One Puddle Reported at Eva and Monroe, Crowd Estimated at Eleven

The first drop hit my windshield with a sound like somebody flicking a quarter at a beer can, and I sat there in the driveway for a full ten seconds not trusting it.

Then the second one hit. Then a dozen. Then the whole sky over Travis Heights opened up and gave us the meteorological equivalent of a firm handshake. That's not a monsoon. It's a contractual obligation.

For the record, and for once this blog gets to deliver good weather news with a straight face: rain fell on Austin today, August 27, and broke a dry stretch of more than a month. That's real. CBS Austin reported it. You can look it up. What follows is what my one block did about it, which is less real but more important.

The gauge

I keep a rain gauge in the backyard. It's a peanut butter jar with lines drawn on it in Sharpie by a man who was confident about his ruler and wrong about his ruler. It's been sitting out there since July collecting dust, two dead crepe myrtle blossoms, and what I believe is a cricket that gave up on life.

After the storm passed I went out with a flashlight like a coroner. Best I can tell, my jar caught about a third of an inch. The cricket floated. I'm counting that.

A third of an inch is not a lot of water. A third of an inch is the depth of the ice melt at the bottom of a Topo Chico bucket at a backyard party. It's what you'd get if a mid-sized dog shook off in your general direction. But this ground has been baking for weeks into the consistency of a terra-cotta planter, and Austin clay does not absorb a light rain so much as reject it on principle. The water hit the yard, considered its options, and left for the street.

Where it all met, at the low corner by the storm drain, was a puddle.

One puddle. Maybe nine feet long, maybe three inches at its deepest, shaped roughly like the state of Oklahoma if Oklahoma had been drawn by somebody in a moving car.

The crowd

I was not the first one there. That honor went to the retired guy from the yellow house, a fictional composite of every retired guy on every Austin block, who had brought a folding camp chair and was sitting next to the puddle the way other men sit next to a fishing hole. He did not say hello. He said, "Smell that."

We all smelled that. Wet asphalt, wet cedar elm, the scorched-dust smell of a city that hasn't been rinsed since the Fourth of July. Somebody's grandmother would have known the right word for it. The rest of us just stood there breathing through our noses like we were at a wine tasting we couldn't afford.

By 7:15 the crowd had grown to eleven adults, four dogs, two kids in rain boots they had clearly been waiting all summer to deploy, and one teenager who announced he was "only out here because the Wi-Fi went down" and then stayed forty minutes.

The kids went in first. Of course they did. They stomped the puddle with the seriousness of people stomping grapes for a vintage that matters. The dogs went in second. One of them, a heeler mix with the judgment of a heeler mix, lay down in it completely and refused to get up, and frankly I respected that more than anything I've seen a living creature do this year.

Nobody had their phone out. Well, almost nobody. But mostly people just watched water sit in a street. That's what a month without rain does to a neighborhood. It makes a puddle into a block party and a block party into the closest thing this town has had to church in weeks.

The professionals arrive

It was too good to last, and I don't mean the water.

By 7:40 a pickup rolled through slowly with a magnetic sign on the door for a foundation repair outfit, invented here because I'm not naming anybody, but you know the truck. You've seen the truck. In Austin, foundation repair guys follow weather the way vultures follow a slow-moving cow on 290. Clay soil shrinks in drought and swells in rain, and every time it does either one, somebody's kitchen door starts sticking and somebody else gets to say the word "piers" and quote you a number with a comma in it. The driver didn't stop. He didn't have to. He just looked at the puddle, looked at the houses, and you could see him doing math.

Then a realtor showed up. Also fictional. Also exactly who you're picturing. Linen shirt, golf umbrella that was entirely ceremonial at this point, and a phone held up at the angle of a man composing a listing. I heard him say, "Seasonal water feature." I heard him say it to nobody, which is how you know it was real.

I would not be shocked to see the house at the end of the block hit the market next week as "walkable to wetlands."

The retired guy in the camp chair looked at the realtor the way the heeler looked at anyone who tried to move it out of the puddle. Nobody said anything. In this neighborhood we have learned that you do not argue with real estate. You just wait for it to evaporate, which, unlike the puddle, it never does.

Civic process, briefly

Somebody, and I'm not saying it was me, wondered aloud whether you'd need a permit to keep a puddle. Whether there's a form. Whether a puddle that persists more than forty-eight hours becomes a drainage complaint, and a drainage complaint becomes a 311 ticket, and a 311 ticket becomes an agenda item, and an agenda item becomes a consultant study recommending a stakeholder process for the long-term visioning of the corner of Eva and Monroe.

The teenager said, "Just let it be a puddle, man."

The best civic policy statement I've heard all year came from a kid who was only outside because the router died.

What we're doing about it

Nothing. That's the point. This city has spent the summer being told how to feel about heat by apps, utility alerts, brand accounts and people on podcasts who moved here in 2021 and refer to it as "the Texas experience." The forecasts came with sponsored content. The cooling centers came with a press release. Even the drought came with a dashboard.

Tonight, for about ninety minutes, the weather came with nothing. It just rained a little and then stopped, and the people on my block stood around a low spot in the road like it was a campfire. Nobody monetized it. Nobody optimized it. The heeler did not post.

By 9:00 the puddle had shrunk to roughly the size of Rhode Island, if Rhode Island were drawn by the same guy in the same moving car. The crowd thinned. The kids got hauled inside with mud to the knee. The retired guy folded his chair, nodded at the drain like he was thanking a bartender, and went home.

I stayed a little longer. It's still warm out, of course. The pavement is already steaming the last of it back into the sky, which is where every drop of water in Austin goes eventually: either up into the air or down into somebody's foundation estimate.

By morning the corner will be dry and the street will look exactly the way it did yesterday, except for one faint, dog-shaped outline in the dust that I fully expect to see listed as a historic landmark by Labor Day.