underneath it. The highway was awash and the rain hitting it splashed up to our headlights; the van rumbled from the raindrops that pitched themselves madly against us. It was almost too much to drive through, but then suddenly it eased up again down to a moderate rainfall, then mere precursor drops, till the skies were merely grey and the road, still dry.
We’d reached Santa Clarita, I think, and we pulled over again. Again, within moments, those same swollen raindrops returned to us, pelting down, splashing high, sheets and curtains of nearly solid water whipping through grey air that was somehow both vague and edgy with rain. Ten minutes on, the torrent was substantially spent.
We cranked the ignition and the tunes and headed off up the tailpipes of that storm yet again, forced our way through its fury on a southbound road, and pulled over again in the sere city of Sylmar to get drenched yet anew, the storm now perceptibly weakening but still impressive at its most intense, scudding overhead for a quarter of an hour of serious deluge before it got past us again.
Over our heads now the rain was merely rain, coming down on a shabby suburb of no distinction, washing clean the dirt that yet dirt remained. We were parked at a meaningless roadside in a rainstorm; there was nothing special about it, no reason to stay there - so we got back into gear and started again on the homeward highway. But by now the storm had broken up; no more gradual build to windshield-crushing intensity, but instead, just ordinary storm cells, some heavy, some less so, none of them remotely like what we’d experienced up in the mountains. The storm had devolved into a drippy mess of duck weather. We were driving, not just homeward, but home.
It was late afternoon, and we’d been toying with this storm for hours. It was time to call it a day. Barry dropped me off at his place, where I’d left my car; I drove myself back home alone. In doing so, through clammy streets in sputtering traffic, I bade farewell to the storm. By now it felt like an old friend from whom I’d slowly grown apart. I was breaking up with a breaking-up storm. It felt almost poetic.
And with those final words the entire internet heaves a collective sigh of relief: I’m done with the Storm Surge series. Finally, I can get back to blogging the important stuff, like what I stick up my nose or defaced traffic signs I know and love. Meantime, it’s Rosh Hashona, and mine has been good. Tomorrow I hit the Tut exhibit and next week will find my delicates skewered once again. Thanks for listening in and keep dry till next time. Or, if this was the last time, get good and wet. I guess it doesn’t make any difference anymore.
