Our upcoming holiday to Iowa has been derailed by Mother Nature‘s abhorrence of controlled waterways. I find it very interesting that after decades of damming and digging and piling and filling in, water still manages to go when and where it pleases in my home state.

During the 500 year flood of 1993, I was living in Des Moines. To this day drenching rain, the kind that wipers on your vehicle can’t keep up with, gives me creepy-crawly feelings of dread. We had day upon weeks of this rain. Between rain and the humidity, the outdoors and summer became distant memories. The whole ordeal reminded me, then and now, of the Bradbury story, All Summer in a Day. It was that kind of relentlessness. Noah weather. Old Testament stuff.

I went to bed the night before the levees gave way and the sandbaggers were told to give up and get to higher ground, knowing that the worst was coming. I woke up in stifling heat. The window a/c was off. My alarm clock was blinking and clearly wrong. I checked the light switch. Nothing. No power. I went to the bathroom and with one flush of the toliet, I knew what the worst was.

There was no water.

I had a battery powered radio and the first station I found was relaying the bad news. The Des Moines Water Works had been flooded and the city was now without any running water.

No electricity. No water. What’s a girl to do?

Well, a single girl without work, spouse or child obligations heads to her folks on the other side of the state where there is both central air and fresh water running wantonly through the tap. Provided the roads between here and there were open.

Hey, I can live without running water, but an asthmatic in July needs air conditioning.

The water was scary ass high on the trip to Dubuque. Around Cedar Rapids, it was skimming the undersides of the bridges, but I made it and stayed for the couple of days it took for the power to be restored in Des Moines.

Living without running water is completely doable. I can’t recall running across anyone during the time the city was without who looked as though they were living the modern equivalent of Little House on the Prairie. As I told my mother at the time,

“Everyone looks clean and no one smells – at least from a respectable space bubble distance.”

My landlord brought us a huge plastic water tank and sat it at the end of the drive. I filled my tub and used the water to flush the toilet per the old adage “if it’s brown, flush it down, but if it’s yellow, let it mellow”, and take sponge baths in the sink.

I had friends outside the city who let me come and use their showers, and I volunteered to help clean up in the worst hit neighborhoods. One of them ironically is where I would end up buying a house four years later. That same house would end up my first “married” home with Will moving in during the fall of 1998.

I told Rob the other day that I am worried about that old place even though I sold it five years ago, but it is where the real memories of Will live. The house I sold to move here was never our home. It was just a place that Katy and I lived.

I have relatives in Cedar Rapids, my dad’s older sister who is 83 and my cousin and her husband. I talked to Chris just yesterday and things in the city are just as bad as it appears on the web news (or for those of you who are catching this latest disaster on television). He had just biked to the downtown earlier to take photos. The National Guard (and I can’t imagine where they found spare Guard in Iowa with Iraq still making off with so many of them) have it sealed off for the most part.

He told me that it was eerily quiet. Hard to imagine a city without people or any sound but the lapping of the water. He thinks it will be years righting all the damage and he is right. If all of the damage can be repaired. That is the thing about tragedy, sometimes it sticks with a force of suction that has to be experienced to be understood, and sometimes it becomes comfortable with an insidiousness that is hard to turn away from.

The images from Iowa City were just as heart-wrenching. I lived there for five years during university. The campus has grown and changed but I still recognize bits and pieces. One aerial shot showed the Mayflower dorm and a neighborhood of homes engulfed. The lake in between them covered a park where I used to jog. I would run along the trail next to the river and then back into those ruined cluster of houses.

I don’t know anyone in Iowa City anymore though my niece Tanna will, with luck, be starting work on her nursing degree there in August.

The spirit with which people come together in the face of adversity is encouraging during these times. A shame though that it evaporates as quickly as the water will once the rivers recede and the summer sun is allowed to do its work. The photos of the brigade of mostly students moving the books at the University of Iowa’s main library (which is right on the river) to high ground was proof that people do truly have good hearts and intentions. Will those same people find time in their busy lives and schedules to carry all those books back to where they belong come August though?

Cynical? Perhaps, but as I recall it was easier for Des Moines to find sandbaggers 15 years ago than it was to find volunteers to help with the clean up. Sandbagging, or moving belongings to higher ground, has a sense of urgency that appeals to us more than the grunt work that mucking out flooded buildings.

We are so much more interested in the now of disaster. Take for example the fact that Ann Curry was interviewing Boy Scouts about the horrific ordeal – the very next morning – but where will she be in a few weeks or months when the shock has faded and these boys and their families begin living in the aftermath? Will television and other media be interested in Iowa when the disaster part of the movie is over? There is nothing glamorous about survival.

Our holiday will take us around the outskirts of Cedar Rapids – an impassable waterway right now and by Iowa City then over to Des Moines. Because this will be our route, we are pushing the holiday back a week and with luck there will be roads to travel on again. We didn’t get to Des Moines on our last Iowa visit. Mainly my disinterest in doing so but we were on a tighter schedule. Skipping it is not an option this time. My daughter really wants to visit her father’s grave.

I am ambivalent. The cemetery was Will’s desire. I doubt I’d have buried him otherwise. I see that stone atop his ashes as an anchor to a place that isn’t my home anymore. Home for me, I realize now, is about people. I was reminded of that last night as Rob and I watched the Cusack film, High Fidelity. Cusack’s character remarks that there is some kind of unexplainable body chemistry that goes on between some people – the smell and taste of certain people just feels like home. For me that extends to the flow between well met minds and spirits. Places are just geography. I don’t understand attachments like those. Even viewing pictures of waterlogged places I knew and frequented elicited more awe for the force of nature that had destroyed them than for the buildings and land. My concern for that old house of mine was more about memories that live in me than in that tiny dwelling.

My last observation on the current state of emergency in the state of my birth is that it seems well past time for we inhabitants of planet Earth to acknowledge the changes to the climate because “when you close your eyes, the sun doesn’t disappear to anyone but you”. Eyes wide shut days are over.