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Call it stormy Monday, etc.
The wind was kicking up when you ducked into another roadside attraction for iced tea and food. You had your notebook, as always. You found a booth by the window where you could watch the storm roll in while writing a few words to your son who is in the army.
A motorcycle couple from Centreville was at the bar. The woman made a cell phone call to their son. They would be late, she said. They had to wait out a storm. The man fidgeted, nervously pacing from barstool to parking lot, checking the sky, returning to predict the storm's arrival.
Another man was at the friendly stage. He talked too loud, flirted too much with girls not old enough for alcohol.
Late-afternoon storms have become commonplace hereabouts. Storms that knock out electrical power – four times thus far this month – down trees and make last year's drought seem like a bad dream.
A bolt of lightning ushered in this Saturday afternoon torrent.
It was another one of those powerful, quick-hit storms. The rain made parking lot ponds in less time than it takes to fill a bathtub. The wind blew the saplings back and forth like windshield wipers, and littered the landscaped and mulched beds with whatever it could find – leaves, bits of papers, omnipresent plastic bottles.
Watching the bottles dance and roll made you think of an old movie. A tribesman in Africa was hanging around with himself when he was conked on the nugget by a Coke bottle that evidently escaped an airplane.
He thought it was something God dropped. So he went on a trek to give it back.
There was that other guy in Mexico. He was minding his own business when a bowling ball fell from the sky and killed him. Stop laughing. It really happened. Out in the yard thinking about whatever they think about in that part of Mexico and thud.
Dorothy and her yappy little dog had no such encounters. Oh, the house landed on a witch and the munchkins celebrated. There was no Coke bottle from on high, no Cessna launched bowling ball. All of it was make believe.
You were explaining this to your son. A voice pierced the concentration. “We should move away from the windows,” the voice repeated. You looked out. It was dark and ominous. Everything except the vehicles was dancing in the wind.
Little rivers connected the parking lot ponds. The parking lot looked like an aerial photograph of the flooding of Cedar Falls, Iowa.
Why can’t we understand such a simple law of nature?
It is called a flood plain for a reason. Put too much water into the river and it will overflow its banks and spread across the flood plain. Fill in the creek to make a road or another place to build a house. Start adding too much water to the area and that water will flow where it has always flowed – down the old creek bed.
The man from Centreville found enough of a break in the outdoor action to scurry to the parking lot and look up. Was he looking for a sign? A Coke bottle?
He reminded you of an old fishing buddy named Jack.
Hey, Jack, do you think it’ll rain this afternoon?
Jack would look up, pensive. “She’ll start raining about 4:30.” He always answered with an exact time.
Jack, what do you tell them when you’re wrong?
“Just make up some other bull about wind direction, cold fronts, stuff like that.”
You thought about making up some stuff for the motorcyclist.
He had to straddle that Harley, wife behind him, and slosh all the way back to Centreville.
What a deal.
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