I've been meaning to clean my car for some time. One of the difficulties in living in a college apartment-like setup is that there isn't a convenient place to do this. I've gone as far as to walk up and down a flight of stairs to carry warm water in a bucket drawn from a common sink area. When I got busy with my work, the Puritanical appeal of this kind of primitive water-carrying activity was discarded in favor of not washing the car. I thought about taking it to a car wash but I don't trust the machine washes and the idea of paying another person to wash my car was very painful to me for a variety of reasons. All the while I was feeling more and more guilt every time I drove in my white and slowly darkening car. Finally, after three years of procrastinating, I had an idea. I'd wash it during a thunderstorm.
For those folks, especially my friends from Southern California, who don't know what Southern thunderstorms look like, picture sheets of rain so dense that they obscure the other side of the street. The world gets very dark and is frequently illuminated by lightning dancing across the ominous clouds or racing to ground and hitting some tree with branches hanging over fragile power lines. There is a steady and droning roar that you hear from outside generated from relentless drops of water, gathered in the stupefying humid air, rushing in a torrent to earth. Often there are are strong winds that accompany these storms that you can actually see in the rain. The winds gather up bundles of droplets and whirl them this way and that in dancing patterns that eventually disperse onto the flooding streets.
I've been planning for months to use such a thunderstorm to wash my car. It just sounded like a cool thing to do. Unfortunately, the region has been in the middle of drought conditions and the thunderstorms, when they happen at all, have been occurring at about 1-2 in the morning. There was actually a sound reason for this NASA scientists had discovered that Atlanta spawns thunderstorms that only affect the perimeters and regions to the east of the city in the evening or at night, as it gives off massive amounts of heat in the form of a low pressure system. So thunderstorms tend to be stronger around the perimeter of the city and often never reach the interior. Between this phenomenon and the drought, my plan to clean my car had been steadily thwarted all summer.
Finally, we were hit by a massive thunderstorm this afternoon. Warned by the ominous rumbling of this incoming storm, I put on my swim suit, grabbed a rag and some soap, and waited for the rain to follow. When the rain finally arrived, it was accompanied by high winds, lots of lightning and thunder, and it was cold. The latter was unexpected because I expected summer rains to be warm. They are, generally speaking, but not when accompanied by high winds - and, to be fair, they are probably much warmer then storms in the northeast. After a slight hesitation, as I wrestled with my more sensible primitive instincts, I ventured out into the storm and jogged to my car, splashing through puddles. The storm was strong enough that, for odd reasons, it felt like I was swimming to the car, with water getting up my nose and everything.
I got to my car, added soap to my rag, and began scrubbing. This was one of the scarier car washing experiences that I've had. You know that thing they teach you in grade school where you see a lightning flash and count until you hear the thunderclap to do calculate how far away the lightning had struck? For this storm, you had to be able to count in fractions of a second. There would be a flash and a very quick boom somewhere in the vicinity. It was very exciting. Every now and then I'd look up to see if anything nearby had gotten blasted. I was hoping to see something, besides me, get struck by lightning because I figured it would be kind of neat. No such luck. I'm sure that something did get hit because the thunderstorm was severe enough to shut down the entire power grid for the block and at the time of writing this from my cubicle, some 10 hours later, the block is still blacked out. Ignoring the pyrotechnics, I continued scrubbing and was happily rewarded. My car was slowly getting clean. The soap was removing the dirt. The sheets of rain were removing the soapy residue. Everything was going according to plan. The whole thing was a very invigorating experience. I highly recommend it to the foolhardy but strongly recommend that you don't carry golf clubs, and are not in a flat parking lot where you are the tallest thing around.
I was literally halfway through washing the car - you could tell because the car had taken on two distinct colors - white on the left and gray on the right - when the rain slowed and stopped. More cosmic irony. If it had been any other time, it would have been a random interval and my car would have been mostly clean or mostly dirty. But exactly halfway through the car makes it a cosmic joke. Most people complain about having it rain after they had washed their car. I was probably the only car owner complaining about the rain stopping while I was washing my car. I tried to take advantage of what water was left to finish the other side but eventually gave up. My car now has a severe Jekyll - Hyde complexion to it. At least I sit on the white side.
All things considered, it was a good experience. The car is at least half clean. Half of my guilt has dissipated. I have a better understanding of why thunderstorms are lethal and why the weather advisories tell you to stay indoors. However, my car is not entirely clean and I'm sure this will bother me. The good news is that a hurricane is supposed to be on its way to the East Coast in the next week or so and with that much rain, I can finish the other half and maybe do the tires.
