While we were under blue skies at the beach, stormclouds over DC were gushing like a crazed fan's loins at a boy-band concert. The phone in the rented house rang unexpectedly, interrupting a languid afternoon spent lounging in sandy, salt-stiff clothes and radiating heat from every sunbaked pore. It was our anguished next-door neighbors, who had just spent half an hour wading outside our house in their bathing suits, using spare bags of mulch to sandbag the downstairs tenant's door against a rising floodtide. Drains and sewers around the city were backing up in a freakish, thunderous afternoon storm, flooding streets and stranding motorists. The overflow ran into underground electrical conduits, hitting bundles of wires that were already sizzling hot from a day of roaring citywide A/C usage. The resulting explosions caused large blackouts and sent manhole covers soaring atop columns of flame.

In short, it was practically Armageddon, and I kind of regretted not being home to see it. As we drove into Washington the following evening, police were still directing traffic at dark intersections, and a number of streets were closed due to high water. Interestingly, the most apparent damage in our neighborhood was to relations between its inhabitants. The downstairs tenant, returning home to find the carpeting in her front hall getting soggy, had somehow failed to understand that the sandbag walls of mulch had been erected in a frantic and altruistic attempt to protect her property. She promptly chewed out the helpful neighbors, who were, as might be guessed, not pleased with her lack of appreciation.

It all paled in comparison with the plight of some of our fellow Washingtonians, who discovered in the middle of the storm that every drain in their house was burbling up the fetid contents of the overburdened sewage system. In a scene straight from a horror film, their sinks, toilets, and tubs filled and overflowed with the stuff. That tended to put the woes of a wet carpet in perspective for the rest of us.

Susan and I walked around the hood the next afternoon to run some errands. Although the waters had receded to gutters and potholes, signs of damage were everywhere. Rugs hung on the railings outside basement apartments. A couple people with wet-vacs slurped the dismal remains of the flood from their floors. Most notably, the entire area was saturated by a sour smell like the foul drippings from a dumpster behind a Hardees restaurant. It was, we speculated, backed-up sewage, now smeared in a thin dry film over the entire surface of every surface below knee level. Our city was coated in poo.