Caroline Kettlewell: Journal

August/September 2004

It's that back-to-school time of year. One feels a hankering for pencil cases and a brand new Thermos bottle.

Here in Virginia we've had rain, rain, rain and more rain. Plus rain. Followed by rain. With occasional periods of rain, alternating with rain. We have had more than nine inches of rain in a month when the usual average is about three. That's on top of a July full of gully-washers. For the year, we are nearly nine inches over average. The mildew is growing mildew and the ants are fleeing upward to drier ground in droves. Today, we discovered a colony that had taken up residence in the car.

Ironically, two years ago we were mired in a drought so severe that we were in mandatory water restrictions, and we walked most of the way across the James River without getting our feet wet.

A lot of freakish weather lately--not just here, but all over, it seems. It's predicted that global warming is going to lead to more and more and worse of the same, and yet we seem to live in a state of massive denial. Probably because "global climate change" is too vast a concept to grasp. Flocks of ants in the kitchen, that I can understand. Droughts alternating with deluges--starting to look familiar.

"Global climate change" is one of those "Aaaaahhhh the world is going to end tomorrow unless we do something drastic right now," kinds of scenarios that feels too overwhelming to contemplate. How can I save the world when there is so much that needs to be done?

But the truth is that the old saw, "Think globally, act locally," really does apply here.

September 7
Apparently natural disasters are aiming to be an annual event in Richmond this time of year.

A week ago, tropical storm Gaston rolled into town, and, finding Richmond to its liking, apparently, decided to hang around. The forecast had called for 1-3 inches of rain, but Gaston had other ideas in mind. The downpour began around 3 PM and didn't let up until somewhere between 9 and 10 in the evening in our neighborhood. The worst of the storm was centered right above the city proper, so while the official measure of the rainfall (from the airport, a few miles to the east of town) was something like 5 or 6 inches (and that would be quite enough, thank you very much, over the space of six hours), here in the city we harvested as much as a foot of rain.

People were swimming to escape from sections of I-95 and I-195 flooded four and five and more feet deep. Roads turned into rivers, hills into waterfalls, alleys into fast-moving creeks. Around the corner from us, a yawning pit as large as a car gapes where the road collapsed into a ravine. Elsewhere, there were mudslides large and small, and a vast sinkhole big enough to swallow houses opened in the historic area of Church Hill. There were deaths too--loss that defies quantifying.

In the heart of the city the worst damage was suffered in a several-block area of 19th-century tobacco warehouses and commercial buildings that has become home to a growing number of restaurants, coffee shops, small businesses, and apartments. It's a part of town known as Shockoe Bottom, and it sits at the bottom of a steep topographical "V." As it also happens to be located right at the edge of the James River, Shockoe Bottom used to go under every time the James had a substantial flood, which was often enough. So the Army Corps of Engineers came in the early 1990s and built a massive floodwall (walking the top of the floodwall is a good, off-the-beaten-path thing to do when you come to Richmond, by the way) to keep the river out.

But nature always bats last. This time, the river was on the inside--roughly a foot of rain pouring down the paved roadways of the "V" and churning into a raging rapids that at the very bottom of Shockoe Bottom--17th Street--rose nearly to the second floor of the buildings. People trapped on those second floors by the flash flood were calling into local TV stations on their cell phones and saying, "It looks like class IV rapids out there."

The stories of loss and devastation from the day are still coming in, and all over the city, everyone with a basement seems to be bailing out, but for writers, book lovers and others, the particularly painful blow was the damage suffered by Cafe Gutenberg at the corner of 17th and Main Streets in Shockoe Bottom. Bookstore/coffee shop/cafe Cafe G. opened less than a year ago, but quickly became a thriving part of the local literary and cultural scene, hosting author readings, poetry slams, a Socrates Cafe, musical events, you name it. You can see some of what the flood wrought at the Cafe Gutenberg web site.

More on the flood: here are dramatic pictures from a Richmonder on the scene in Shockoe Bottom as events unfolded (with thanks to Ken Weber).  "Historic" Flood of 2004

September 20

What I'm reading now: The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost.  What happens when you and your girlfriend leave everything behind and head for the ends of the earth, a.k.a. an island in the Equatorial Pacific.

On my I-pod mini (oh, I'm so trendy): The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde.  (The "F" is silent, as in "fshrimp.")

So, we've had dry, cool air and sunshine for two days in a row!  One hardly knows what to do with oneself. One's self?  I'd say the latter. 

It's got me positively dumbstruck.

Click here for July 2004 Journal
Click here for June 2004 Journal
Click here for May 2004 Journal

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