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In summertime, during the occasional heavy rain, I like to sit in my rocking chair and watch the water gush down the gutter, as high as the curb, as murky as the hearts of men. And like Proust's Madeleine, that gutter water triggers a memory as vivid, though not as refined, as Proust's.
Indiana's muggy summer weather got temporary relief when heavy thunderstorms passed through, thunderstorms that gladdened the hearts of the county's farmers and delighted the children of the towns.
It is hard for me to credit it now, but what we did during the heavy rains was swim in the gutters. Is this true? Were we the only family in town with such lenient parents? I don't know whether our friends were also doing this at their respective houses. But we were. The six of us.
Once a deluge began we stripped down to underpants and raced to the gutter in front of the house. (That sounds like a novelist's description of his hero's downfall: "he was on a race to the gutter.")
As the torrent of muddy water flooded toward the grates of the storm sewers, we chose our spots and lay flat out, feet toward the oncoming water, heads raised above the surface to avoid drowning, mouths closed to avoid being swamped by the rain itself. None of us ever did drown, I'm happy to report, though that was due more to luck than to parental supervision. Parents in those days didn't supervise. They birthed you. They fed and clothed and housed you. The rest was blind luck. Or perhaps this is a familial tendency and not a generational one.
After being attacked by twigs and leaves and pebbles that pinged us and bumped our feet, we might reverse position and face the water head-on, belly down, chin lifted, making some but not much effort to avoid swallowing mouthfuls of gutter water. In this position we could at least look ahead and avoid what was coming toward us, such as larger branches. Or cars, perhaps, the drivers more intent on the rain pelting their windshields than on a passel of wild, mostly-naked children making their own fun.
During a Toronto rain I watch our local child-free torrent, wave after wave of roof run-off, garden pesticides, and asphalt leavings headlonging it toward our Gothic Avenue grates and I cannot imagine the children from our child-saturated street plunging themselves excitedly into the waters of the gutter.
What has changed? Standards? The make-up of gutter water? The concept of untrammeled, unsupervised fun for children?
Oh, where are the guttersnipes of yesteryear?
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