Adventures of an Urban Nomad - Trapped

Laurence Harrould - Sunday, December 11, 2011

In Jewish tradition rain is called a "siman brakha" - sign of blessing. Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.

Recently, we had a phone call at 8 o'clock one morning from the owner of the property on which we're staying. She'd had a call from one of the locals saying that if the rain didn't stop by midday we would be flooded in and she was ringing to warn us.

This raised some interesting dilemmas for us. 

Firstly, we had a visitor staying over for the weekend and if we were trapped he'd be with us for an indefinite period. That was OK (he's quite a nice guy) but he'd just started a new job and we were a bit concerned about him having to ring his boss and say he wasn't coming in, at very short notice.

There are animals on the farm (horses and cattle) and they needed moving to higher ground. Sancho would be in his element for this as he's become very proficient at herding cattle. Our challenge would be to get him to move them where we wanted.

Did we have enough food and supplies to last?

So we spent a very anxious morning watching as the rain got heavier trying to decide whether to take our guest to the nearest railway station and hopefully get back before the roads were blocked.

I could tell you about how the waters rose and we were out in the rain moving animals and how we ran very low on fresh food and how we had to call clients and move meetings etc. I could, but I won't, because that would be lying (otherwise called "poetic licence").

What happened was that by midday the rain had stopped and the day became quite hot and humid. The river rose almost to the road but that was it. And so an opportunity for a new experience passed us by.

The interesting thing since that happened has been to notice the type of conversations people have around here. In Sydney it usually gets on to house prices. Out here it's about how high the water gets, when the last big one happened (2007) and who'll be stuck.

This week we move to Rose Bay so concerns about flooding will be off the agenda for a while.

Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Permalink

Comments

Post has no comments.

Post a Comment

Name (optional)

Website (optional)

Email Address (optional)

Please fill in the text in the image in the box below

Your comment