water disaster

One great thing about studying other languages is that you sometimes get a different perspective on words or events that have lost their "real meaning" because we use them so often and so familiarly.

For example, one way to translate the word "flood" can be called a "water disaster". We would never say "water disaster" in English, but truly that's what it is. To help illustrate this point, I have a story that personally happened to us on tuesday.

Tuesday was play-day at clara anne and chloe's house. Due to an unfortunate incident of disobedience, emma was not allowed to go. She stayed home with josh, mantha went with me to play-day. Just after lunch, I got a call from josh. He had taken pity on emma and took her to pizza hut for lunch (truly, a very special treat!). The problem - it was raining. Not raining, like "turn on your windshield wipers" rain, but "pull over because you can't see anything" rain. Heavy rains also mean no taxis.

Josh asked me to come pick he and emma up after samantha and I got in a taxi on the other side of town (where it wasn't raining at all). As we're driving along the highway, the rain comes out of nowhere. Pounding, deafening rain. I see a steady line of cars along the highway that are stopped and waiting it out. Later down the road, I notice our exit has been blocked off by police cars - flooding.

We take the next exit, planning to circle around to josh's location...but not even off the highway, we encounter streets so flooded you can't even see the curb. Dirty muddy water, swirling past us...cars stalled in the road...and me and samantha praying in the backseat. We finally pick up josh and emma, then start to head home.

Taxi man decides that on this torrentially rainy day, he'll take a backroad to avoid the traffic. Hmmmm. Turns out that this backroad is at the bottom of a hill. He bravely drives into what looks like a small lake. We're hoping he knows his car better than we do, because it looks like trouble.

As the car plunges futher into what should be the road, we make it about halfway through and the car stalls out. At this point, the water outside the car comes midway up the doors. I could roll down the window, stick my hand out, and touch the water if I tried.

I'm not much of a discerning person, but I got the distinct sense that this was very bad.

Josh affirmed my sense.

Emma, also, affirmed my sense when I heard this panicked cry come out of her mouth - "Mama, my feet are getting wet! This is yucky water!" Water had started seeping in through the doors and was beginning to fill up in the floorboards in the backseat. "Please, mommy, let's pray! We need to pray now!" she directed.

Pray we did. I could make this story much longer, but let's just say that even though our driver wanted to "sit and wait a minute and see if it goes down" (what?!) in the end, we were able to back the car up and out of the mini lake that very possibly could have been a disaster.

We backtracked and slogged our way through pouring rain and still-flooded streets, til we finally came to our street.

Ah, traffic was backed up for two miles. Bus drivers and taxi drivers had exited their vehicles and were chatting it up in the middle of the expressway, smoking, laughing, comparing notes with how long they thought the jam would last.

We paid our driver triple the fare and bailed. By now it was only barely sprinkling, and we were only two miles from home - we'd walked it many times before (on cool spring nights, but still...we had done it!) Josh hauled emma up on his shoulders, and I cradled mantha in my arms and we weaved our way through the lanes of traffic for the next mile.

A mile up the road, we saw the problem. An entire stretch of road was flooded so heavily, it was impassable for cars. Big SUV's and buses could make it through, but nothing else. We sat on the side of the street and...um...well, we gawked. We watched people, pants hiked up to the knees, pushing their cars through knee-deep water. We watched children in raincoats splashing and sloshing, thinking this was anything but a water disaster. We watched bicyclists get sprayed with the surf from the buses that made it through.

It was actually really fascinating to watch, and it didnt feel so morbid since it wasn't a flood where people actually died - they were just inconvenienced.

So I left my friend's house about 1:30 and we made it home just after 4:00 that afternoon. It was quite the little adventure, but at least I'll never think of "water disaster" the same way again!