Three weeks after

 

 

Three long weeks after a flood the likes of which no river rats in the county had ever seen before, there's no missing what the beast left behind. 

Those hydrangea bushes beside the house have accomplished their mission. The white flowers are gone, but what's left is what's always there this time of year, the congregation of greens that'll stay there in emerald beauty 'till fall. 

There's a new roof on the house, a metal roof, bright and shiny, fire station red. Whoever lived there loved its near florescence so much he painted the window frames and the front door to match, must have been proud of it too. 

It's over now, post-flood. One of those red notices adorns the front door. Life in the house with the new red roof just isn't possible anymore. Flood gorged itself on its life, higher water than anyone can remember.

Did in grain bins from the inside, like sabotage. All that water got in these metal walls and swelled up whatever grain the big guy held until its metal walls gave way and left this one and several of its buddies lying sideways like great dead bugs.

It's not a someone's old picket fence here--it's a railroad track. I'm not making this up.

Tore right off its bed, as if it were an affront for those tracks stay there. It looks perfectly helpless now, as  if the flood deliberately wanted to leave more than family dwellings wrecked. Playing havoc with a railroad track, wrestling it off its gravel bed and twisting it into a children's game, leaves yet another flood story. 

Litter is still all around, but work is going forward--lots of trailers parked along the road where they weren't before; more are coming. Everyone who faces the unwelcome streets is deciding whether they'll start over and try to forget what that mega-flood did to them, how it came in the darkness of early morning.

There's nothing welcoming here, nothing at all. The ordinary folks who lived in this place, like many, many others, may have to build "dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear," to paraphrase Martin Luther King. 

Tornado damage is complete. Homes are moved. Cars are tossed around like handfuls of steel. But the silence of flood damage is eerily different, mostly within, almost a secret until what's left inside gets lugged in a mess to the street.

On a dark Saturday morning, every last river in the region swelled up with 15 inches of rain on saturated ground--all of them, the Rock, the Floyd, the Little Sioux, and Big Sioux all angrily altered the lives of thousands.

Us too.