Here is the continuation of Part 1 of A Crack At Dawn – The Torment Of The Torrent.
Equally spaced pickets made up the upper portion of the gate. The right gate was opened outward, away from the house, rather than inward. “Wow! The floods did that.” I asked myself. The hinge on the gate to the gate post had been wrenched out of its socket, dragging along a hefty chunk of block. The raging waves continued to batter the right gate, which vibrated hopelessly against its post.
Floods are no news
Our street came to a dead end at my house. In the past, when the wall had not fallen, rainwater would flow down the street from our end. It is common knowledge that the estate was built on a waterway. Those in the heart of the estate, where the bridge is located, typically bear the brunt of the rainy season. Some years ago, the bridge in the middle of the estate gave way. Residents behind the bridge were unable to drive their vehicles out of the estate. The flood had wrecked a part of the estate wall, a lane after ours. That was a wild event, but I wasn’t affected at the time. But this! This dawn! A day I’ll never forget in my life.
Testing the floods
My hypothermic body began trembling like the gate. The sky appeared to be cheering the deluge on, for as the pounding rose, so did the water levels. My shoulders rattled. Perhaps they were shaking off the idea of wading through the flock to unlock the left gate, which was still locked in place. I weighed the risks. Step into the floods, open the gate, and risk being swept away by the floods, or wait behind and watch the floods rise and drown us all.
Courage overcame me as I tested the depth of the flood on my porch with my right foot. Silly me! As always, it was one step down. That explains why the flood did not enter the hall from the porch. It would have to rise higher before spilling into the hall. I dropped my other foot on the porch. After ensuring that my feet were securely placed, I dragged them one after the other. My shin felt gooey in the flood. I traced the submerged porch stairs carefully. The water gripped me immediately above my belly. At this point, the floodwaters have gotten under my chest.
The locked gate
Knowing I couldn’t swim, I seized a picket on the left gate and firmly planted my feet in the roaring stream. The water felt great on my skin. I buried my left shoulder in the water, its wetness tingling up my arm. Then I bowed my leg outward towards the gate to make room to swing my hand. I fidgeted down below to free the latch, putting my weight on the gate. I kept on pushing the gate. Why didn’t it budge? Could it be that the pressure built up by the flood was overwhelming?
I pushed. I pulled. I pulled. I pushed. I gave up trying to open the gate. The confidence I set out with into the flood got beat under the rain. My body wasn’t, though. I dragged myself away from a failed mission, across the compound, and back up the porch stairs to our living room. I did not close the door. I turned towards the compound, my mind racing with the floods. Our home had been transformed into an island overnight.
We were not the only ones
A shadow slithered over the hood of the vehicle parked at my neighbour’s house and onto the wall. It faded into the light, revealing the form of my neighbour. He was inspecting his vehicle. That’s when I realised my house wasn’t the only casualty. My neighbour’s house was also replete with floodwaters bulldozing their way through their compound into the confluence on the street. The wall that separated his home from the next-door neighbour’s was not spared. It was demolished to the ground. I saw a flurry of shadows behind the windowpanes of a room in the adjacent home. They appeared to be scurrying to salvage goods.
Was this the apocalypse?
I recently came across footage on social media showing floods in several regions, including Dubia, Brazil, Nigeria, Uganda, and India. Was this the apocalypse? My gloomy thoughts were interrupted by a poignant comment over my shoulder. “Oh, Maa Akua’s car!” my younger sister said, her voice tinged with anxiety. She and her elder sister, who came after me, had flanked me in the doorway, our heads serried in the direction of my neighbour’s saloon car, which was parked outside on the street, the floodwaters lamming the bonnet.
We were trying to determine the degree of the flood’s oppression. Everyone seemed to get their fair share. Fortunately, Maa Akua’s compound did not suffer flooding due to the wall that separates our house from hers, which performed a fantastic job of containing the floods in our compound. Most homes were awake by now. The heavens had been ravaged by extravagant thunder and lightning. It no longer sounded like music to me. The air was filled with grating noises.
Scooping the floods
The cold dawn could not penetrate my heart. Trepidation, despair, pessimism, and dry tears insulated my heart from the cold. As I returned to the house to scoop out the water, my athleticism rose to the occasion. I grabbed the rectangular red plastic ice chest from the kitchen. Its shape made it uncomplicated to drag its long edge by the handle through the flood, scooping up any trapped volume in its path. There was no time or place to deposit the water. The rooms were filled with running water. It was only logical that I scooped down the course of the flood. With all my strength, I bulldozed the floods with very powerful hauls, sending the floods through the hall and down the porch.
‘Wow! Keep it coming! Whoever is doing that is really helping.’ Mom’s voice could be heard coming from the hallway. For a brief moment amid the chaotic dawn, I was unfazed. My mission was singular. Scoop out every molecule of water. The rain did not show any signs of fatigue. I went ahead to steer the floods into the hall, where they joined the muddy-looking stream that flowed in the compound and onto the streets. When this nightmare is done, we will have a lot of work to do. Clearing, washing, and mopping silt streaks off the tiles in every nook and cranny. Fortunately for us, the floods occurred on a weekend. This would give us ample time to speck the grubby floors before the week ended. After much scooping, our bedrooms were signally spared.
The rains didn't stop
‘Stop! ‘Stop scooping!’ my sister yelled from the hallway. “The water is now entering the hall.”
I gulped hard, not breathing for the next few seconds as my heart froze at my sister’s warning. What I dreaded had come true. We were about to die. I dashed to the hallway. The water levels in the compound were rising to the sill of the hall door, slowly seeping into the hall. If the beds and furnishings became drenched, we could certainly huddle on the freezer or kitchen countertops until we had to swim outdoors to a safe sanctuary. We could scale the wall to enter our neighbour’s compound, which had been spared by the floodwaters. As a gated community, today was our turn to experience a flood tragedy. I mused to myself as I returned to my bed, hoping under my breath that the rain would cease so we would be safe.
Screams erupted from the neighbourhood and into the estate, reinforcing my morbid anxieties. The screams were deep, repeated, and holophrastic. The floods and shouts fuelled my imagination. Each scream lighting up morbid scenes in my head. Of houses caving in. Of life being extinguished underwater. My imagination was smothered when the screaming came to a sudden stop, so I quickened my pace back to my room.
Was it the crack?
We were at the mercy of the skies. My heartbeat echoed the beating rain. The house sat silent. Everyone remained silent. However, our emotions were not. The faces of my sisters, mom, and dad looked drab and featureless. Everyone appeared out of it. What was there to discuss?
Perhaps I could begin by explaining how I think the wall gave way to the floods. I couldn’t believe the floods could do it alone, but I was confident that there was an accomplice. The wall itself. Over the years, anytime I was in the backyard, I would wonder at the sight behind the fallen lime tree. A very strange happening on the wall. A noticeable black line ran along a pillar, superficially splitting it in half. The crack was roughly a centimetre deep. Its continuity and span along the pillar startled me.
Obviously, if the floods scended the wall, they could have deepened the crack. The greater headache was figuring out how the floodwaters got to the wall in the first place. The land behind the wall was bushy. On several occasions, my father and I had to prune the branches of shrubs that had creeped through the circular razor-barbed tape wire that ran along the wall. Why couldn’t the bush cushion the floodwaters? Besides, the bush grew on mounds. Did the floodwaters wash the mounds away? Something wasn’t adding up.
Sirens blaring
I enjoyed the dry comfort of my bed with my legs sticking out its edge so as not to contaminate its dryness. I eventually donned a loose, round-neck silky-like shirt to keep warm after a cold struggle at dawn. My ears were drawn to the blaring sirens outside the estate. To satiate my curiosity, I walked to the kitchen door. A red fire vehicle was making its way through the floodwaters. Was the Fire Service on a rescue mission? Was anyone trapped in their home? What a disquieting night! There was still darkness in the sky.
I headed to my room and took solace in surfing social media. I was also proud of myself for capturing moments of this calamity on my phone—a memory that I could always come back to view, not just recall if I survived it.
Back to normal
The floods had kept us up for the last two hours. Most of the residences on the estate have their lights turned on by now. If the rain didn’t wake you up, the encroaching waters would. I couldn’t tell if the rest of the town was kept awake. The voices gathering in our street suggested the rain was relenting. When I got out of the house to engage in ohs and ahs with my neighbours, I inspected our compound. The drumming of the rain was much more bearable now.
For the first time that dawn, I saw the porch tiles and the garden plants. Silt streaked all over the tiles. The garden that abutted the collapsed wall was nowhere to be found. It was obscured by the bush growing behind the wall. The long blades of the bush had been permed by the floods into the garden, glistening in the gaping spotlight.
The floods calm down
I could see further without straining, hinting that the day was almost here. The compound was now a silty river bed, with shattered wall blocks strewn around. On a regular wet day, I would have inhaled the petrichor wafting from the ground, but today’s floods had dulled my senses. My only awareness was of the cold and the shock of the incursion.
The water level was now at ground zero. I didn’t wade through any river this time, but I had to tip toe over the exposed blocks and silt as I made my way to the gate that I once couldn’t force open. My mouth was forced open at the sight of the right leaf of the gate. The side of the gate extending into the hinge was mangled. The floods had pushed it so much that it had retroflexed, yanking the top hinge from its cemented socket. That explained why the left leaf didn’t budge! Ah! I was pushing in the wrong direction.
Flashback in the floods
Our gate was built to open inward, into the house. And here I was pushing it out! It isn’t like I could have opened it inward if I had tried. The sheer force of the roaring torrents would have pushed back like a hand swatting a fly. I carefully traced my feet on good ground, avoiding the shingly earth, as I approached the other houses, looking for traces of damage. I couldn’t simply observe. I took out my phone to capture these brutal sights so they wouldn’t become a tale when narrated in the future. I walked down our street, once rushed by loud, turbulent waters, preening at every structure in the compound of homes.
The unfolding damage
So far, it appears that most properties, particularly those adjacent to mine, did not suffer much from the flooding. Their compounds looked intact and quite clean, unlike the dirty, rocky shore in my compound, until the mark of the floods proved me wrong. The floodwaters, like a toddler, drew their height on the walls that fronted every house. I traced this line with my gaze from house to house, like a toddler marvelling at the progress of his doodle.
So, I was mistaken. Every house had tasted floodwaters, although not as bad as the last two houses on the lane. Even some metal pickets set in the bowed bottom design of the wall of the house after Uncle Percy’s had been ejected, dangling in their place. I met a peer striding up to our end, obviously satisfying his curiosity by surveying the path of the flood.
More shock
‘This has never happened before. Yes, we experience heavy rains, but this is absolutely cataclysmic.’
I was curious to know if the floods had invaded his house.
‘Did your house get flooded?’
‘Yes, my car as well.’
I kept blinking as I turned my ears towards him. “What?”
I could hardly wait to see the car. If he was referring to his parked car on the street, it was clearly in the path of the floods. However, the car parked inside the compound could not have been flooded.
I was picturing how the floodwaters would rise up the slope leading to their compound. If anything, the water in their compound should naturally run off onto the streets.
…To be continued in Part 3
What’s next in Peter’s Box? ¡Hasta luego amigos!
