Stay away from the deep end
It rained earlier this evening. Not a little shower but one of those “who turned on the firehost” deluges, accompanied with some wonderful lightning. I assume there was also thunder, but the rain was coming down too hard for me to hear anything inside the van. We now know that there aren’t any leaking windows or doorseals, which is a good thing to have under control.
The whole thing ended up reminding me of an experiment from a child psychology course (taken years ago, when I didn’t have any kids to absorb knowledge from). Specifically, we learned about the visual cliff, where even the most confident child won’t step into the void until proper depth perception has developed. A good evolutionary strategy. I mean, if you don’t know where you are about to step, stand fast. Avoid the doozie.
But here we were in a parking lot of the local DQ (it’s a new thing for us, unlike Charlottetown that has had one for just about forever). We couldn’t go inside because of the virtual lake forming around us. Now, we know that parking lots don’t usually have craters; that’s reserved for city streets. But just about every car hesitated before rolling forward, in exactly the same way a child on the edge of an illusionary chasm behaves. Did they really believe that the water was going to rise to the rooftop, in what had been a flat paved section only minutes before?
And how did the crew that laid down the lot miss such an obvious drainage issue? I mean, even a rookie surveyor would recognize that “grade level” doesn’t mean rolling tundra. I don’t get out much, but has this parking lot ever had its own duck colony? An interesting way to get a waterside view for an ice cream place. We were able to leave without the van floating free, and I’m sure that by tomorrow, the lot will be just another blacktop. Tonight, though, it gave a thrill a minute to the cautious road warrior.
