The rains are back. We were granted a few cold, clear days last week, much as a drowning man is allowed to stuggle to the surface for one last look around before the final submarine plunge into another raincoast winter. For two nights now the raindrops have beat a perpetual battery upon the bedroom skylight, and all my dreams have involved water in one of its forms. Two bedraggled cyclists toiling across Second Narrows bridge on their Friday morning commute provide the only spash of colour — red Gortex on one, the other wearing yellow — in a world otherwise grim and grey.

At the corner of West Hastings and Richards Street a man pauses as he steps up from street to sidewalk, to glance down at the water streaming against the curb. Pauses — just into the shelter of an awning, his umbrella already furled — and then steps back into the rain bareheaded, looks down again at the stopper of bright yellow leaves which has formed into a dam against the upstream edge of the drain. Reaches out with the tip of his umbrella to poke at the leafen dam; working at the clumped yellow with the umbrella’s ferrule until he’s made a passage; stands there another moment with head bent over, his gaze intent upon the finger’s width of rainwater which now floods through; the glazed black street dimpled with raindrops, Hastings Street chock-a-block with cars, the crosswalk emptying of office workers who hurry to their elevators, their fluorescent desks, their e-mail, their phones.

For a moment he’s a boy again, his briefcase forgotten, and the rain on his bare head is the rain of an autumn — oh, too long ago, now, too long ago to have been real — an autumn when he was all day in gumboots, mud-spattered and busy at his amateur hydraulics, investigating the principals of fluids: gates and channels, twigs and mud, locks and dams.

Caught in the brevity of an eddy, which swirls him back against the fatal flow of time.