09.17.04 - 11:43 p.m.

The remnants of Hurricane Ivan are hanging around here like an old beggar, repetitive, droning, maybe a little fitful. It's dark now - sunset long past - and with the wind still gusting up and the air cool, wet, chilly, with the day so seemingly short, so dark, so lashed by strange winds and cranky rain, it seems like a winter evening. I watched the day fail. The local news droned on the television while I watched the sky's leaden color change from merely gray to luminous black-marked shadows, to nothing more than night. Of course, they showed the same pictures over and over again: water running, streams rising, old people rescued from sodden houses by fat middle-aged men in 1/2 ton trucks or smart little swift boats, churning through muddy waters swirling where someone's house or elementary school used to be. Local reportage is never so brilliant as when there is weather to be lamented: weather that is far too hot, sparking concern for the elderly, children, pets, weather that is far too cold doing quite the same thing. Weather that is too dry, or too wet, streambeds that are too full, roads full of noxious damn water with no place else to go.

Samples: "Residents of Point Pleasant are concerned about the rising rivers." Cut to: some poor middle-aged woman, hunched over in the rain. An off-camera voice says: 'Are you concerned?' and she looks off-camera, squinting, the light gray and lacy on her face. 'Am I concerned, of course I'm concerned. I've got to get to work yet an' then we'll be up half the night watchin' the river.' She pauses, squinting, wondering if she's fed him enough, or maybe he's just standing there, stupid, because she did little more than parrot back to him what he parroted at her, the standard script. ("Residents are concerned about the dry spell/snowstorms/constant rain/heat wave.") 'It'll be dark then,' she adds, her mouth half-collapses as she sucks on the structure of her false teeth. This is the edited portion of the tape, and it ends quite abruptly. The broadcast goes careening back to some poor sod standing at the junction of the rivers, indistinguishable from the rest of the reports scattered around the region, standing on the banks of some river that is hopefully rising dramatically enough to make it worth their while to stand there through the 2 and 1/2 hours of redundant broadcasts. He steps back and points out that, indeed, the river IS rising, in case you missed it, but fortunately Point Pleasant - like most river cities around here - has a floodwall, and anyway, the major rivers won't crest until tomorrow or Sunday or Monday, when the rain is long gone and a last blast of summer is in the September sky and we can't be bothered to remember all that rain unless there are five inches of foul mud in your house, or your trailer was knocked off on your foundation.

Every flood is worse than some old person or another has ever seen it. I admit: fifth and third avenues might flood all the time, but I've rarely seen the city close the viaducts under the train tracks that bisect the town. We left work early today - the weather, even though by then it was abating, the long waving arms of yellow and green storms sweeping away from us in elliptical arcs. (The Hocking River. The Little Sandy at Grayson - we hear that people are having trouble getting around Grayson tonight.) My agenda of serious rubbernecking starting, of course, at the riverfront park. The Ohio in near-flood is a fascinating thing, the park's lower levels lost in water, the traffic signs marooned in a rich, frothy brown stew, the ducks that congregate near the marina ruffled with sullen irritation at the assault of water from above: water's only supposed to be below, and then dive repeatedly below the deceptively placid surface of the murk to rinse the offending raindrops from their oiled feathers.

I wasn't the only one there; a stready stream of traffic curved down Veteran's Memorial Boulevard, turning off through either of the massive flood gates that the Corps of Engineers said would be closed soon. Saturday or Sunday or Monday, when the river reaches 52 feet, or 53, then the brown water is lapping at the foundation of the flood wall rather than swallowing the riverfront park/what's left of the old flood plain, which is to say, not much, not much at all. When I left, I planned to sweep past the park, to gawk at the creek, which supposedly was so backed up during the 1937 flood, which swallowed all downtown and doubtless sowed the seeds for the floodwall, that it flooded the whole southside. It still floods of course, quite regularly since they denuded the massive hill between sixteenth street road and the interstate, evened up the top and dumped the debris into the culverts for a new "technology park" on land deemed too unstable for the new citywide high school, which still remains - still - quite empty except for the pretty, pseudo-quaint streetlights lining the freshly paved road to the top of nowhere. Rashes of wild clover cover the hillside in summer, pink and green and white, which was, of course, once covered by trees whose roots helped anchor the hillside and absorb and retain the water that, now, has nowhere to go but the concrete course of fourpole creek and Enslow Park, where otherwise nice houses are essentially worthless, wallowing, as they do, in a flat, low-lying plain that floods everytime someone in Hamlin sneezes.

"I've never seen it git this bad - " - that's obligatory footage as well, some old woman, huddled in an Elder Beerman jacket, her wrinkled fingers bristling with rings buried in the hide of her aggrieved looking puppy-dog - "an' I kin remember the '37 flood." Someone I doubt her account. The thirty-seven flood brought water up to my nose into the lobby of my office building a good three blocks from Veteran's Memorial Boulevard, where the floodgates were still open and not even the lower parking lot was yet engulfed in water, althought - admittedly - it was coated with a thick slathering of mud, like an overgenerous smear of dubiously chocolate icing, from the last weekend's high water, after the remnants of Francis rained on us for three days.

City authorities foiled by plans by closing the viaducts, or at least by closing the viaducts convenient to the south side and thus the park. Contrary to the alarmist reports (our file clerk planned to go home via Ohio), the viaducts further down were not closed. Or, perhaps, they were "no longer" closed, high water having quickly receded when the heaviest of the morning's rains passed. The public works department still had the "Road Closed" signs sitting on the side of the road, ready for employ at a moment's notice. Or perhaps they just couldn't be bothered to pick them up again. I wouldn't be bothered: I'd leave them there for the next flood, the way I leave my trash cans disordered at the lip of the grass alley, ready for the next flood, ready for the next week.