Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [134]
Eventually he came to a roadblock and parked, following the directions of a man in an orange vest. It was a moment of hard rain. In the distance he could see people passing sandbags down a line, just to the east of the U.S. Marines’ Memorial. He hustled over to join them.
From where he worked he could often see the Potomac, pouring down the Boundary Channel between the mainland and Columbia Island, tearing away the bridges and the marinas and threatening the low-lying parts of Arlington National Cemetery. Hundreds or perhaps even thousands of people were working around him, carrying small sandbags that looked like fifty-pound cement bags, and no doubt were about that heavy. Some big guys were lifting them off truck beds and passing them to people who passed them down lines, or carried them over shoulders, to near or far sections of a sandbag wall under the Virginia end of Memorial Bridge, where firemen were directing construction.
The noise of the river and the rain together made it hard to hear. People shouted to one another, sharing instructions and news. The airport was drowned, old Alexandria flooded, the Anacostia Valley filled for miles. The Mall a lake, of course.
Frank nodded at anything said his way, not bothering to understand, and worked like a dervish. It was very satisfying. He felt deeply happy, and looking around he could see that everyone else was happy too. That’s what happens, he thought, watching people carry limp sandbags like coolies out of an old Chinese painting. It takes something like this to free people to be always generous.
Late in the day he stood on their sandbag wall. It gave him a good view over the flood. The wind had died down, but the rain was falling almost as hard as ever. In some moments it seemed there was more water in the air than air.
His team had been given a break by a sudden end to the supply of sandbags. His back was stiff, and he stretched himself in circles, like the trunks of the trees had been doing all day. The wind had shifted frequently, and had included short hard blasts from the west or north, vicious slaps like microbursting downdrafts. But now there was some kind of aerial truce.
Then the rain too relented. It became a very light drizzle. Over the foamy water in the Boundary Channel he could now see far across the Potomac proper: a swirling brown plate, sheeting as far as he could see to the east. The Washington Monument was a dim obelisk on a watery horizon. The Lincoln Memorial and Kennedy Center were both islands in the stream. Black clouds formed a low ceiling above them, and between the two, water and cloud, he could feel the air being smashed this way and that. Despite the disorderly gusts he was still warm from his exertions, wet but warm, with only his hands and ears slightly nipped by the wind. He stood there flexing his spine, feeling the tired muscles of his lower back.
A powerboat growled slowly up the Boundary Channel below them. Frank watched it pass, wondering how shallow its draft was; it was twenty-five or maybe even thirty feet long, a rescue boat like a sleek cabin cruiser, hull painted a shade of green that made it almost invisible. The illuminated cockpit shed its light on a person standing upright at the stern, looking like one of the weird sisters in the movie Don’t Look Now.
This person looked over at the sandbag levee, and Frank saw that it was the woman from the elevator in Bethesda. Shocked, he put his hands to his mouth and shouted, “HEY!” as loud as he could, emptying his lungs all at once.
No sign in the roar of flood and rain that she had heard him. Nor did she appear to see him waving. As the boat began to disappear around a bend in the channel, Frank spotted white lettering on its stern—GCX88A—then it was gone. Its wake had already splashed the side of the levee and roiled away.
Frank pulled his phone out of his windbreaker pocket, shoved it in his ear, then tapped the button for NSF’s climate office. Luckily it was Kenzo who picked up. “Kenzo, it’s Frank—listen, write down this sequence, it’s very important, please?