A story with a lot of unhappy endings

Part of growing older is telling the stories of your youth - never mind that everyone has heard the story before. Humor my advancing age.

On the news the other night there was some film footage of the consequences of the recent rain deluge in Abilene - namely cars half-submerged in a flooded street. If you've ever lived in flat West Texas you know that there is no drainage; when it rains, there is no place for the water to go, so it fills every low-lying area and depression.

There is a railroad that divides north Abilene from south Abilene, and while there are some ground level crossings, on many north/south streets the city fathers in their infinite wisdom dug underpasses, thereby creating wonderful basins to collect rainwater. In all fairness they have tried and tried to adequately drain these underpasses - digging and re-digging to install yet larger and larger drains, but whenever it rains like it did last Thursday it is a lost cause. Us old folks call those rains "frog stranglers." I used to work in the building that sits on South 1st and Pine, overlooking one of these man-made sometime-lakes, and when they would start to fill, we would all go look out the windows to gawk at the dramas that were sure to come.

One afternoon after a hard rain, we saw a pickup truck with a man and a woman hesitate at the barriers that the police swing into place when there is a chance for flooding. They had been shopping - there were already-wet sacks of groceries in the back of the pickup, and the wife was no doubt unhappy about that and in a hurry to get home so we could see her telling her husband to drive on, and bless his hen-pecked heart, he did exactly that and got about 20 feet further before the truck flooded out.

After he caught grief about that, she sent him to our back door to call for help in getting the truck out. Meanwhile, the water continued to rise - and rise - and rise. We saw the woman shift her position so that she was crouched with her feet up on the seat (all the while yelling at her absentee husband), but that was only a short reprieve. In just a few minutes the groceries were afloat and water was over the front of the truck. A police officer had arrived at the scene, and he was yelling for the woman to get out NOW and the husband joined the officer and and added his voice, but the woman only plopped back down into the now-flooded seat and continued giving her husband what for.

Finally, the policeman kicked off his shoes, took out his wallet and left it and his belt with all his trade craft items on the hood of his cruiser and waded into the water - now up to and pouring into the truck windows - to rescue the woman. He approached on the passenger side, she scooted over and got out on the drivers side, and immediately disappeared from view under the water. In a few seconds she popped back up and headed for higher ground, completely drenched, leaving the policeman searching the truck for the missing woman.

In the end, the unhappy policeman wrote out a citation - no doubt for crossing the barrier - to the unhappy husband, who, on top of drowning his truck and losing his groceries, could look forward to going home with his unhappy wife (you've heard the expression "mad as a wet hen"?) and later on unhappily paying a large fine. Oh, and and also paying an unhappy tow truck  driver who literally had to dive in the muddy water to attach a cable to the truck.

And that's what I think about when I see that it has rained a lot in Abilene.