After a night of steady rain that sometimes thickened into tropical fury, I ran and walked in the Ross River Parkway in early morning. Solitary ibises and flocks of geese accompanied me, winging through wind and drizzle. Fluffy yellow tree blossoms lay squashed on the paved path, downtrodden by rain and humans. The poincianas that wore flames of scarlet among their feathery, divided leaves when I first discovered this park now dangled long, narrow seed pods which looked as if they might belong in the fairytale Jack and the Beanstalk.

The river ran full, its sandy flanks and bellies invisible, the meadows and groves of shrubs bordering it inundated by its overflow. Sheets of water lay on the lawns in Bicentennial Park, creating temporary wetlands utilized by floating silver gulls and wading white ibises. Beyond exposed red soil displaying sunken fingers gouged by the Wet, feisty little cisticolas still perched atop leafless shrub towers and challenged intruders with buzzes and throaty chips.

On my return to the house, I stripped off my wet clothes and  placed my sneakers on a chair directly in the line of fire of the air conditioner’s blast of cool air to dry them. With the recent continuous days of showers and downpours rendering the drying of laundry outdoors impossible, Vilis and I decided to let the air conditioning, which we have running anyway since I work in the living room, suck the moisture from our laundry and spew it outdoors. This strategy has worked surprisingly well, allowing us to avoid the Paluma radar operators’ predicament of having their clothes mildew before they dried (see January 3 post, http://maginams.ca//2010/01/03/).

By late afternoon, our yard, with the exception of raised beds, was under water. A narrow creek poured down Lindsay Street. From a white-grey sky almost liquid with rain, thunder pounded out a percussion solo accompanied by brilliant flashes of lightning.  When Vilis appeared in the doorway before supper, he greeted me with, “Well, Magi, that was an adventure.” I asked him, “Were there rivers running down the streets?” to which he replied, “You should have seen it. There was one car stopped, stuck because the water was too high. Trucks and cars were going through, pushing waves out ahead of them. On my way to JCU, before I reached the biology building, there was a washout, so I had to park farther away and walk.” I asked him how the Kia had fared. He nodded. “I got there.”

After supper, we ventured out with umbrellas and slopped our way across the golf club, which was deserted and possessed many more water hazards than it had previous to the rains of the past few days. Sand traps resembled miniature crater lakes, and gentle valleys among the rolling swales had become wetlands inhabited by avian waders – ibises, stone-curlews, lapwings. The eastern rough adjacent to the course, where we walked last week after sitting on a bench beside the river, was under several a metre or more of water, with the river’s central current a broad, rippling band in the distance, laden with leafy branches and pushing hard for the ocean. We squelched across saturated turf, waded a shallow creek running through a drainage canal, and returned to the sidewalk, over which water poured from the sodden golf club lawns.

“When I was driving around today,” Vilis told me, “I could really see how Townsville is a huge floodplain. Just a huge floodplain.” He also informed me that the weather forecast is predicting rain for the rest of the week and the weekend. Undoubtedly, this is some of the ‘serious rain’ Richard warned us we would receive. As we slopped homeward, with my flip-flops flipping water up onto my legs and backside, I wondered if today would fit Millie’s description of a day from the old kind of Wet.