The Tuesday Soak

I had to drive to the YWCA last night in the pouring rain because I'm a die-hard Yoga fan and also because I didn't realize how hard it was raining until I pulled into the YWCA parking lot. It was raining so hard that in the 20 feet between my car and the front door of the YWCA I got completely soaked, and it continued to rain that hard through my 30 min run, 1 hr yoga class, and another 15 minutes later as I stood outside hoping it would let up (and it didn't). So for at least two hours it was a torrential downpour, and understandably my drive home was a little challenging. Visibility was really bad (even with the wipers on full-blast), and the streets were flooded enough that you couldn't tell what was deep water and what was shallow. Thinking I was being smart, I stayed on the main road but found out soon it wasn't the high road and ended up driving through (or you could say under) a flooded intersection. My impressively tough car made it through the deepest stuff (the wheels lifted off the ground a little during the worst of it but touched down again before I ran out of momentum), but then my car stalled out as I hit the more shallow middle of the block. I conveniently stalled out about 10 feet from a cop car, who was blocking the intersection from the other direction. After my car stalled I opened my door to check out the situation and found that the water was almost up to the door, about an inch below the floor of my car (and this is the shallowest part of the road). I'm guessing that was about 6-8 inches, and I'm thinking the deepest part was somewhere between 3 and 5 feet, since the water was over the hood of my car. Since I had nowhere to go, I rolled down my windows and leaned out and had a look around. The rain was starting to let up and I could finally see more than a half a block, and I found that there were stranded people all around me - a car was being jump-started in a parking lot across the street, an SUV was stranded right behind me, and down on the other side of the intersection were at least five more cars that were more deeply submerged (but all bigger than me). I want to make a note here that of all the other cars in the intersection, mine was the one that made it the furthest, AND mine was the smallest (since they were all SUV's or minivans, although mine is no small potato of a car).

The cops finally wondered what I was going to do and pulled up alongside me - since I was in the more shallow part of the block I was the only one they could reach by car. I rolled down the window and the dialogue went something like this:

Me: "what do I do?"
Them: "we dunno. Damn, that's deep back there."
Me: "Yeah, it went over my windshield!"
Them: "Yeah, we saw, it was AWESOME when you went through it!"
Me: "So what do I do?"
Them: "we dunno. Maybe try restarting it in a few minutes after it dries out?"

So I continued to sit. The cops got called away and disappeared. Meanwhile, I saved a few oncoming cars from the same fate as mine by flashing my lights and yelling at them before they could get past me. A few didn't get the signal soon enough and ended up stalled out in the middle of it with the rest of them. After about five minutes, I tried restarting my car again with no luck (although it was turning over which I consider a good sign). I heard some yelling and car horns behind me and looked out the window again and saw a city bus coming down the block. I had been sitting with my lights and flashers off, except when a car approached, so I turned everything back on and watched in horror as the bus actually sped up, hoping to make it through the intersection and around all the submerged cars. Both me and the stalled car behind me were immediately in the middle of the road and I braced myself as the oncoming bus made its path directly for us. At the last minute the bus swerved one way to miss the car behind me and then went the other way to miss me, coming within a foot of my back bumper and causing a huge wake that rocked my car forward a few feet and filled up the floor of my car with two inches of water. I knew there was another bus coming soon and I would wreck my car if I stayed there (if it wasn't wrecked already), so I opened my car door but before I stepped out the woman in the car behind me came wading over. The water was up to her knees, and she was wearing a dress and tights that I'm sure were ruined. She offered to push me out, and told me her car was unpushable due to something or other (it was locked in gear or something). She wanted to get me out of the way though so the next bus could get by and a tow truck could get in. As soon as she got behind my car, three guys came out of nowhere to help (I think they had also been sitting in stalled cars down the block). Since my car was half floating, they easily pushed it up into the parking lot (which was dry) and pushed me into a parking space. I tried to start it again, with no luck, then got out but they were already gone, wading through the water down the block to push the next car out. Again I heard yelling and honking, and another city bus came barreling by, but this time it slowed right in the middle of the deepest part of the intersection because another car was trying to get through. Both stalled, the people on the bus were yelling, the people on the street were yelling, and next thing I knew the bus had started up again and gone on its way and there was yet another car that needed to be pushed out.

At this point I had to decide what to do - I either would wade in and help push cars out, which could take all night, or go home four blocks to my husband who was no doubt very worried. I opted for the latter, since there seemed to be quite a few car-pushers already and I didn't have a cell phone to check in with the husband. I yelled to make sure they didn't need anything, like a cell phone or a flashlight, and then began trotting home. I trotted because I was in the one part of our neighborhood that I would consider sketchy - and once I left the well-populated lake-block full of stranded people there was nobody and poor lighting and a big scary park for a whole block. But, my shoes were still dry which was amazing so I figured I could make it. About halfway there my husband found me in his car, I was drenched, without a car and a little wild-eyed but glad to see him. We opted not to go back, since his car is smaller than mine and I wasn't totally sure where the flooding would start getting bad. I still feel a little guilty that I couldn't thank those people for helping me, so I guess I will someday have to repay the favor to someone else that's stranded.

This morning we went back to get my car and it still wouldn't start. We had to get it out of the parking lot, so we pushed it down the block to a spot on the street. All the submerged cars were gone, the street was dry, and everything looked normal. I'll keep you posted on the car.