Here comes the rain again

The joy and the downfall to living on the beautiful marina is all that water.

I often brag to my contemporaries that I live literally a stone's-throw from the water. I have a friend in Columbus OH who has a lovely brick house in the heritage district there, with twice my square footage, and I tell him how lucky he is all the time. Well, he recently reminded me that he has to drive quite a way to get a water view, so I know I'm lucky too.

But last Friday reminded me that the location I live in and love comes with a cost. Right around mid-day, the 5th most severe storm in half a century was battering California, coinciding with the seasonal high tide and easterly winds keeping water from exiting the mouth of the Bay. This group of events backed up the storm drains, and my street was flooded. Everything on the ground floor of our building and those surrounding was in danger. This neighborhood has flooded before (2005), and residents who had to endure and rebuild from the damages last time were bracing for a rerun. I ran home from work as soon as I could, and we sandbagged our garage door (heavily -- I'm ready to build a fox hole, should that need ever arise), and battened down the hatches.

Thankfully, the tide went out in the afternoon, the storm drains cleared up, and before anything serious happened, the river that was my street had gone out to sea.

In the midst of the scare, a couple of noteworthy events reinforced my optimism about humanity:
First, our friend Ed who works for the City but lives 20 miles away came down from home on his day off and gathered his crew to sandbag my garage door for Kristi because he knew I would be at work when the water was at its highest. That's like something Mother Theresa would do (you know, if Mother Theresa had a truck and a bunch of sandbags). I don't know what I did in a past life to deserve a guy like him in my present one, but I sure am thankful for the selflessness he has displayed many times over the course of our friendship.

After I got home, I went to the City corp yard where they have a big pile of sand and bags to put it in, and there was a guy there named Ron who helped me fill up about 30 sand bags. He said he lived down here on the marina too, so he was very aware of what I was doing. I assumed he was a City worker, assigned to help in the yard. He wasn’t; just a neighborhood guy who spent the day helping people fill up their sand bags. He’d been out there in the rain since the morning, just knowing that all of his neighbors would be in and out of there all day. We brought him some coffee, and I offered to have a cold beer ready any time he walks by my house. Was a cold beer the neighborly thing to offer to a sock-soaked guy manning a shovel at a sand pile in the rain?