Storms, natural gas leaks, and fallen students

Even in the midst of the calm, crime-free atmosphere of this small college town in rural Wales, there is occasionally some drama. Here on the seafront, we experienced a good amount of it last night.

A storm came in yesterday afternoon, with violent winds and driving rain. Waves were crashing against the seawall up and down the promenade, sending sprays of mist into the air and sometimes even cascading out onto the street. After dinner I walked outside and stood at the railing for a while (notice that I didn’t say on the railing), watching the scene unfold around me. “Things are definitely going to get interesting later on,” I said to myself as I headed back in.

Shortly afterwards I walked outside again and noticed a crowd gathered in front of one of the other houses owned by the university, a block or two down. Everyone had been called outside due to an alarm that had been set off indoors, and it was rumoured that there had been a leak in the natural gas heating system. I had taken my laundry down to the basement of this building a short time before, and since the doors were locked and I couldn’t get to it, I walked back to my flat again.

About half an hour later I returned, and again, there was a crowd outside the building, gathered on the promenade. This time, people were out there for a different reason. From what I could gather, shortly after they were given the go-ahead to head back inside – just after I had walked away, before – a guy had stood on top of the railing of the promenade and, losing his balance, fallen into the churning waters below. In the time I had been gone, the police and fire department had been called, and by this point an ambulance had arrived and everything. All of the wardens were out, wearing neon-yellow emergency vests and talking hurriedly among themselves, and a man bundled up in full body gear, wearing a helmet with a light attached to it, was making his way along the base of the seawall below, climbing over the rocks with a life preserver in hand while holding onto the wall for balance.

I stood there for a few minutes with everyone else, taking in everything around me, but once we all realized that there was no hope of rescuing the poor soul, I didn’t see much of a reason to stick around. The whole thing reminded me of a scene from the novel White Noise (Don Delillo), and I immediately began to feel guilty for being there, entertaining myself at the site of another man’s demise. So, I paid my silent respects to the fallen student, and headed back down to the basement to take care of my long-neglected laundry. An hour and thirty pages of British political history later, I opened the dryer and found that my clothes were still wet. The heat had been turned off in the building earlier, in response to the alarm, and I had just wasted a pound. I bundled my clothes back into my laundry hamper, hauled them back up the three flights of stairs to my flat, and hung them on doorknobs and bedposts in my room, reflecting on the events of another day.