Dam

Dear diary,

Our new house was built on a steep hill. It’s not at the top of the hill; it’s in the middle. So there are a few houses to the east of ours which sit higher, and then all the houses to the west are lower; and at the bottom of this hill is a lake – that’s where the water drains when it rains. And when it rains, it pours. I found that out the hard way.

Remember when my friend came over and helped us trim our trees? That was about a week ago. Well, after he left, we had a yard-full of brush to clean up, to gather into heaps. We rented a pickup truck, with the intention of filling its bed with brush & then dropping off the load at the Local Recycling Place. We thought this job could be accomplished with just one trip, but it turned out that we had enough branches & leaves to fill THREE pickups. But we only had time to make TWO trips; so the pile of brush that should’ve been trip number last got left in our yard. Huge branches, large as logs, with robust leafage – so big that they almost require two people to move them; and you must drag them across the yard slowly, & when you’re doing so, you feel like a tiny ant trying to carry a quill pen: it’s more than seven times the size of your whole body. Roughly a dozen of these huge branches were stacked in front of our back door, waiting to be disposed of. And then it started to rain.

Now the backyards of all the houses on our hill share a lengthy indentation, which crosses thru them all, like a riverbed, and allows the water to drain into the lake at the bottom of the hill. So when it rains, this channel transports raging rapids, right outside of my own back door. I can look out my window and see, no more than ten meters from my face, a scary river racing past. It flows into my western neighbors’ yard, then gushes down into the next backyard, & so on.

Now I hadn’t intended to leave all those big branches out in front of my service door – I had planned to take them away to the Brush Recycling Place; but, like I explained, we ran out of time.

So I created this dam that blocks our yard’s natural drain-channel; and today was the first time I’ve been in our house when it’s rained heavily. I didn’t intend to build a dam – I didn’t even know that I did this, that I blocked the river rapids. Here’s how I found out:

I was watching my favorite daytime television show – it’s a show for women, where women sit round an oval table and discuss women’s issues – and suddenly the sky grew very dark, right in the middle of the afternoon: it goes from bright noon to darkest purple, in like five seconds flat; & the sun slams shut, & the moon turns to blood. Then I hear rain—HARD RAIN—pounding on the roof. It’s louder than a nonstop locomotive. Wow that’s loud! So I labor myself up off the sofa and go peek out the window:

I see that my backyard, up to the pile of branches at our door, is a swelling pond. The branch pile dammed up the rainwater’s natural drain channel, and my yard is collecting the runoff from all my eastern neighbors.

This gave me a fright. I said to myself “What should I do?” Thus, in panic mode, I ran to the garage and opened the service door at the back, and it was like I was in a Magritte painting, or an Edward Hopper painting, because the door opened out onto an ocean: it was one vast surface of water, from the foot of the door, out to the heaping pile of branches. If the water level had risen a single centimeter, it would’ve spilled into our house. “My cup almost runneth over,” I remarked to myself. Also I thot:

“This is how Noah must’ve felt, except there’s no God, and no ark to save me, and this flood isn’t global: it’s just a stupid mistake that I made, which blocked the flow of water in my backyard.”

So I dug around in our recently inherited garage until I discovered an ancient wooden headboard, which was perhaps once installed at the crown of a bed and thus oversaw the evening routines of an old married couple. Forthwith I repurposed this headboard as a plank and a skiff to help me navigate the sea (I briefly considered using an egg-beater as a propellor—I mean the handheld kind, with the crank on the side—but decided against it) & when I got to the land on the other end of the brush pile, I disembarked and began to heft away the dam’s branches, one by one, across the slippery ground.

Moreover, all the while, the rain was pelting. But I wore a hooded sweatshirt to protect my hair.

So then when I got the dam removed, the whole lake sort of melted and oozed off westward; and it pressed its face up against the glass of my house’s lower windows, as it went. And I watched this body of water gain momentum and gush past my next-door neighbors’ yard, into the further neighbors’ yard; and I noticed that, between the 3rd and 4th houses down, a stone stairway was built into the landscape, which the river flowed over. It was like the “Odessa steps” sequence from Battleship Potemkin (1925), as described in one encyclopedia entry:

A montage shows poor innocents fleeing and falling; a baby carriage rolling down the steps; a woman shot in the face; broken spectacles; and the high boots of soldiers moving in unison.

That’s exactly how it looked, when the rain drained past my yard.