THE RAINS

John Tavares 

      Jared missed the mass evacuations. He stayed in his apartment and did not join the stream of refugees heading north to higher ground, above the sprawling city. The torrential downpour continued for several days and several nights, longer than any previous downfall of precipitation. There had been simply no letup in the rain, no relief. When authorities first ordered mass evacuations, most residents and virtually all neighbors complied and evacuated. Jared decided to stay after he quietly argued with his neighbor, concerned about his safety and well-being. Polly insisted he join her, but he resisted the evacuation order. 

      When Jared tried to pretend that nothing extraordinary had happened during the first few days of the rainfall, which occurred at the end of a record heatwave, he constantly received reminders that the city had entered a state of emergency. During the first day, before the evacuation orders, he even tried to visit his favorite café and comic bookstore downtown. But he could not commute across the city because the subway line, tunnel, and subway station was completely flooded with brackish water. 

      The flooded tunnels had already claimed the lives of a group of urban adventurers who wanted to record and document the storm in an urban setting. But the storm unexpectedly grew more severe, and the storm chasers became trapped in a flooded tunnel during their explorations. While kayaking through the subway tunnels, they were overwhelmed by an onslaught of gushing waters. Rainwater started rushing into a subway station north of the lake, on higher ground where they thought they would be safe. The party of adventurers ended up suffocating and drowning.  

      On the second day of the rains, when he decided to stay home and resume his freelance work duties, Jared could not log into the website of the company for which he had a contract to provide software emergency services, debugging, and operating system optimization. He thereby began to lose hours of billable services, but this should have been the least of his concerns.  

      Then the internet went down and cellphone service was lost. Even the landline and VOIP phone he kept for emergencies and backups failed to work and function. On the third day, when his part of the city, on lower ground, close to the shore of Lake Ontario, received an order to evacuate Jared ignored the urgent directive, the sirens, the electronically amplified megaphones, the emergency broadcasts and battery-operated FM and AM radio warnings. 

      Jared believed he was about to experience the adventure of a lifetime. He did not see what he could lose by staying, since he had his digital camera and several lenses to capture a variety of landscape and skyline perspectives, in photographs, from wide angle to zoom. Remembering the semester when he was a journalism student and volunteer at the campus newspaper during his first year of university, he thought he could document the disaster and flooding. In fact, he even envisioned creating a website where he could post his images and commentary. 

      That documentary project would have to come after the flood, after he resumed a normal life. As the rains continued he wondered if he would ever resume a normal life. Many of his books and personal belongings were already stored in his storage locker, located far outside the city, on higher ground. He found himself following the practice of fellow city dwellers who decided to stay, to stand their ground. Still, many decided to move their personal belongings to what they regarded as safer places.  

      Jared boxed his desktop computer, placed them in durable plastic storage bins, and drove through several inches of rain flooded streets to the elevated expressway where he followed a convoy of urban refugees impacted by the flood and the torrential rain. What was most depressing was the rain continued, never abated, never receded, never stopped. The rain, the downpour, continued to pelt the concrete and asphalt and fell on the streets and sidewalks that had been turned into rivers, creeks, and canals. 

      The storage facility was located on a hillside a sixty-minute drive outside the suburbs of the city. Elevation increased the further north one drove and therefore the storage facility was located on high ground, at an industrial and warehouse facility, the barren site surrounded by a high chain link fence located at a higher elevation, which he could never see getting flooded. Then again, he had never seen rain this voluminous, rain this durable and consistent. The constant rain and downpour, the deluge, was a meteorological mystery. 

      At the warehouse facility, he pulled his kayak out of storage. He also loaded his hip waders into the kayak. He packed his backpack with enough dry goods and tinned food, ready to eat, as if he was going on a long camping trip into the tamed wilds of Algonquin Park. Then he strapped the kayak to the racks mounted on his car roof and drove back towards the city. He reached the large parking lot of a huge, abandoned shopping mall located near a flooded creek—an area he remembered from the times when he shopped for staples and the cheap salty and sugary snack food on which he subsisted as a college student. 

      Jared figured this abandoned parking lot might be the southernmost place and locale with dry land in which to leave his car. He decided to park his car in the large parking lot of the abandoned shopping mall in the hopes the motor vehicle would not be flooded so its engine refused to start. He even feared the car might be washed away completely if the torrential rains resumed and the roadway was eroded and collapsed. 

      He loaded his backpack and hip waders, which started to feel heavy and bulky, after he carried his kayak to the flooded embankment of the creek behind the mall. Then he got into the kayak with his provisions, which should have lasted at least a week, if he could scavenge for food along the way. He paddled along the creek until it merged through flood waters with a street that had transformed into a waterway with the rains. He followed this channel southward into the downtown area. 

      Jared decided he would first visit his date, which was originally supposed to occur that day, but after the torrential rains started he was unable to contact her. He simply could not remember the last time he had a date. Jared had met her at Woodbine Beach, a week ago, near The Beaches neighborhood where she lived in a squat wartime apartment block on Queen Street West. 

      Violet was fascinated by his kayak, as she walked alongside him on the sandy and gravelly shore of Lake Ontario. She peppered him with questions about his long narrow watercraft. He agreed to meet her at a café on Queen Street West that evening. After they had lattes at a coffee and croissant shop on Queen Street and chatted on beach towels on the sand at Woodbine Beach, until sunset, she invited him to her apartment block. He drove to the squat wartime building the first night he took his kayak for an outing with her. Now he paddled southwards down Yonge Street, which appeared flooded from Dundas Street to Lake Ontario. In fact, that part of the city had become part of Lake Ontario. He paddled past flooded motor vehicles, waterlogged buses, and floating bodies, face down, drifting bodies, drowned bloated bodies, including one he recognized as the corpse of a uniformed police officer. Then, as he drifted in the kayak, taking in the remarkable flooded scenery, the abandoned, flooded streets grew eerily quiet. He entered an area where there were no living humans around. 

      Jared suspected he was violating some sort of curfew or emergency order issued by the police and emergency services. But he had not heard about any curfew or evacuation order technically. He decided to paddle onwards to meet with his date. He paddled along Queen Street East where the numbers of drowned floating bloated bodies grew greater in number. 

      Queen Street East was now a river. As he floated, drifted, and paddled that distance, the further he paddled along Queen Street East through The Beaches neighborhood the greater the number of flooded buildings, homes, stores, shops, and restaurants he encountered. 

      Finally, Jared arrived at Violet’s apartment block. He found Violet’s body floating in the lobby. He imagined she had found herself stuck in the lobby wondering what course of action to take as the flooded waters rapidly rose. He remembered she told him she was afraid of open water and the lake. She said she usually ended up panicking whenever she tried to swim for fear of drowning. 

      Jared tied his kayak to the door and threw her body over his shoulder. She had a ground floor apartment. She might have survived if she evacuated to a higher floor or had an apartment there. Then again, she may have tried to escape the building, believing she would be safer, drier, and free, if she tried to seek help or flee to somewhere else, on higher ground. Perhaps she was hoping to flee to somewhere where she believed she could be rescued, or seek help, like downtown. 

      Jared climbed from her floor four flights of stairs to the rooftop where somebody had already laid out drowned bloated bodies and had marked them with orange spray paint. He assumed they had written names and dates on their bodies for identification purposes.  

      The heat and humidity had become intense; the skies remained cloudy and gray, but the rain had finally ceased. His date had prominent colorful tattoos on her arms. If rescue and recovery workers were able to clean up this part of the city, recovering and identifying her body should be easy enough.  

      The fortunate part about being single and a loner, and on the autism spectrum: he had few friends and family members about whom he needed to worry during such a disaster. Still, he remembered his uncle, who had provided him with a basement apartment when he first moved into the city. 

      Jared decided to check in on him. He lived on Euclid Street off Dundas Street West. He started paddling along Queen Street East, taking the route he had taken back in those earlier younger years in the city on a streetcar. Many of these transit vehicles stood abandoned on the streetcar tracks, flooded with water. He passed them in the eerie silence, noticing the absence of the clanging and heavy rolling noises, as he continued along Queen to Yonge Street, where the number of flooded motor vehicles and floating bodies increased.  

      Jared even encountered boaters on bass boats, flat bottom boats, kayaks, row boats, canoes, and even jet skis, looting huge flat screen TVs, stereo equipment, tools, bottles of medications and drugs, and he speculated, even canvas bags of money into their boats. Some of them carried weapons, handguns, shotguns, and rifles. They were in no mood for friendly gestures, small talk, or convivial greetings. They bore stone, cold faces, as if on the morning commute through the underground subway trains. He merely ignored them, looked the other way, and continued to paddle.  

      Law and order had broken down and health and safety had become completely compromised. He saw no first responders, no police, no emergency vehicles, no paramedics, no ambulances, no fire fighters, no fire trucks. He supposed it had simply become unsafe for them to work. These personnel may have abandoned their posts, or exhausted themselves during the onslaught of the rains, the endless precipitation, and the ensuing floods.  

      Jared went down Euclid Street past the cafes, shops, storefronts, and restaurants. His uncle had first introduced him to the Portuguese Canadian ethnic neighborhood when he first arrived in the city, a seventeen-year-old, about to start his first year of college, an outsider, from northwestern Ontario, naïve to the worldly ways of the urban and urban world. 

      Then Jared arrived at his uncle’s house, his uncle’s pride, which he had built up and renovated extensively and which now looked completely flooded. He tied his kayak to the guardrail near the base of the fire escape stairs and climbed the fire escape stairs to the second-floor door and patio. The door was closed and locked, but he realized he still had the key on his tether and key chain. He wondered if his own key, which he kept tethered to a belt loop in his pants, for years, long after he moved out of the basement apartment, still worked. The key clicked in the lock, the door opened, and he found himself in his hip waders, which he had used a few times when he had made an attempt at fly fishing for trout in a river, up to his waist in the water. 

      Jared found his uncle’s body floating near the stairwell on the main floor. His uncle had set up pumps, sump pumps, emergency power generators, and water hoses throughout the structure, the basement, the ground floor, and outbuildings of his large house. He imagined that his uncle had perished attempting to rescue his house, which meant so much to him, as a retired construction worker, who helped build countless condominiums and office towers in the metropolitan area, from the flood. It seemed exactly the way he would have wanted to die, protecting his property. Jared thought his Uncle Paul’s favorite saying was, Get off my lawn, even though, in true city style, he barely owned any lawn, since the extensively renovated and expanded house, garage, and a small vegetable garden covered most of the property. 

      He dragged and carried his uncle’s body on the stairs and placed it on the rugged steel corrugated patio of the staircase, the steel fire escape, near the grape vines. He covered the body with a blue tarp, which he latched and secured with rope in case the torrential rains resumed and the mass flooding continued. 

      Then, after he paused to pick and eat a handful of grapes, he continued to paddle northwards along Bloor Street. He remembered his cousins who lived just off Bloor Street near Spadina Avenue. The semi detached house was completely flooded. He simply did not have the courage and initiative to check their house and see what horrors might avail him. Then he paddled along Spadina Avenue southward to Lake Ontario and through Chinatown—the avenue filled with floating debris, including rotting fruits and vegetables, to say nothing of bodies. Looters moved through the older buildings searching for goods to stock up on their shallow bottomed boats, skiffs, canoes, kayaks. 

      Jared paddled along this storm-made waterway to the open space and broad skies and deep waters of Lake Ontario. When he reached the elevated lake waters, he paddled along what had been the shoreline and lakefront. 

      He decided he would resume his journey until he reached a suburb, town, or city, which had not been impacted by the torrential rain and flood. When he reached the geodesic dome of Ontario Place, though, two men in a canoe paddled furiously from the shoreline towards him. As soon as he realized they were in pursuit of him and he needed to flee, he picked up his pace, but his pursuers, both athletic, bare chested, with muscular arms, covered with tattoos, and shaved heads, overtook him. 

      They beckoned him with their paddles. They distracted him, with this sudden conciliatory gesture. Then the duo crashed their aluminum canoe into his kayak. One stood and the other reached from the stern. They clubbed him with their paddles repeatedly, with all their might. They beat him until he was unconscious and bloodied. They heaved and tossed him into the deep chilly waters of Lake Ontario. Then they seized his kayak with its provisions.  

      One assailant slipped and fell into the water, as he attempted to board Jared’s kayak from the canoe. Finally, after Jared’s assailant struggled and splashed, and even flipped the kayak, he righted the long slender watercraft. He managed to pull himself aboard the sliver-like boat, donned the lifejacket Jared had doffed to avoid the heat, and positioned himself comfortably in the seat with the paddle. The pair paddled away, as his body drifted along the littered shore of Lake Ontario. The two paddlers steered towards their boathouse in a marina near the geodesic dome—the canoe and kayak moving at a steady pace.