Pictured at right is one of Washington, D.C.'s tourist attractions, the D.C. Duck. Half-bus and half-boat, You can ride around town on it, and then right across the tidal basin.
If things don't ease up here soon, however, the D.C. Duck might become a mode of commuter transport.
In fact, if things don't ease up here soon, we may all develop webbed feet. WE'LL be the D.C. Ducks.
If you were to visit the nation's capital now, I swear you'd think you were in Seattle. You know, good old rainy Seattle, where they see the sun so seldom that Bill Cosby once commented that when the sun does come out, people look at each other guiltily and ask, "What did we DO?"
Today is Thursday, and I don't think we've seen the sun since last Friday. In the meantime it's been either pissing down or pouring rain down rain steadily. Rain to annoy you a bit, like that persistent dribble that forces you to set your windshield wipers on "every-ten-seconds," and then all of a sudden whoosh--it's coming down like the proverbial cow pissing on a rock.
Last night my wife Valerie was busy in the garage, sorting out things for a neighborhood yard sale this weekend. She wanted me to get my three bicycles out of the way. I put them in the backyard for temporary storage, but was afraid they'd get rained on, so I rummaged in the basement until I came up with the only thing I could find to cover them with -- the drop cloth I use when I paint. Not the best thing, because it's only canvas, with no plastic on either side. But better than nothing. I threw it over the bikes where they leaned up against the back fence.
A few minutes later Valerie came up to me with an old used shower curtain she had found. "Here, this is plastic, it'll cover those bikes better than that canvas drop cloth," she said.
I went out and threw the shower curtain over the bikes. And not a moment too soon, either, because less than five minutes later here it came again, another downpour like something out of the ninth chapter of Genesis.
What is going on here? If this had happened in January and all of this precipitation we've been getting this week had been snow instead of rain, the government would have shut down completely. I'm not kidding. I have lived here in D.C. off and on for years. At the first sign of a winter snowflake, government offices empty out. It looks like the crowd fleeing Godzilla in a Japanese monster movie.
Come to think of it, that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, would it? D.C.'s horrific commuter traffic would get to take a holiday, as would the rampant waste of your tax money on things like invisible sneakers and studies of why fish don't watch television.
I'll tell you one thing, though. All joking about the government aside, this relentless storm system is playing hell with us suburban crabgrass farmers. We have a particularly aggressive species of bluegrass that grows around here. When this stuff takes a nap in the winter, it's just harboring its energies for spring. The grass in my backyard grows so fast that the place looks like the Guatemelan jungle if I fail to mow at least once a week. Now, add all of this rain to that and you have a situation where the grass is growing so fast it looks like it's threatening to overthrow the city.
Remember that Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon about the Pottsylvania Creeper, Bullwinkle's prize-winning flower that grew to monstrous size in minutes...and then started eating people? I think I have something like that on my hands.
So does my next-door neighbor Ted, who came over here last night just as he was preparing to launch a lawnmower assault on his own lawn one more time. He had a great idea.
"I'm gonna buy some goats," he said. "How many goats do you want?"
"I'll take three," I told him. Do I have to provide them with rain slickers?
Ha-ha, of course not.
But I might have to call the D.C. Duck to come rescue them -- and me -- from off the roof if this doesn't end soon.
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