Come......High Water

A boat on the wrong side of the wall.

I'd looked at photos of floods, watched movies with floods and seen floods on the news. Then one night a flood knocked at the door of my tiny yellow house with turquoise shutters and this time the photos, videos and news were about people and a place that I knew.

My house is on a long, thin island between the Venetian Lagoon and the Adriatic Sea.  At its narrowest it's 16 feet and at its widest, about a quarter of a mile. There are only two roads on the island, one by the sea and one by the lagoon. Colorful houses line the lagoon and face the sea, but most (like mine) are tucked in the tiny calli (lanes) between the two.

Storms on the island are always spectacular.  The residents congregate in the lagoon to watch the clouds roll in and the whitecaps grow.  As it gets colder and windier, most head back inside, but some of us don't give in until the first cold raindrops fall.

On November 12, 2019 I wasn't on the island for the storm. That night I received a video with waves sloshing over the low wall on the lagoon side, 30 steps from my front door.  The message said that everyone was on alert for acqua alta (high water). There were voices in the background on the video, but they didn't sound much different from what I usually hear at the beginning of a storm...oohs and aahs like spectators at  a good American fireworks display and a few ciaos from people pedaling past on their bikes to beat the rain. 

Acqua alta wasn't new on the island, but it hadn't been around for nearly two decades after pumps were installed to protect the island from seasonal high water. It took several years before the residents found the courage to store their emergency acqua alta panels in the attic.  That's where I found mine when I bought the house and for history's sake decided to use them as kitchen shelves.

The beginning of the eerie clean-up.

Shortly after receiving the first video, I got a message saying that no one had seen anything like it (which was alarming since many of the islanders are old enough to remember the flood of 1966).  Then came the video with waves pouring (instead of sloshing) over the wall and heading straight down my calle.

The videographer was my neighbor.  She's of the group that usually runs for cover before the first raindrops fall, so her videos were shot from her second floor window. Twenty-eight minutes after her first message she wrote that the water in our calle was one meter high (3 feet, 3 inches) and there was no electricity. Next came a photo with water as high as the bottom of my first floor window. There was nothing to do but wait in my safe, dry kitchen (a 90-minute drive and 20-minute boat ride away) while my friends on the island waited in their second floor bedrooms (because they no longer had safe, dry kitchens). 

The island skyline.

Some families spent the night bailing water out their windows while others tired and went upstairs to bed. Everyone knew the water would eventually recede but many worried about when it would rise again.  Acqua alta had always been a part of life on the island. This group was just out of practice.

For a few hours that night the island and lagoon had become one. Those that slept woke to bikes and upturned dumpsters floating past their doors and found boats where cars were once parked.  I was told to wait a day before making the trip because parts of the island were still under water.

Two days after the flood I shared  the ferryboat with a lot of new stoves, fridges and washing machines. When I arrived on the island I was greeted with somber yet resilient hellos from a population insistent on staying afloat instead of bailing out.

Several years ago I found a sunken boat washed up in the lagoon. I made it into a sofa. This time it didn't sink. It floated around my livingroom until the flood receded.

Runnin' in the Rain

My grandma had a mudroom. When you went in the house through the garage, it was on the left. There were probably a couple of hooks on the wall and there was definitely a stool where my grandpa sat to put on his boots.      

We had the same kind of room at my childhood house. It was also on the left when you went in from the garage, but we called it the back bathroom instead of the mudroom. It didn't have a stool because my house didn't have a grandpa. But you could sit on the toilet if you had to tie your boots .

Our back bathroom was long and narrow. One wall was lined with waist-high hooks overhung with clothes we never wore. The hooks were meant to be used for dirty football uniforms and wet winter clothes. As a family of skiers, snowman builders and tobaggoners, winter was our wonderland. I was never told not to get wet....not until moving to Italy, anyway. Here I'm often warned of the dangers of dampness and looked at in disbelief when I walk through the piazza without an umbrella on big snowflake days.

In Chicago I was a year-round runner. Traction cleats on my running shoes solved the problem of slippery sidewalks, I didn't care how fat I looked in two pairs of running pants and I liked the sound of the icicles clicking in my hair. Even though my Chicago house didn't have a back bathroom, life went on in any kind of weather.    

Due to the great care (many) Italians take to avoid draughts and siutations that involve sweating when there's no hot shower close at hand, it's not surprising that rain can ruin more than just a good Italian parade. It can also (almost) ruin a good run.  Dark clouds out my back window are commonplace.  Behind the olive grove are the mountains and behind the mountains the sky is either convertible blue or 50 shades of grey.  

I was pleasantly surprised the day my 40 year-old neighbor wanted to run on one of those grey days.  And she was unpleasantly surprised when it started to rain. She thought we should turn around until I reminded her we were exactly halfway from home. When she started running faster I told her that we'd be drenched when we got home no matter how fast we ran. She was nervous and cold and uncertain and said she'd definitely have to wash her running shoes as soon as she got home and that her mom was going to kill her. I can't remember if she really said that part about her murdering mom, but all of the scolding kids get for walking in the grass in their socks and sitting on the dirty floor and keeping their coats zipped up leads me to believe a 40-year old might still be afraid of her mom if she came home with wet shoes.

Believe it or not (for my Italian readers), we made it home safely from the rainy run. And, believe it or not (again for my Italian readers), my nervous, cold and uncertain friend finished the run quite giddy and proud to send her husband (but not her mom) a photo of her smudged mascara and huge smile.

I'm not sure what she did with her running shoes when she got home because Italian houses don't have mudrooms.  Collin's Dictionary defines a mudroom as "a room in a house used for the removal and storage of wet or muddy footwear and outerwear." American houses are designed with the idea that we might find ourselves wet and muddy. But the words for mudroom in Italian are atrio/ingresso and those words translate as lobby and entrance, with no mention of mud. It seems Roman architects were too worried about the Colosseum to consider just how much a good mudroom can change your life.