I finally heard from a friend in the second of my worlds. She had just arrived home last Thursday after a month away. That night was the torrential downpour that pushed the canals over the limit. The next day water poured into their house. Her father who is disabled from a stroke, and her mother were able to be moved to a relative’s house but my friend and her sister spent the next week living on the second floor of their house with knee-deep water on the first floor and deeper outside. They were without power for the entire week. And then they had a huge mess to clean up. That is why I just now heard from her.
The gigantic city I was living in last August has recently been suffering from worse than usual floods. At one point they figured over half the metropolis was flooded. Most of the city is built on what were formerly marshes and is drained by a system of canals. Any rivers that passed through were also eventually cemented and straightened and became part of the canal system. Over the years the canals have become the public sewer and there are no words to adequately describe the utter fetidness of these canals today.
Although I refrained from mentioning the canals in previous postings, I am now going to let her rip. The building I lived in is on the edge of one of these canals. Somebody planted decorative bamboo along the edge of the canal to try to hide it from view. Somebody else planted bananas along the other side of the canal. But the breezes wafting off the canal still make it through the bamboo. I learned early in my stay to mouth breath whenever outside near a canal. There is more than one benefit from having air conditioning. The problem was drying laundry up on the fourth floor roof. It can be nice and breezy up there but if the breeze is coming from the wrong direction – it can be pretty difficult to breathe. I was happy when my clothes smelled like fresh traffic, because it could have been MUCH worse.
In the dry season the canals get thick. They don’t ever go dry but they are lower and more sluggish. Sometimes I would stop and just watch the effluvium pass by in morbid fascination, half afraid of what I might see. Some of the effluvia was still recognizable, bubbling away as unknown gasses escape. Only God knows what chemical and organic matter was in it. I could identify plastics, cans, dead rats, coconut husks, tires, papers, etc. A friend’s son and daughter-in-law and two children on board a motorcycle were in an accident on a bridge and ended up in a canal. The baby was submerged temporarily under the, uh, fluid, and was sick with pnemonia and diarrhea for a long time afterwards. But last I heard, he did survive.
In the rainy season there is a bit of relief because the mess is diluted and so is the odor. But, sometimes there is a lot of rain up stream and then the canals can go over their banks.
I was there there a couple of years ago during a normal flood and got to wade home in it. All the filth from upstream, unmentionable flotsam floating and bumping against you in the opague water, other stuff rolling and tumbling along under the surface, fortunately invisible, as you wade through sometimes thigh deep water. One of my companions was nervously wondering if there were snakes. Actually, yes, there probably were snakes, and rats, and baby diapers and more, but since you can’t see them why worry? What you need to worry about is staying on your feet and keeping your slippers on.
Here are a few descriptive words from the thesaurus:
maloderous, fetid, foul, noisome, rank, reeking, reeky, smelly, stinking, stinky, putrid, disgusting, offensive, repulsive, revolting, vile, dirty, filthy, nasty, noxious; odoriferous, odorous, dirty, filthy, foul, muddy, nasty, contaminated, defiled, polluted, tainted, unsanitary, toxic.
I assure you, they are inadequate.
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