Two hurricanes in one month leaves us soaked

EMMA GORDON BLASS

When you live in South Africa, you rarely have to worry about the weather. There are plenty of other things to keep your bucket of worries full, but the weather co-operates perfectly with whatever plans you have, outside or in.

But in North Carolina, we are in the middle of tropical storm Michael, just three weeks after hurricane Florence, which overfilled our dams and flooded every low-lying piece of land south and east of here.

I live two hours from the coast, so we don’t get the destructive winds that rip off roofs and get all the media coverage, nor the storm surges that send high tide waters over boardwalks and through the living rooms of vacation homes. What we do get is the “dissipation” of all the water in those impressive circular bands you see in satellite images. We get heavy, soaking rain, and biblical quantities of water falling for days, turning every gutter into a waterfall, every ditch into a creek, and every stream into a potentially damaging wash looking for somewhere less wet to go.

When it rains for days and days, life is transformed in interesting ways. You can’t do anything outside like exercise or work in the garden, and simple tasks like taking out the trash or bringing groceries inside become complex arrangements of how to do everything with one hand, because the other one is holding an umbrella (the experience of being a mother of a small child is great preparation for this).

After a day or two of constant rain, your glasses fog up every time you move from the bathroom to the rest of the house, or the house to the outside, because water vapour is everywhere, and you start to feel like you can see puffs of it in every exhaled breath.

The lights are on all day, every day, because the sky outside is shingle grey, and the branches are hanging lower than usual. The trees themselves seems to be leaning at worrying angles. The birds have stopped chirping because, it turns out, they find days and days of getting wet nothing to sing about. I suspect they are all taking refuge in the eaves of our roof and are staying really quiet not to draw our attention to this fact.

I know for sure that lots of other critters are taking refuge in our dry home, because we are starting to see palmetto bugs on our floors, and spiders on walls, the reverse of that season in South Africa, perhaps the one you are in now, when ants stream into kitchens seeking water.

Our neighbours, who are very “right on” with the best social trends, have a system for storing and reusing rainwater. I’ve been chuckling about this to myself about these past few weeks, considering that, in the two years or so I’ve lived here, the water-level sign outside the offices of our local water utility has never dipped below 100%.

A mental image comes to mind of their overflowing storage tank pouring into their soaked garden. Imagine trying to save the rain water? What we need are ways to get rid of our rain water and send it somewhere else – to California perhaps, or to the Sahara desert, so they can stop sending their dust here, which is the precursor to all these hurricanes in the first place.

I almost forgot to mention that school is off, again, owing to the threat of severe weather to transportation safety, which means that my children have not yet experienced a full week of school in a month and half of the new school year (although the Jewish holiday season is also to blame). I probably really have the attention of any parent reading this now, because imagine having your kids inside all day? The mess, the food lying around, the noise, and the squabbling!

If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can imagine the colours of dry places: khaki, raw umber, desert brown, and ferrous red earth. I can even remember the smell of the dry, sandy highveld air before the rains. It’s a reassuring thought, that I will be able to return to the outside world again after the rain stops and, hopefully, make it over to you.