On Wednesday, July 27th, the weather forecast had said there was a 30% chance of rain, but there had been a lot of dry days all summer with the same possibility. I headed out for my bike ride that evening hoping that it would start raining before I got too far so I could go home and get caught up on my writing. But it didn’t and it was also quite hot down on the ground beneath the big, luminous and indecisive clouds.
On Broadview a
little girl was trying to pull her little bicycle with training wheels up the
front steps of her house. She still hadn’t cleared the first step when I
passed.
As they say,
“Wouldn’t you know it?” although how could anyone have known that just as I was
at the north end of the Leaside bridge I started to feel raindrops. It was
raining as I entered Leaside and it really started pouring. Since I was already
soaked and the rain wasn’t cold, I figured I might as well finish the ride I’d
intended to make. I turned right on Esandar Drive. There was a strong smell of
some kind of herb or spice in the air as I passed the Amsterdam brewery. I
don’t know if it was some kind of herbal beer ingredient that I was smelling or
not. I followed Industrial Street up to Commercial Road and followed Industrial
back to Laird, then headed back for the bridge.
By a strange
coincidence, as soon as I was back on the other side of the Leaside Bridge, the
rain stopped. It got quite hot again almost immediately and I was starting to
predict that all of my clothing, except of course for my shoes and socks, would
be dry by the time I got home.
I rode down Pape to
Danforth, and one block west, at Gough, I stopped to use the washroom at
Starbucks. When I was leaving it looked like they’d built the Starbucks inside
of a waterfall. I stood under the coffee shop’s canopy and waited, because it
looked like it was going to be another short downpour. I could still see plenty
of blue between the clouds and when I leaned out to look west I could see blue
behind the Toronto skyline. I waited about ten minutes, but the rain got more
intense and the blue was replaced by grey, so I took my phone out of my pocket,
stuffed it deep into my backpack so it wouldn’t get wet, and resigned myself to
be an aquatic cyclist.
At Broadview I got
splashed by a car but the water was pleasantly warm.
Another bizarre,
bridge related coincidence was that the rain stopped again as I was crossing
the Bloor Viaduct and the started again once I was on the other side.
There were strange
alternating pulses of warm and cool air as I rode into the heat rising from the
sun baked concrete and sometimes through veins of a breeze that came down with
the rain.
The puddles that I
splashed through were deep and warm, like a bath.
There was a smell
of freshly turned soil when I passed flowerbeds that were being hammered by the
rain.
Waiting at the
light at York and Queen, a flattened Tim Horton’s cup floated slowly down a
river in which my bike wheels were resting.
When I got home, my
shoes were loudly sloshing as I walked and my living room floor was soaked
around my living room chair as I began to peel my juicy clothing off. I carried
my shoes out back and dumped their contents on the deck.
That
night I started watching the second season of I Love Lucy. The first episode
had the famous scene in which Lucy and Ethel were working on an assembly line
as candy wrappers and as the belt starts to move faster and faster they start
stuffing the candy in their mouths in order to keep it from getting past them.
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