"Reed, Robert - OurPrayers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

News teams were dispatched, thousands of technicians and reporters helping to
absorb the scarce hotel and motel rooms. For all the reasons people watch
tragedies, we were watched. Never before had so many cameras showed so much
disaster and to such a large audience. I've heard it claimed that the Third
World, full of superstitious people, particularly enjoys the dramatics: These
floods are judgments from the gods. Americans have been rich and happy for too
long goes the logic. Too much success leads to misfortune. In other words, we
deserve our suffering. I know I feel that way sometimes. I'm not the most
religious man, but I keep looking at my life, at my failures, wondering why the
Lord is spending so much time and effort trying to drown poor me.

Back in July, someone hired an American Indian -- an official shaman --to come
and try to dispel the rain clouds with dancing and chants. It was considered an
amusing story in New York City; but locally, without exception, people found
themselves hoping for the best. Even committed skeptics waited eagerly for some
change in the jet stream; and for a couple days without warning, it did swing
north, leaving us out from under the worst of the storms. But one Indian wasn't
enough, it seemed. That high altitude river of air returned, and August --
normally a dry and hot cleansing month -- began with tornados and a three inch
downpour.

Sixty-two inches by then, which is twice our yearly norm.

Reservoirs full. Fields and downtowns underwater. Every old record made
ridiculous, and the nervous and sullen weatherpeople admitted finally that there
was no end in sight. Computer models and common Sense were no help, it seemed.
Perhaps by September things would slacken, they would say. Maybe, maybe. We
could always hope.

It rains into the night, hard and then harder.

When I was a boy, I loved rain. Now just the idea of water failing from the sky
seems horrible to me. I close my eyes and dream of deserts. Sand is a beautiful
concept, particularly when it's baked dry and capable of burning flesh, and I
dream of lying naked beneath a fierce blue-blue sky, letting myself broil.

Then I wake and sit up, aching through and through.

I'm sharing a prefab shack with a couple dozen other people, most of them awake
and watching a portable battery-powered TV. The news has a new drama building.
The reservoir downstream of us -- a tremendous inland sea built by the once
god-like Corps -- is being assaulted by runoff and its own intense storms. The
thunder we hear is just the tip of it. By some predictions, ten inches of cold
fresh water will fall in the next hours. And the Corps' spokesman doesn't seem
convinced by his optimistic statements. "Ten inches is within our tolerance," he
claims, words slurring from a lack of sleep, or maybe a love of drink. "The dam
is solid. The excess will drain over the spillway. Yes, there's going to be
flooding downstream. We can't prevent flooding now. But the reservoir will stay
where it is, unless --"