ER in the rain

January 5, 1999

 My mother called Sunday morning to say she needed to go to the emergency room.
 This was to be our third visit to the Emergency Room in St. Mary's Hospital in Hoboken, and the best scheduled. Our two previous trips had come as the result of last-minute disasters, and always had critical times in my own life when I thought things had calmed down and would go smoothly for a while.
 My mother called Saturday claiming she felt dizzy whenever she got up from laying down.
 "It could be the medication -- the doctors said I might have that reaction -- but I'm not sure," she said.
 "Do you want me to drive you to the hospital?" I asked, already weary from a full day of trying to put together our house after moving in the week before, the usual assortment of cardboard boxes littering the landscape of two floors.
 "No," she said, although overnight she had an apparent change of heart and called me in the morning to ask if I could drive here there.
 I had cancelled a trip to Pennsylvania on Saturday on rumors of a huge storm expected to hit, which -- although merely rain by Sunday morning -- shook the house. Water cascaded off the face of the Jersey City Palisades as if its rock face had always served as a waterfall. Our neighbor across the street saw half the dirt of his back yard flowing down his front steps and into the street.
 Driving was worse since I had to steer uphill into the flow along streets already treacherous by acute angle. I pressed on the gas and hoped no one would run a stop sign while I made my ascent, coming to the crest of the hill only to find conditions worse on the way down. Water pouring into the street from every angle, so that the viaduct into Hoboken looked like a shallow river with the string of cars like boats moving up and down it. The cab in front of me, usually reckless, had a fit of fear and would not move more than 10 miles per hour the whole trip down, stopping at each slightly deeper flow of water as if expecting Moses to part it for him.
 Hoboken was no better. Even in less frantic storms, the mile square town returned to its roots as an Island, the stream along its western edge reemerging, swallowing up the streets that had built above it. Travel was impossible on that whole end of town, and St. Mary's was right on the edge of this zone. I drove up one one-way street only to find it impassable at the end, backed up and tried another street, and in the end had to leave my mother at the front door of the hospital for her to walk through the hallways to the emergency room, while I found safer higher ground to park the car.
 Twelve hours later when my mother finally was released, we emerged into a dry world again, the water having seeped into the deep recesses of the earth from which it would reemerge at the next rain. Yet after so long, I felt cheated, as if the 12 hours had vanished as easily as the water, gurgling down some hole in my life, just one more wasted day waiting for doctors to make up their minds about my mother's health.
 I drove home feeling the chill start, and noting the frost forming on the ground and car where some wet remained. The next morning, I found all the locks to my car frozen as well as the doors, one more nasty shot by mother nature.