Trong mưa

While our seminar students take their group Vietnamese lessons from 9 to 10 every morning in the same classroom as our regular lectures, I take an individual lesson a few buildings away in the Department of Vietnamese Studies. This usually means wrapping up a few minutes early so I can scamper the 200 yards or so and avoid being late for a lecture on LBJ's escalation of the war or the intellectual background of Ho Chi Minh's communist and nationalist movements in the 1940s and 1950s.

Apparently -- and I would not necessarily have noticed this had sudden events not made the campus's topography very, very relevant to my life -- my language class's building sits a few centimeters lower than the buildings in the central part of campus. As regular readers of this blog know, I consider my body to be a machine; I happily ascend those few centimeters each day without complaint. But in a downpour yesterday, virtually all of the water on campus swept down toward my building, collecting outside the slightly elevated front step and trapping a few of us inside.

My thoughts, naturally enough, turned to the question of how long we could hold off before turning on one another, first with the kind of bitter recriminations of frightened people trapped in a lifeboat, and then later resorting to cannibalism. My guess was that we could probably hold off for 90 minutes or so before the absolute worst began, though admittedly my understanding of the limits of human endurance has been shaped by the length of the average zombie movie.

Others in the building -- perhaps as fearful as I was of the consequences of sticking around, though they hid it behind a kind of resigned laughter, like "here we go again" -- took off their

shoes and socks, rolled up their pants, and plunged into the foot-deep water (immediately

outside our building) and moved up to the slightly higher ground of the road. I'm not one to shrink from a challenge -- except for quitting my marathon training in 1995; deciding not to ask out a girl in junior high school after some of my lying, horrible classmates convinced me that she had been a cast member of the Brady Bunch and therefore far above my station; and turning down a friend's request last year to quit my job and join him on a new venture -- I said, no, but why not take Joe Biden? And look what happened... -- so I followed suit. Silently thanking Princeton for demanding that I update my tetanus immunization, I trudged through the knee-, then calf-, then ankle-deep water to join our class a bit late, barefoot, and soggy.