July 14, 2002

• “When the flood comes
  You have no home you have no warmth
  In a thundercrash
  You’re a thousand miles within a flash
  Don’t be afraid to cry of what you see
  The actor’s gone, there’s only you and me
  And if we break before the dawn
  We’ll use up what we used to be”
  –Peter Gabriel, ‘Here Comes The Flood’
  
  
  My parents’ vacation house is in the middle of a solitary road through a river valley between a dammed lake and a sizeable small town. When things are fine, you just go there and it’s nice and pleasant.
  
  You don’t concern yourself with whether there’ll be electricity or a phone line, and you know you’ll be able to get potable water. You drive there, because there’s a nice road. You’ll drive slowly because the whole valley is lovely, even if the scene is marred by brightly-colored inner-tube and canoe rental ad signs. It’s pleasant, even in the middle of July, when all the party animals in Texas have rented a special inner-tube for their ice chest and are floating down the river getting drunk and hooting and hollering and laughing as only a drunken inner-tuber can. It’s even nice then, because you’re in the shade, on the screened-in porch drinking a Shiner Bock, munching on some kolaches you got at Naeglin’s bakery in town.
  
  And you take it all for granted. You drove across two bridges and a road that runs right next to a river, in some places only a few feet above the waterline. The power and phone lines follow the same route. The dam upstream is feeding a carefully regulated amount of water into the river, which flows by at around three-hundred cubic feet per second.
  
  Then there’s a flood. One so huge it overflows the dam’s spillway, creating a new channel for the river below. The porch where you enjoyed your beer, and the rest of the house, and the road leading to it, were all underwater for three days at least. And not just underwater, but under water moving at around eighty-thousand cubic feet per second.
  
  Houses leave their foundations and smash into other houses under this kind of pressure. Cars end up in the tops of trees.
  
  The water picks up everything and drops it. That’s the job of a flood; to rearrange the world. The main thing that gets rearranged is the earth. Topsoil and gravel and rocks and boulders end up somewhere besides where they started.
  
  Where you were drinking your beer is now a hydraulic feature called an eddy. Imagine a clothes washing machine the size of a room, and it’s the spin cycle. Wheee!
  
  The main force of the flowing river is buffeted away from entering the house itself. Some of the energy enters through broken windows and doors, but through an accident of engineering, the house is set at such an angle that the water moves around it rather than through.
  
  Still, though, energy comes inside and rearranges the furniture. The silty water enters with force and slows down inside. Guests had always said the house was relaxing. And just as guests release their cares, the water releases its silt, which builds up on the floor, right on top of the carpet. A foot thick. Very rude.
  
  This same dynamic happens outside the house, too, on the downstream side. A foot-thick semicircular deposit of red-brown mud, as wide as the house, is jostled by an eddy out of the hands of the river to rest atop the grass.
  
  So today, when you go to the river house, there is no electricity. There are no phones (though this isn’t such a big deal in the era of the ubiquitous wireless phone). You have to take your own water. In fact, you have to take your own clean place to sit down, because everything, absolutely everything, is covered in mud. And you’ll have to wait until the road crews have filled in the roads where they washed away from the bridges.

  • 9:59 pm
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