On Bailing Out
It all started on Saturday, at 4 am. I woke up to the maniacal chatter of my alarm. It was time to grab my bags, head to Pasadena, and drive my parents to the airport as these are the duties of an only child. My paternal grandmother had passed away the week before and Mom and Dad were headed to Wisconsin to pay their respects and spend some time with family. It was my job to hold down the fort, take care of the dog, and make sure the cat had someone to scream at. I’d done this duty countless times before but something was different this time: there was an atmospheric river headed towards LA.
I returned from the airport at 6:30 am and promptly fell asleep. By the time I woke up, the skies were beginning to darken on the horizon but, where I was, it was still beautiful out. I took Sophie on a long walk knowing it might be the last comfortable one for days. The rest of the afternoon was spent relaxing and doom-scrolling the weather sites that were warning of biblical rains and catastrophic flooding. It would be fine, I kept telling myself. The dog looked at me as if to say, “Are you sure about that?”
Sunday the heavens opened up. It was beautiful at first. A perfect time to grab a warm cup of coffee and find somewhere cozy to watch the rain and read a good book. That night I had plans to have dinner at a friend’s house. I knew the rain was supposed to get worse but I didn’t want to be a wet blanket so I (foolishly) braved the roads and made my way across town. It was a bit harrowing but everyone was doing their best and driving slowly. A wonderful dinner followed and then it was time to drive home…and boy was it one of the most stressful drives of my life. Massive puddles everywhere, visibility getting worse by the second, and cars hydroplaning. Not a fun experience. I made it home, took the dog on a quick soggy walk, and went to bed hoping the rain would let up the next day.
*Narrator’s voice* It did not.
The next day, the floods got worse, the pool almost overflowed, and the rains just kept getting worse. I was sitting in the living room, trying to think calm thoughts and not let my anxiety get the best of me when I heard a dripping…coming from under the floor. Traditionally, a bad place for things to drip. I threw on my boots, grabbed a flashlight, and headed into the crawl space. What I saw was my worst nightmare: a pool of water about two feet deep and getting worse. I Face-Timed my parents in a panic, found the buckets, and got to work. I spent the next few hours, calf-deep in mud bailing out bucket after bucket of water.
I got the pool down to a small puddle before it became clear, I wouldn’t be able to do anything more. That night was full of anxious nightmares of collapsing floors, structural damage, and buckets upon buckets of muddy water. The next day, the cavalry arrived and the plumber came to my rescue. Finally, someone who knew a little more than, “Water bad, drainage good.” It was a trip sitting in the house with the dog at my feet, both of us fixated on the floor and the sounds of crawling, banging, and occasional swearing coming from underneath us.
My heroic savior was able to cap the leak, stop the flow…and find a much bigger problem. Another area under the house was two to three feet underwater. But, like many other problems in life, the diagnosis is the scariest part. Once the problem was known, the solutions began to formulate, the rain eventually stopped, and the water was pumped out.
All the stresses of homeownership in a convenient three-day demo period.
How did you hold up during the rains? Have you ever experienced any intense weather-related anxiety?
Two moments come to mind, decades apart: When I was a kid in Milwaukee, we had a very rare near miss tornado. They almost never came through because Lake Michigan has an ameliorating effect on the dramatic air pressure changes that create them, but I remember one summer night my folks were out (maybe working at our restaurant and the winds starting howling - shaking windows, rattling doors, snapping limbs off trees. It was Wizard of Oz terrifying, but a lot more short-lived than the monsoon you dealt with. We found out the next day that a twister had indeed touched down briefly just a few blocks away. The second instance was about eleven years ago, shortly after we moved into the house we're in now. A major wind event (not a tornado but more widespread) came tearing out of the desert with winds that were clocked at 100 miles an hour in our area. At the time we had three huge eucalyptus trees in the front yard, and my car was parked in the driveway right near our front door and beneath one of the trees. Around midnight I told Susan I was nervous about the car and went out into the gale to drive it around the circular drive and park it away from the eucalyptus. I came back into the house and no more than five minutes later we heard a crash as a massive branch from the tree came down right where my car had been parked, just grazing the front porch overhang. The next day trees were uprooted all over the neighborhood and down a two block stretch of Green Street in Pasadena. Other parts of the city experienced almost nothing.
Same house, last year’s storm. At midnight Steven and I heard the sump pump in the sub basement cycling on and off and when we checked it the pump wasn’t draining and the basement was filling with rainwater threatening the heaters. We bailed for about an hour in the pouring rain, soaked to the skin, saving the heaters, but had to do it all over again at 3:00am. Homeownership. What are you going to do? Thanks, Will for saving the family farm!