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.
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!
Loading ...