The channel the day after

The rain came through overnight and was gone by the time I woke up, which was noon, because the shift had run long. The house smelled like wet dust, the smell Los Angeles gets when it finally rains and the streets don't know what to do with it. I made coffee in the shared kitchen and nobody else was around. Their mugs were in the rack. Mine is the chipped one. I took it to the room and then didn't drink it there. I wanted to see the channel.

The river path was open. The water in the concrete bed was the color of tea with too much milk, moving fast in the center and almost still along the slanted walls. People say flood and mean a disaster. Most years what I see is this: a controlled rush in a shape the county poured, and a path beside it that is officially for bikes and is actually for anyone who can stand the sun. The day after rain the sun is the same. The path is just darker at the edges where the dirt washed down.

I walked until the coffee was gone and the chip on the mug was worrying me, because I had brought a ceramic mug on a walk like a person who doesn't own a thermos. I do own a thermos. It was at work. A cyclist called out that I was on the wrong side, which I was, and I stepped over. He wasn't angry. The path was wide.

On the way back a crew in a city truck was pulling branches off a storm drain. One of them nodded at the mug. I nodded back. There wasn't a conversation in it. At home I washed the mug before anyone could put it in the rack with oatmeal on it, which happened once and which I have not forgotten. The channel will drop by tomorrow. I'll have been at work and I'll have missed the middle part, when the water goes from fast to ordinary. That middle part is probably the one worth seeing. I saw the day after, which is what I had.