All last week the Metro
D.C. area was engulfed in your typical summer weather: temps in the 90s (with
no discernable cooling off after sundown), humidity almost the same, and a
consequent heat index hovering in the low three digits.
Each morning, when my colleague
in the next office, who also came here directly from California, arrived at my
doorway, we’d moan about how hot and
miserable it is. Because—even when it’s hot in California, there’s almost
never the humidity you find here, and you can count on the temperature dropping
by 20 degrees at night.
“Eighty-three degrees
at 0520 today,” I said on Friday.
“That’s brutal.”
“And 91 degrees last
night at 2130.”
“Brutal, man.”
By 1130 on Friday, the
heat index had hit 105, and I was already worried about making it home on the
50-minute Metro ride, without anything to drink.
(Yeah, I know—“eating,
drinking and smoking are prohibited on any Metro train or property.” But since Metro
staff turn a blind eye to it, you see it all the time, especially in the summer.
Maybe it’s just the tourons doing it, but I doubt it. Metro staff might step in
if families started hauling out their KFC-and-two-litre-bottles-of-Pepsi and
handing round the cole slaw to each other, but I doubt it. That train has left
the station, as it were.)
(As an aside: Metro
would have a better case to make for prohibiting beverages—and even food—on their
trains if they could convince passengers that they had a reasonable expectation
of getting to their destination in a timely manner, and therefore they wouldn’t
feel obliged to provide sustenance for a five-hour journey from Foggy Bottom to
West Falls Church.)
Then there was a later
forecast for possibly very strong storms moving into the area late in the
afternoon, with the hope that at least they’d break the heat spell. Man, it’s
always something, eh?
Okay, as I walked the
block from work to Metro Center, there were clouds, but no sign of imminent rain.
I got on my Silver Line train and started working on some spreadsheets until we
emerged from underground past Ballston. At that point, you could see the
almost-black clouds blanketing the north and west, and I thought, well—hope it’s
not too bad on my quarter-mile walk from my station to my car.
Then I cranked up my
mobile phone to check what fresh hell the administration was causing, via
Twitter. And when I looked up around Tysons, the rain had started. Back to
Twitter and a couple of miles past Spring Hill I noticed that the train had
slowed a whole lot, until about a
mile before Hunter Mill when it just…stopped.
And the rain was
pouring down around the car’s windows in sheets. It was like going through a
car wash—absolute sheets. I watched cars on the toll road driving through it
with their emergency blinkers going, and recalled rain like this when I drove
once from Houston to Lafayette, La. That was so bad that you could barely see
the front of your own car, much less anyone in front, behind or on either side.
Must be Metro protocol
to stop when faced with this kind of downpour, even though we were on raised
tracks, so not really any danger of flooding. After some minutes, the train
started up again, and we eased onward toward the final station.
Funnily enough, there
wasn’t really any rain falling at the platform (I was in the first car, so no
overhead structure), but when I emerged from the station, it was raining fairly
steadily. And we were in downpoursville by the time I got home. And it indeed
was somewhat cooler than it had been when I left work in D.C.
So here’s what I’m
grateful for today: that nature here offers such a variety of weather—sometimes
in the span of a few hours. That rain can make you pause and just watch it—even
in a Metro train. And that this particular deluge meant I didn’t have to go out
and water my plants, so I was spared the swarms of mosquitos that lie in wait
for me.
None of this would you
find in California.
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