Flooded!

I was tired on Thursday (May 8) after work, so instead of going to the temple as I usually did, I decided I would take a nap. I turned on my computer first, cause I always do, then cleared off my bed and sat on it to take my shoes off. Lappy booted and I walked over to check my email and other sundries. That’s when I knew I was in trouble. I lifted up my foot, but I hadn’t dreamed up the sensation: water had soaked through my sock. The carpet was wet.

I felt around for the size and source of the wet spot. Had someone really, really overwatered my plants? No. Did I have a cup of water on my desk that fell? No. Maybe the laptop peed all over the floor? “Don’t let’s be silly,” I muttered as worry began overriding humor. The wetness lasted as far back into the corner of my room as I could reach, beyond the desk.

Nobody else was home and time was of the essence, so I quickly moved all my stuff out of that corner and pulled the desk across the room. It’s amazing how fast a little zing of adrenaline can turn lethargy into energy. Water was coming in from outside through the bottom of the wall somewhere under the carpet in that corner. About a quarter of the room had wet carpet now, but it didn’t seem to be coming in too fast. I called the landlord and my roommate for help, and headed outside to find the source.

Yep, there it was at the corner of the house, seeping into my basement bedroom: a huge puddle of water. I didn’t spend much time investigating; I moved some more of my stuff out of danger. Nothing was really wet except my empty laptop case, which had sucked up the water like it was dying of thirst. The only other worrisome items were my suitcases and the electrical cords running through that corner, and all of those were a tiny bit damp but mostly high and dry.

My roommate, V, called me back and asked me to pick her up from campus, so reluctantly I left the flooding apartment to get her. It was what I needed, though: you can never have too many intelligent, common-sensical people at the scene of a disaster. I went in to check on my bedroom as soon as we got back to the apartment, and this time it ocurred to me to check the empty bedroom across from mine, which had a wall facing the backyard like mine. I opened the door and was introduced, for the second or third time in my life, to unbreathable stench. Even though my self-preservation instinct had me holding my breath as soon as I caught a whiff, the scent was palpable, and it made my nose sting and itch. The air was damp with it, and it looked like the entire carpet was soaked. A tiny river of dirty water was flowing past the window.

Ok, so it’s not like we hadn’t noticed a bad smell growing in the apartment. But we’d kept that bedroom door shut since L moved out, and there really isn’t good air circulation in the apartment. V and I had assumed that it was something in the fridge. In fact, as I swam through the stench toward the window to get a closer look at the water, I was thinking, “Oh good, it’s not rotten food in the fridge.”

I opened the window to that bedroom, once I saw there was no danger of water running through it that way, and then hurried outside to tell V that the leak was worse than I’d originally thought. I called the landlord again and encouraged her and her husband to hurry.

While we were waiting for them, V and I followed the water up the hill of the backyard to a sprinkler control in the ground near the back door. Clearly something was broken there, but we didn’t see any knobs to turn to get the water off. The water was coming out in a small but steady stream, so the control box was underwater and the overflow was running down the hill, past L’s old bedroom window, and pooling at the corner of the house where the ground leveled out. V eyed the situation. “If only we had some sandbags,” she said.

Well, there’s a gravel/dirt area on the far side of the yard, and we have a ridiculous amount of plastic bags under our kitchen sink. It only took me a few seconds to put two and two together, and then V and I spent the next twenty minutes filling the bags with dirt and piling them up near the broken sprinkler box. Fortunately, our newest roommate has gardening ambitions, so we had shovels and other tools at our disposal. Our next idea was to try and siphon the water elsewhere in the yard with a garden hose, which worked beautifully.

By about that time, the landlords arrived (and weren’t they pleased to have smart tenants). They turned off the water and started pulling up the carpets, and V and I started digging a trench to lead the water away from my room. Once that was finished, though I looked around for some other way to help out, there wasn’t much more I could do.

By this time it was getting dark, and I glanced down at my sweaty body, rumpled clothes, and mud-covered hands and was surprised how I felt. I felt happy and fortunate. If there was ever a perfect time to have a flood, maybe this was it. We all had evening plans, but they were easily cancelled. We had the tools and the smarts at hand to fix this problem before it got any worse. Nothing of mine had been ruined (though the laptop case is substantially uglier). L had taken her things with her when she moved, instead of storing them at the apartment temporarily, as she’d originally planned. My friend K, who’s highly sensitive to mold, didn’t move in (she would’ve had that room). I had taken my shoes off in preparation for a nap, but stepped into that corner and got my feet wet before actually taking one. My room was affected, and I’m the one with a grandma nearby who graciously allowed me to spend yet another weekend at her house. Most surprising of all, I could’ve felt anxious, stressed, and very grumpy, but all I thought about was what could be done next and how glad I was about all these coincidences. That was the greatest miracle—that I didn’t have to count on hindsight to show me how much I was blessed, but I noticed each blessing as it came. It was as if I sat in the backseat of disaster, calmly watching everything through the window, understanding that every detail was planned and taken care of by the guy driving.

The carpet in my room is mostly dry now. Ugly and crispy from mineral stains and an unfinished carpet-cleaning job, but dry, and my stuff’s back in place over it. Actually, I find the stains more irritating than that whole evening of work, isn’t that strange? I have to keep reminding myself about little coincidences and taking the backseat view and for heaven’s sake, New Orleans and (more currently) Maryland. The flood, and mulling over and discussing the flood with others (who always share their flood stories after) has taught me again that there’s always a silver lining somewhere.

Mine’s streaked across the middle of my bedroom carpet.