Follow The Flow

(ed. note: like several archive posts, this has lost several early paragraphs. The story regards my car washing away after a regular workday.)

When I went out to check on my car for the first time, a couple of hours later, there was a wall of fireman preventing anyone from going anywhere into the area. The water was visbly flowing quickly in a gigantic pool around the corner of 15th and Cary. I was parked roughly at the corner of 16th and Cary, )if 16th were a real street), and I couldn’t see anything of my car. I went back to the restaurant where my team was staying and hung out for a bit. They left, but I declined their offer for ride home, since I wanted to see what happened to my car.

I had dinner and then went to check again. This time, there was no barricade and no water. There were a lot of car horns going off, but my car was not where I had left it. I wandered around most of the lot to confirm that it was gone. At this point, it was time to walk home. I fell over once when an area I knew to be solid ground was actually a mud bog about three inches deep. I walked the thirty blocks or so to get home in about forty-five minutes.

After calling in the insurance hounds, and making a tour of the tow yard where my car was most likely to end up, we finally found the car on the end of Tuesday. We went to inspect it on Wednesday morning. It was clear that it had been totally submerged. The top was caved in a bit from an inch-thick layer of mud on top. On the inside of the car, the roof had bits of twig and detritus that weren’t there when I left it last. The whole affair was very stinky and sludgy, but we did retrieve a fair bit of the stuff that I wanted to keep. I wasn’t too upset with losing anything that happened to be in the car at the time, except one computer book.

Mom took the garbage bags of personal effects home to hose them down. We went to a rental place and picked up a car, courtesy of State Farm. That’s where we stand. My car was totalled by about ten inches of rain in a four to six hour timeframe when parked at the bottom of a hill by a river.

Next time, I’ll be in the garage!