Saturday, June 25, 2011

IT'S ONLY FLICKING ITS TAIL

This year may be remembered for many things. 2011 the year Bin Laden was killed. 2011, the year of the tornadoes. Joplin, Sedalia, and Bridgeton in Missouri and many more across the Deep South. 2011, the year west Texas burned....and Arizona and New Mexico.
But for many thousands from Montana to Louisiana it will be remembered as the year of the flood. Along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers many farms, homes and businesses are facing the worst flooding in decades.
Sometimes the water comes from blown levees or opened spillways. Showing that even the government of the greatest nation on Earth can't out fox or out muscle a river with an attitude. The very structures built to protect are proving to be the downfall of some areas. Purposeful flooding of homes here, farms there or an entire community may save a larger one somewhere else. But we should pray for the men who must give these orders. I can't imagine how it must feel to order the blasting of levees and opening of spillways knowing full well it will result in the destruction of homes and disruption of lives, regardless of the reasons.
Many people have fought the river before. Some are facing floods for the first time. For each it is an exhausting and heart rending time and each will deal with the water and its aftermath in their own ways.
Many others will see short clips on the evening news. But out of the path of the high water, they will only empathize with those in trouble. They don't feel the pain the same way.
These lines I write are an attempt to help those people understand more closely how it feels to be directly affected by the floods.
The battle against the rivers will leave scars to heal and bills to pay. It will exact a price in lost time and lost wages, in anxiety and fear and debt. Some will move away from the rivers and others will return, but none in the waters path will escape unscathed.
Some communities will build levees higher and hold off the water. It can sometimes be done, given enough time to prepare and adequate resources to mount a defense. But when these aren't available the waters wash away our efforts. It does so with a power so impersonal, so unaware and so uncaring of our plight. I think that is the most frightening thing about the flood. It ignores me, it pushes through, and it fails to acknowledge that we even exist. We aren't just small in the eyes of the river. When it rages we are nothing.
Unlike a storm or a fire, a flood is often a slow motion disaster. The people in harms way may spend days or weeks working and worrying themselves sick. And when your home or business and your family's welfare is at stake you will get physically sick, maybe violently sick and maybe over and over again. But the river doesn't care.
A person will watch the water creeping closer. They will check the forecasts and then check them again and again. As the ordeal stretches out nerves will fray, tempers may flair and willpower might ebb.
To fight a river is to engage a force of nature that takes its time and gets in your head. And win or lose, afterwards you may be drained and limp and emotionally wrecked.
Some people can take it in stride. They have the fortitude to deal with the adversity and look beyond the trouble and into the future. Some people will blame the government and some will blame Mother Nature, but blame no longer matters once the rivers rise.
To watch a flood up close and personal is an amazing thing. The water tops or bursts a levee and though it roars through the breach it spreads slowly at first. Swags and road ditches fill first. It's interesting, the detachment you may feel, to see which areas fill, or where it crosses the road first. You'll think "Wow, I didn't know that spot was so low." Or "It looks so level but see the path it takes?"
Soon though it's in your house and what once was a river a mile away is now a fast flowing lake, maybe two or three miles wide and two thousand miles long.
It may engulf your home to the eves or stop half way up a wall, it really doesn't matter. For now the structure is shot. A few hours will leave a coating of silt everywhere. Flood lines on even the exterior walls will last for decades unless scrubbed away by hand. Insulation, carpeting and drywall are ruined immediately. If the water stays up for weeks floors may sag and collapse under the weight of accumulated silt as the water falls. Digging out any possessions you may have left behind will be like digging them out of wet cement. The lake that surrounds your home may be whipped by wind into waves two or three feet tall. Waves that will bash out your windows, rip and tear siding or peel away roofing. The current passing through your yard will leave behind all manner of trash and debris and the ever present mud and stench will coat it all.
After the water has gone the mud dries and cakes and your lawn will look like the floor of Death Valley with small cracks and fissures and cakes of dirt everywhere. And what wasn't destroyed in your home, things like rafters and studs and the basic structure of the house will hold the moisture and begin to mold.
The beautiful pastoral landscape that surrounded your home will look like a wasteland once the water recedes. Weeds will grow; fields once fertile might be covered with fine blowing sand. Where the levees were breached, blow holes covering acres will form sometimes holding water as much as fifty feet deep.
The river is like a bull; it's been grazing in the valley for eons and will never move away. In the last two hundred years we arrived like flies and landed on its back. And in spite of the fact that we know the bull will occasionally swat its tail, each time we swarm right back and make the same mistakes again. The rivers own the valleys and though we may occasionally cause the bull to flinch or flick its tail we will never take possession of the valley.
Flies just aren't all that smart you know.