The Geyser on our Block

I would like to point out that that is not a misprint. This is not a post about a geezer on our block. This is a geyser-related post.

Let me set the scene. It was evening. Yesterday. We were at home. I lay on our two-thirds-of-a-couch sectional, reading the final pages of Dune. Michael was playing video games, until he stood up to get a drink of water. Standing near the kitchen window, he pulled back the drape and looked out into the still black night, which was actually neither still (due to traffic and other activity) nor black (being lit with street lights and what not). And that was when he saw it.

"There's a fire or something over there," he said.

"Huh?" I replied, showing off my quick wit and verbal prowess.

We looked out the window to a place about half a block down Kapi'olani Blvd., where police and fire engine lights were flashing, and a thick spray of water was evident in the air. Quickly, we deduced that we would be able to see more if we stopped looking through the small window, and instead went outside. So we went outside.

No one else in our building seemed aware of the excitement just half a block down, but the people across the street were all outside looking. We looked too. At the distance, we couldn't tell if a pipe had busted or if the water was being directed to put out a fire. Using our brilliant intellect and basic reasoning skills, we figured out soon thereafter that we would probably be able to tell if we moved closer to the action. So we did.

Half a block away, we came to a stop within the circle of police cars flashing blue and white. There was a small crowd of people around us, looking at the enormous spray.

"Do you know what happened?" I asked one man.

"No, I just got here," he said.

I waited for a lady to get off her cellphone and then asked her the same question.

"No, we just came outside and this was going on," she told me.

"Do you know who lives there?" I asked, motioning to the building that was being deluged.

"No," she said. "But their roof is getting a good cleaning."

A few of us laughed. You had to be there.

They spray--the geyser, if you will-- was over four stories tall, which we were able to immediately assess because it was more than twice as tall as the two story building right next to it. In fact, the conversation went thusly:

"What do you think? Four, five stories high?"

That was me. I was being inclusive by asking a question rather than just stating my assessment as fact and leaving others out of the process. It's because I'm so open-minded.

"Mmm... closer to four. More than four, I think."

That was Michael. He was also contributing to the assessment so that the facts would not be based on a single person's opinion. That would be autocratic. We like to discourage that sort of thing.

The water blew up in a torrent. It was really quite an incredible sight. When the wind would blow, it created an arch, which, unfortunately for the firefighters at work, would land on their heads as they slogged through a two-foot deep puddle, trying to secure a giant allen wrench into some unseen valve. They stumbled under the weight of the water, stumbled under the force of it. It was pretty loud out there because of all the water, but I like to imagine that the firefighters were swearing imaginatively, rather than just saying the same few swear words over and over.

Me? I was upwind, and the water--the growing puddles, even-- only came about four or five feet in our direction, instead spilling into the street, spilling over the firefighters, spilling over the apartment unit next the geyser's source. I was able to get close enough to see the base of the geyser. And the base of the geyser was... the ground. But next to the base of the geyser, on the ground, was a fire hydrant laying uselessly on its side. It was an entire fire hydrant. Not a piece. Not the top of it. It was the entire friggin fire hydrant, including part of it at the bottom which was not painted yellow, presumably because it had been secured inside the pavement.

I looked around for a car that might have bashed into it, tearing it from the earth. But there wasn't one. There seemed to be no source to the disturbance.

"It looks like it just came out," I said, motioning to the useless fire hydrant.

Michael grinned with an inward vision. "I wonder how far it shot into the air."

I grinned as well. Maybe I had a different inward vision than Michael, but I bet they were pretty similar. However, I didn't ask, so we may never know for sure.

Michael went back home after a bit because we had not bothered to lock our front door when we left, but I stayed on, orange plastic tumbler in my hand. It was empty of water now, because I had drank it all, and I wished that I had more in my cup, but it's funny because it never occurred to me to go fill it up from this seemingly endless source of water tumbling out of the earth in front of me. I'm not sure the firefighters would have appreciated that anyway.

So I stayed on, and I marked the shape of the water as it hurled itself into the air, came back down upon itself, was hurled up again by the force of more water. And I marked the shape of it as the wind began to blow and it landed on the firefighters who had just made a little progress in turning the ginormous allen wrench. And I marked the size of it as it reached various summits. And I marked the size of it as it began to shrink. And it was funny, because when it was two stories high, it looked so much smaller. But it really wasn't small. It only seemed small in comparison. And when it was one story high I had to remind myself that was still pretty high. And when it was one person's height high (which I could immediately judge because there was a person standing next to it), it seemed so small. But I thought how powerful it must still be, and that even as small as it looked now, I would not want to have that force hitting me. And then it went away altogether.

And a few people on the other side clapped. And this one woman started yelling out, "Thank you! Thank you! Thank God! Thank God for this day! Thank God! Thank God for this day! Thank God for this day! Thank God for this day!" And at first I thought that was kind of nice, but then she just kept yelling the same things over and over and I started to think she was probably a crazy person and she reminded me of the woman we saw at the garden in Chinatown who was screaming at the bushes and splashing water on her feet and at first we'd thought she was an actor or a storyteller giving a performance to children, until we got closer and realized that she had her own reality and something very interesting was happening in it.

The lady kept screaming, "Thank God for this day!" and I thought of that lady in the garden and again I wondered what it was that had been going on from her point of view.

In the relative silence of the lack of geyser, I heard the crowd of people on the other side talking, and one man said, "No, just all of the sudden I heard this loud SHHUH!" And this led me to believe that there had been no wreck or accident or crash or any reason really for the fire hydrant to come out of the ground. That it had just happened of its own volition. But I didn't stick around and ask anyone else, and I didn't have Michael there anymore to offer his own assessment of events, and I didn't find anything in the news this morning or online when I looked just now, so that's just one person's opinion, really. And it's a little autocratic, if you ask me.