Recently, I went swimming in sewage. Even for those who enjoy extreme sports, I don’t recommend it. Sewage stinks, in all senses of the word.
Let me say right up front that there is a moral to this story and that moral has nothing to do with climate change or infrastructure failings. The moral is: Listen to your grandmother. Even if she is neurotic. Especially if she is neurotic. You shouldn’t listen all the time, obviously, or you’ll end up a shut-in, so listen only when she is right. How do you know when your overbearing, Doomsday-prepping grandmother will be right? That’s just luck.
It was the end of September, and I was strapping my six-month-old into her stroller so we could pick up her big siblings from after-school, when my grandmother called, as she likes to do, to tell me it was raining. Nonny acts as my own personal weather advisory system, alerting me to hurricanes, flash floods, icy sidewalk conditions, and heat waves. I blew off her warnings, as I like to do, dismissing them as the ravings of a lunatic.
“Is gonna be a looooot a rain,” she cautioned, “Tunderschtorms.”
“We’ll be fine,” I assured her. “We’re not going to melt in the water.”
“Leave de baby wit me,” she pleaded.
“Fine,” I conceded. Nonny lives seven blocks away from us, conveniently located near my big kids’ after-school.
Within ten minutes, I was dropping the baby off at her doorstep, and it was apparent already that she’d been right about the rain. It was pouring, the kind of rain which falls not so much in drops but in sheets. Cataclysmic thunder and lightning exploded overhead, making an End-of-Days light show.
“OK,” I told my grandmother as I passed off the baby, “I’ll be back soon.”
“No!” Nonny gasped, “You can’t go out!”
“What, am I gonna get hit by lightning?” I joked. As if replying to my hubris, a peal of thunder erupted outside the window, the subtext of which was clearly, “Keep it up, lady, and see what happens.” Then, for extra measure, the rain was replaced by hail—large chunks of hail—which made a racket on my grandmother’s metal patio set.
Nonny held the baby tighter and shook her head.
“What?” I asked, “I have an umbrella.”
That umbrella might have been useful had not the wind tunnel of Fourth Avenue blown it inside out within five seconds. I got pummeled by hail all the way down to the intersection of Fourth Avenue and First Street, at which point I stopped noticing the hail because I was confronted with bigger problems.
The curb was flooded with the nastiest-looking and most vile-smelling water I’ve ever seen: grayish brown, littered with floating bits of garbage. I looked to my right and realized why. A manhole had popped off the street, sending a geyser of sewage spewing into the intersection.
Trudging through the puddle, which reached my mid-calf, wasn’t the most pleasant experience of my life—what with the slimy bits of refuse clinging to my bare legs—but it was still significantly less revolting than the time I stepped inside the carcass of a dead rat in Central Park, which is the barometer by which I gauge grossness. And, it was over fast—until I got to the next intersection on Garfield Street where the water level was even higher.
“Gotta love city living,” I grumbled as I waded through, consoling myself with the thought that I was almost there; the kids were just a block away, across Fourth Avenue. But once I’d crossed the mammoth puddle, I saw that getting across the avenue—without an ark at least—was not going to be pretty.
The sewage was lapping in waves over the sidewalk, and on the street, the water reached the car bumpers. Huge black garbage bags were floating down Fourth Avenue, just as if it were a river. I hadn’t passed a pedestrian in a few blocks, but as I stood there, somewhat stunned, a middle-aged woman walked by, mincing her steps as if that might keep her legs from getting coated in toxic sludge.
“This is just naaaaaasty,” she grimaced, “and it’s worse that way. Do NOT go that way.” She pointed across Fourth Avenue.
Then she pulled an iPhone out of her purse and started snapping pictures so people would believe her when she told them about it later, I presumed.
I cowered under my umbrella, holding the rim so it didn’t blow inside out, and weighed my options. I could stand there and wait for the sewage to drain, but, I thought as thunder boomed overhead, only if I was OK with getting electrocuted. I could turn around and wait at my grandmother’s until the storm died down—the kids would be OK at after-school for another half hour—but I’d have to trudge back through the massive puddles I’d just crossed. Besides, I was nearly there, just a block away, and I’d come this far. It was just a puddle, after all. It wasn’t Scylla and Charybdis.
I tucked my diaper bag securely in my armpit and stepped forward, slowly making my way to the crosswalk.
“Ugh blegh crap blegh,” I moaned as the water crept up to my knees.
I crossed Fourth Avenue, the six lanes virtually empty, but instead of the water level receding when I got to the other side, it got higher. Within a few steps I found myself waist-deep.
A gaggle of mechanics in uniform stood under an awning further down the street, watching me.
“Hey lady, get out of there!” one yelled, and then another elaborated, “It’s sewer water!”
“I’m TRYING,” I bellowed back as I tried to move forward against the weight of water. It occurred to me that maybe I should give up walking and start kicking but that option, though expedient, seemed insane.
If I had the baby with me, I thought, she’d be doggie paddling in sewage right now. Nonny was right.
Just when it seemed the mechanics would have to send a tire upstream so I could float down the street, the water level dropped and I was on dry land again.
I speed-walked the rest of the block to the kids’ after school program, yanking up the waist of my skirt because it was so sopping, it was sliding off my hips. My skin wasn’t just wet, but gritty. I tried not to imagine little cartoon bacteria characters crawling under my skin, a devious-looking e. coli, a cackling staph, whatever-the-heck germ causes typhoid fever and cholera, doing a conga line across my epidermis.
It was official: swimming in sewage was worse than stepping in rat guts, if only because it was a far more immersive experience.
As I walked into the storefront where Primo and Seconda were waiting, I spotted a rack of T-shirts for sale—which was fortuitous, since by my estimation, I could tolerate about sixty seconds more of being in the sewer clothes before I went cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. In sixty seconds, I would be stripping down naked and it would really be preferable that there be another item of clothing for me to wear at that point because otherwise my children would never be able to show their faces at after school again.
I grabbed the biggest T-shirt I could find, and emerged from the bathroom two minutes later wearing a gray XXL whose hem made it as far as my mid-thigh. A shirt-dress, I reasoned.
“Oh hi Mommy,” my seven-year-old, Primo said, hardly lifting his head from his work, “Did you see the rain?”
“As a matter of fact, I did.”
Seconda, my five-year-old, stared at me: “Mommy,” she asked, “where are your clothes?”
“They were compromised,” I replied, “A little sewage problem.”
Then Primo looked up and began to guffaw: “No offense, Mommy, but you look like a crazy person.”
It was only later, in the shower at my grandmother’s, when I really looked like a crazy person, as I scrubbed my lower half like Lady Macbeth with her damn spot.
Finally, though, I felt satisfied. I had no open wounds and I hadn’t drunk the stuff; I just might avoid cholera after all.
What I would avoid, with certainly, was Fourth Avenue during flash floods. You know what they say: swim in sewage once, shame on you . . .
You can read more of Nicole’s misadventures in Mommyland, and beyond, in her forthcoming memoir Now I See You (June ’14, St. Martin’s Press) and on her blog A Mom Amok).
For Your Parents, Who Get a Kick out of Using “Brooklyn” as an Adjective: BKLYN Larder (228 Flatbush Avenue)
For the Men in Your Life You’ve Already Given a Dozen Scarves to: Bitter & Esters (700 Washington Avenue)
For the Hosts of all of the Holiday Parties You’ll be Juggling: Wedge (728 Franklin Avenue)
For the Friend that Instagrams all of their Meals: Empire Mayonnaise (564 Vanderbilt Avenue)
This bar is in Park Slope, Brooklyn and it is called The Black Horse Pub. I went there to watch a soccer game which is a qualifier for the World Cup to take place in Brazil in 2014. Everyone in the world is playing soccer in order to be one of the thirty-two qualifiers. It is a big thing.
We went to the theater the other night. We got to our seats right before curtain, but there was some commotion on the aisle of our row. An usher was checking the ticket of a large boy/man in hipster attire holding a huge piping hot cup of coffee. A middle-aged woman clutching a purse stood nearby waiting anxiously. The usher declared that boy/man was in the wrong; his seat was about a dozen rows back. It was clear the boy/man hadn’t made a mistake, he just was trying to better his experience. He didn’t apologize or explain why he was there, he just gathered his things, which included a backpack, a laptop bag and that cup of coffee, half of which he spilled on the seat as he was getting up. The woman with the correct ticket for the seat was as steaming as the coffee, and while the usher did his best to blot up the coffee with a huge wad of toilet paper, she launched into a monologue far better than any we would see on stage in those next few hours. It went a little like this:
A Q&A with Denise and Meadow Linn, authors of The Mystic Cookbook
So, what is the secret alchemy of food?
Pull up a chair, and sit yourself down. I’m going to tell you something you already know, but you need to be reminded.
You know the perfect melon when you read one—food writers are hopelessly poetic in the face of hyper-seasonal food. But what happens when the food we pay homage to falls short of expectations? What do we do when perfectly ripe produce is anything but?
BOGOTA LATIN BISTRO | 141 5th Avenue
