Rainy Day

New York, NY - Peter - Wednesday, April 10th, 2002 : goo

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When it rains, ir pours; the days go dry, repeatedly here in New York, then the bottom falls out and it rains for days, just as everyone starts discussing drought. I never pictured droughts applying much to big cities; our worries orbit concerns of civility, density, social experiments, terrorism... not the sparseness of water. But alas, urbanites must drink too, bathe, and flush away untold millions of gallons of metropolitan offal.

Most Manhattanites look to the gray rainy-day skies, muttering silent curses; they'd shake their fists at the fates of precipitation if they weren't too busy white-knuckledly clutching wind-blown umbrellas, cigarettes, and coffee. While waiting in the morning's mist for the bus to arrive, I was moved to mutter "drought relief" to a damp, flustered commuter. "Its not my fault I forgot my umbrella" she wailed back, toward the sky while drinking her steaming coffee. Yet the reservoirs fill, the river's pace is up, and the streets begin to wash clean.

An odd process of cleansing, of sorts, settles over the city when it rains for hours on end. Sooty street grime, flurries of paper trash and cigarette butts, coffee cups and faded bus transfers all wash toward gurgling gutter storm drains. If you look carefully, you can see slight streams of stain rinsing off of objects, specks of dirt and diesel exhaust trapped in condensation, accumulating and slowly flowing to the ground in massive drops. Even the trains look as if they're sweating when they enter the station, wipers aflutter even indoors, ridgy, rusty hulks rinsed clean to gleaming graffiti'd steel.

And for a day after the rains, the city smells like ozone; clean air abounds, and things just seem more quiet. Sometimes I pretend that the commuters travel their work-day loops with a sense of awe, astonished by the city's fleeting new cleanliness, fresh streets, white busses, rinsed sidewalks. More likely, though, they're just relieved that they picked a clear-skied day to forget their umbrellas.

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Pidge: I love it , fantastic.

Peter: today is a day like this...

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