Playing In The Rain

Rain is descending in splattering waves from the darkness high overhead, and it seems the world is entirely wet.  It reminds me of walking to school the few blocks uphill that we had to go when I was a kid.  When it was as wet as it is right now, gullies and gutters coursed with streams of runoff.  When you have galoshes on - rain boots - and a thick raincoat, being out there in blowing wetness is no concern.  

Actually, being impervious to soaking, we seized the chance to play in the thick of it, to make streaming gutters into diverted flows, dam up waterways and float small rafts of leaves and sticks on the little torrents streaming down the street.  

My brother and I had occasion to find large rocks, ones with some real heft, and drop them resoundingly into giant puddles of standing water when we saw them.  To make a huge splash and make a deep gurgling smacking sound and then shout and yell about the quality of the noise was an unparalleled experience for us on a wet, rain-sodden day.  He was older and stronger and a few times picked up a real whopper of a rock and sent it arching to what he'd estimated was the deepest zone of a large brown muddy puddle and jumped back to avoid the wide wet splat.  It was exciting and challenging stuff to make puddles empty themselves of water when a perfect big rock was launched into its center.  Yes, sir, that was finesse at its best.  

Wearing a yellow raincoat, the thick kind with levered clamps instead of buttons, allowed us to abandon restraint and heave mighty missiles into the drink.  Blam!  "Whoa ho ho!  Did you see THAT?" It was nearly an addiction.  After each one, we'd stand there reveling in the dimensions of depth, heft, sound, and quantity of liquid we'd seen fly.   

Another ultimate high could be achieved when we were driving in our car with mom at the wheel.  All five of us or at least most of us kids would spot a big puddle on the side of road.  Then our requests and pleas for her to drive through the puddle and launch a big sheet of water with the tires began.  "That puddle is HUGE! Drive through it!  Pleeeeeeeeeeeeaase!" We begged and wheedled relentlessly, hoping she would risk all and go for it.  We wanted to send puddle water into geyser-like shooting sprays and hear the water roaring under the tires.  

The point was to keep a running Guinness Book of Puddle Records in mind and to bolster our awe of the unknown, represented by big mean lakes of standing water, which were actually a little bit vertigo inducing if we waded out into the middle of one while out walking on our own.  Puddles held a fascination because they were large bodies of water that had just come into being, resulting from ferociously wet downpours.  They were a sort of indicator that while we had been safe indoors during the worst rain, disaster was near at hand.  You never really knew if a puddle might swallow a car up or if the rain would just come smashing into the windows.  For a kid, anything was possible.  

Sometimes mom did drive through, and then we went into orbit with delight, yelling and screaming when the car's tires plowed through the edge of the puddle.  You had to know how to hit the right speed and angle so the water didn't just hit the bottom of the car, preventing it from spraying out sideways.  She would protest that if she drove too fast into a puddle that was opaque with brown silt, she might hit a big rock and ruin the tires.  We negotiated with her and made arguments in favor of huge splashes and tried to reassure her that her tires would not be ruined.  But, how could we know for sure, we secretly thought.  When the big puddles sprayed in a vast arc of whooshing brown, we kids were subdued in awe, "Ohhhhhhhhh, that's so cool!"  

When we had heard heavy rain on the roof all night, our eyes unable to close, we felt small and the rain powerful. Flowing rivulets rushed down the street and, pooling into big brown lurking collections of water, had the same appeal to us as a sleeping lion does to a gang of monkeys who tease and torment it.  With every heave of rock into the maw of a giant puddle, we regained some sense of invulnerability and power.  It was a matter of respect to whack a puddle with a big rock.  We defined ourselves and the water itself by challenging it, but we didn't know that then.  On gray soggy days wearing our raincoats and boots, calm brown puddles of water were just too tempting to ignore.  Sure beats sitting in front of a computer, you know?