hey, ho, the wind and the rain

for the rain it raineth every day.

last sunday (18 may) it rained in the afternoon. ten it rained again monday afternoon. tuesday night the sky opened up late and it rained heavily most of my sleeping hours. on wednesday there were a few hours in which it wasn't actively raining, but then at about 6 pm it really started RAINING.

and then it kept raining filthy blattereing, slat-splitting, barrel-busting rain right through until sunday afternoon when the sun came out and the weather tried to pretend everything was all good between us but the damage had been done.

thursday night the police were out in force, crawling the roads with their spotlights glued to the shoulders and i thought: i wonder if they're looking for washouts?

of course they were. when the water comes it eats away the dirt under the pavement and sometimes you see the sharp gully where the shoulder used to be and sometimes you don't see it so much until the pavement collapses and our road crews have been hot juggling to backfill with big stone just to keep the roads open, the ones they can save.

thursday night the water came and swept away a good deal of weed road.

used to be a lot of road up in essex and westford that were sitting low in relation to the lamoille river and its feeders would just get closed until the water backed off, and in the spring kayakers just use pettingill road as a temporary parking lot for the meltwater playground.

so when i saw the ROAD CLOSED signs i just thought that i'd have a little look at how much water is across weed road because that can be cool.

but the problem is not that there's water on weed road. the problem is not that the shoulder's been eroded or some of the pavement washed out.

there's a chunk missing so big you could drop a dumptruck into it and have room left over for a few smartcars.

i went to look at it on this first day of sunshine, this first day of not-raining and i was not the only person with that idea. it's like a party going on, all the cars and trucks parked and people walking in and out with cameras and -for some reason- paintings of guitars.

we were out to look at the damage to our roads, and weed road was the place to be.