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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Noah spotted in
Kaneohe during rainsOne of the more unusual sights you might have encountered had you been driving through Kaneohe during the recent downpours was an apparently crazy man perched perilously on the roof of a house shoveling leaves out of the gutters with his hands.
With the rain beating down so hard, visibility was nil and the man moved along the slick slanted roof with the agility of a drunken seaman making his way across the deck of a fighting frigate keeled over and the scuppers awash.
I was thinking that someone should have told that idiot to get off the roof, that no amount of flooding inside a house was worth breaking a neck over. But nobody did and the idiot, who was me, actually, continued his foolhardy enterprise.
That was just a little bit of the fun we had during what was one of the worst rain storms in the past eight years. There were so many high points, it's hard to pick out a favorite.
IT COULD HAVE been when I thought I had lucked out and found a parking spot at Safeway near the building so I wouldn't get soaked running into the store. I stepped out of the car into near waist-deep water, which explained why nobody else had jumped on this prime parking spot.
Then again, it was also a jolly time discovering 3 feet of water had backed up under the house and the sump pump I had installed years ago had not kicked in. The reason it had not kicked in is because I had unplugged the bloody thing just a few weeks earlier while painting the garage. It had been plugged in for eight years. Eight years. Since the last deluge of Noah proportions that thing had been plugged in, waiting to be called to it's duty. And some idiot unplugged it just weeks before the Great Thanksgiving Washout of 2003. What joy!
Or maybe the high point of the day was discovering my wife soaked to the gills and building what appeared to be a dike behind the house where a flood of water had infiltrated her walk-in closet and was threatening to carry away the storage room. Placing brick upon brick, and looking very much like Sissy Spacek holding back the river in the movie "The River," my wife gamely shouted through the downpour, "I think I've diverted it!" only to see a breach develop in the breastworks and watch helplessly as lawn furniture, yard implements, cats, dogs and a bicycle were washed down the street and into Kaneohe Bay.
But to be totally honest, the most enjoyable aspect of Deluge Days was discovering the new roof -- installed at a cost that caused bankruptcy trustees islandwide to clasp their hands to their chests in giddy anticipation -- leaked in four distinct places into the living room. What fun!
What's really fun is that as of this writing, the torrent has not yet ceased, animals are queuing up two by two outside the house to get in and the roof, like Bali Hai, is softly calling an idiot to climb up and clean the gutters once more.
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Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com