Anodyne
Friday, November 17, 2006
 
Two Million Told: Don't Drink the Water (Vancouver Sun headline)

Rain (surprise!) again, this morning's deluge turning the West End's slippery back lanes into a maze of irrigation canals. Yellow leaves reflected under a foot and a half of rainfall. Lane Lake's placid surface punctured by raindrops punching into the water like bullets. The parking lot at Main and Broadway just one big sheet of liquid, draining sideways into a new storm drain, around which the city crew's recently and loosely packed gravel has eroded and been unceremoniously dumped out onto Broadway, an alluvial plane crisscrossed by tire tracks and sodden pedestrians leaping into the road to avoid the white sluice of run-off toward the distant drain.

A bad smell in the bathroom. The water in the toilet bowl brown and rank. I held my nose and flushed, and an even stinkier sample came swirling in to replace it. I took the lid off the tank and gagged, thinking someone had shat in it. But no: just "turbidity" caused by landslides, tsunami waves, etc. unfolding in the drenched mountains. Reliable reports of fish exiting the local mocha-colored rivers ASAP, willing to learn to fly and take their chances overhead.
- posted by cjb @ 9:23 AM


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