Stickybuffalo.com

1937-2008

the really sad thing about carlin is that his despair and general old-guy crankiness overtook his sense of humor years ago, and he ran out the clock on an otherwise brilliant career coasting on pure bile thinly disguised as standup. lenny bruce said comedy is pain plus time, but i guess george didn’t have enough of the latter.

regardless, and ironically, i expect he’ll live on in the form of chipper, uplifting witticisms mistakenly attributed to him in the kind of blandly humorous email-forwards my dad likes to pass on. a more fitting version of hell george carlin could not have devised himself.

things that washed up in our yard:

we can’t figure out how this got here, or where the other half is. the nearest state patrol field office is in cedar rapids.

we think the picnic table may have come from the park about a half-mile upstream.

tripped on this huge jug of deadly poison while hauling up sandbags from the neighbor’s house. happily the seal was intact, but makes you wonder what else is in that water you’ve been slogging through…

this is my favorite find. as you can see, it’s from the famous Ayinger brewery in Bavaria and traveled a long way to become my new fifteen-gallon brew kettle under the sacred law of Finders Keepers.

items not pictured that also drifted by during the flood: two trash barrels, a door, several trees, and something we think was a buoy that got loose from the reservoir.

two likely long-term political outcomes of the 2008 flood occurred to me while in the midst of sandbagging last week:

one, a lot more people are going to be open to the idea of global climate change after this summer. two 500-year floods fifteen years apart should be enough to convince even the most willfully ignorant skeptics that, at a minimum, something is up.

two, there’s vast political capital to be reaped by whoever is smart enough to grasp the magnitude of the disaster and respond accordingly. unlike louisiana, a state where democrats lost influence with the post-katrina exodus of african americans, there will be no diaspora here. instead, as is often the case in situations where normal life has been turned upside-down, the potential for change — and people’s appetite for it — are at a peak. the conventional strategies and demographic calculations that used to keep populations divided and neatly contained within predictable voting blocs are falling apart faster than a poorly constructed levee.

in the last week i’ve seen iowa city hippies working side-by-side with mormon and baptist missionaries, farmers holding bags for college professors to fill, black folks showing up to stack sandbags in exclusively white neighborhoods. it’s funny how little it resembles the red/blue america we’ve been told we were living in. the more people get outside, meet their neighbors, engage with them in common cause, the less interested they become in the old ideological wedges and abstractions: those who pitch in to help are friends, those who obstruct and drag their feet are not.

as george bush arrives in eastern iowa today, more than a week after the need for help was greatest, nobody is particularly pleased to see him. nobody that i talked to was much impressed by michael chertoff’s mealymouthed, empty platitudes after last week’s tornadoes either. but barack obama filling sandbags across the river in quincy makes an impression:

even if it is a staged photo-op, it’s clear from his remarks that obama has at least spent enough time in the affected areas to have some idea what its like for people there, and more importantly, to understand the feeling in the air and the fluidity (no pun intended) of the political situation. that’s one reason why stories like this one are happening all over the region.

and where’s john mccain? who the hell knows, or cares? people here have been too busy to watch or read anything but local news. nobody’s paying attention to mccain or his 20th-century-style campaign. until he actually shows his face here, he’s a nonentity.

meanwhile, bleeding heartland reports on some iowa GOP bloggers who are objecting to state & federal flood relief on the grounds that it’s politically beneficial to democrats. i’ll give them this much: it’s true that actually, y’know, doing the work of government likely redounds to the benefit of those politicians who are doing it. but convening a special legislative session to address the worst natural disaster in our state’s history, they complain, constitutes pandering to special interests — in this case, the people of iowa. this, ladies and gentlemen, is the legacy of the bush presidency, in which nobody ever lifted a finger to help anyone but GOP cronies. from a post-bush republican mindset, any meaningful action whatsoever is only comprehensible as political payoff — why else would you bother?

so, my fondest hope for 2008 is that iowa republicans campaign hard on this theme, that democrats are only pushing the relief effort because they want your vote — as if rewarding effective leadership and punishing incompetence and venality weren’t the whole reason we vote in the first place.

the last week has trained us not to make optimistic pronouncements prematurely, but it does seem like the worst is over, for our neighborhood at least. the river crested late sunday, two days ahead of schedule and almost two feet lower than predicted. the water line doesn’t seem to have gone much higher than our bottom two tiers of sandbags, which were more than enough to keep it out of our lower level, though a few inches seeped into the garage from below. in short, we dodged the bullet.

the river has been receding fast since yesterday — it’s almost back down to street-level here, though it will be many days or maybe weeks before the rocky shore drive can reopen. the power company shut off gas to the neighborhood on friday, in the midst of evacuations, but miraculously the lights stayed on, along with internet. in order to get the gas turned back on, we need a city inspector to come by and okay the house, but we join a very long list of houses that all have to be checked out individually by a department already stretched thin — we had an appointment to be inspected this morning, but nobody showed. water service, meanwhile, has been uninterrupted, though the city was been mumbling about conservation (the water treatment plant is fine, apparently, but some of the sources of treatable water may not be), so we’re trying to go easy — not having hot water for showering helps.

until the water recedes enough that sandbags can be removed, most of our cleanup work consists of moving stuff back downstairs — it came up in hasty, disorganized fashion, so it’s a big job of organizing and getting rid of crap we should have pitched years ago. happily, though, nothing was damaged. otherwise, the weather is nice and it’s a pleasant interlude before we have to contend with the layer of toxic mud that the river will leave behind all over town. thanks for all your thoughts & prayers, and huge thanks to everybody who helped out!

keep those positive mind bullets coming — it seems to be working. the reservoir crested last night and we’re expecting the river to crest within the next day, potentially a foot lower than previously predicted. amy checked on the house this morning and reports the water is up to the levee all the way across and there’s a couple inches of water in the garage. somewhat disconcertingly, water seems to be seeping up from the cracks in the concrete floor. however, barring any really heavy precip, the worst seems to be over. we’ve been tremendously lucky.

rolling back the chronology a bit, here are a couple more pics from the first day of sandbagging (thursday) that i didn’t get a chance to post before, showing our wall in its early stages and the neighbor’s house before the river took it:

hey presidential campaigns…

available for the taking on a first-come, first-served basis: seven electoral votes in a closely contested battleground state, slightly damp. first guy to show up and demonstrate an interest can have them. one catch: you have to actually do something useful, like mobilize your campaign volunteers & contributors to help with the relief effort. otherwise you risk getting in the way and being seen as an opportunist. see also: wisconsin, with 10 EV’s and a lot of unwanted water.

come get ‘em!

recapping the last 36 hours:

we woke up yesterday to water lapping over the curb and starting to creep up the lawn. in what seems like an astonishingly shortsighted decision from the vantage point of the next day, the official university of iowa position was Business As Usual, so amy went off to class while i charted a course via roads still open to menard’s for plastic sheeting. all the traffic has been funneled into a few streets, so what should have been a 10 minute trip took almost an hour. 

sandbagging re-commenced shortly thereafter with about eight of us — me, the next-door neighbors, my landlord’s dad (long story), and charlie. the sand trucks could no longer get to us, but we borrowed a canoe and began hauling up bags from the across-street neighbor’s now submerged levee, then schlepping them back across the street for ours. 

things really got going when a truckload of sand arrived at the end of the street, just beyond the water. one of the neighbors’ kids is on the UI football team and managed to raise a small army of players, and more of our friends turned out to help along with some total strangers — about fifty people in all. the neighbors grilled burgers and put out a vast spread of food & beverages for the troops. 

somebody turned up a johnboat and a second canoe, which were loaded up with sandbags and pulled down the street and up the driveway to the levee. this went on until about seven, when most of us were too exhausted to carry on. by that point we had a wall theoretically high enough to withstand, just barely, the crest level that was then being predicted. besides, we couldn’t have made it any higher without also widening it significantly, so it seemed like a good time to stop. 

by now the word had gotten around that mandatory evacuation was imminent, so we moved the last of our stuff up from the lower level, packed a few bags, closed the windows, unplugged the appliances, threw a sandbag over the floor drain, and got the hell out. we’ve relocated to higher ground and are staying with our friends jordan and janet. 

fortunately, even though our driveway and the street leading up to it are underwater, we still have access to the house via the hillside above, so we went back today to have a look. as of this afternoon the water had just reached the low end of our levee but nothing was getting through yet. there was a brief period of optimism when it looked as if the river would crest after another 3 feet, which might just leave us dry if the levee isn’t too leaky. but then we got hit with another heavy thunderstorm, which is probably going to raise the levels.

right now, best-case is a low crest and minimum leakage, worst-case is we lose everything, and most-likely-case is a few feet of water in the lower level. we’re lucky in that the city has backed off its mandatory evac policy and merely strongly urged us to bail, but they recognize we can get in and out easily so we’re not in immediate danger and they can’t exactly keep us out short of posting a guard. but the gas has been shut off and water may be next — we’ve already been having intermittent interruptions in electricity. so, living conditions are less than ideal and we’re not planning to return just yet.

that’s our flood story so far. the bigger story (bridges collapsing, hospitals evacuating, curfews, animal rescues) is more interesting, but you can find that stuff elsewhere. more to come… it may be a long summer.

a few shots from sandbagging yesterday: 

a few shots of my neighborhood from this morning:

more later…[p.s. Ben, Charlie -- if you guys know how to make the wordpress upload tool stop rotating vertical images to horizontal, would you please fix the second one...?] 

it’s almost midnight and the iowa river is in my driveway. i’ve been sandbagging since about three, building a levee around our house and the one next door. a ton of people turned out to help — some very good friends from around town, and a lot of new friends who just showed up (something about piles of sand seems to attract people with shovels).

the house across the street went under about an hour ago. i didn’t see it happen, but the outer levee protecting their basement just blew out and the water came crashing in. when i left it was up to two steps from the top of the basement stairs. the owners shut off the power and left.

have been working with the family next door for the last few hours. one of their sons is a UI student and lives downtown, but wanted to get to this side of the river before the bridges go (i think we’re down to one). reports are that the highway 6 levee breached around 10 and the coralville strip is now underwater. the levee also breached at skeeter flats, which is completely inundated. so, essentially, we’re trapped on an island that’s about a third of the city. cedar rapids is even worse.

i took some pictures, but am too exhausted to post them now. i’ll throw them up tomorrow, along with some shots of how things look in the morning.