Almostgotit.com

I can only (almost) imagine losing my house or my farm or my livelihood in the midwest floods that are still taking place. It’s either too big, or too foreign a set of things for me to think about. But as for the much more specific matter of the IMU building on the University of Iowa Campus in Iowa City, Iowa — now that’s about the size of a thing I can focus my attention upon, for one week at least, and understand.

Almost.

(Images from the UI News Service photo stream on Flickr.com)

The ground was saturated, too.  Iowa Street (above), where it comes into campus, began flooding by Wednesday, from groundwater alone, and we watched water rising — and roads being closed – by the hour.  Those of us staying in the Iowa House/IMU were told we’d have to evacuate by Saturday.  We shrugged and kept on writing.  Some of us helped put little twistie ties on sandbags.  Others of us (ahem) kept on writing, just pausing  periodically to take pictures.  (Did I tell you?  My digital camera is working again!)

By Wednesday or Thursday, 25,000 people had been evacuated from their homes in Cedar Rapids (just a few miles upriver) and we were told Iowa City was next.  Volunteers began arriving in larger droves to further build up the city’s levees, especially around our low-lying arts campus which straddles both sides of the river.  The sight of all those noble Iowans rallying to the cause was enough to make one’s throat go all lumpy.   

Just across the river, the university art museum began to evacuate its most precious paintings (one of my friends witnessed an escaping Chagall) and the library began saving books.  The National Guard arrived, too.

Sandbagging efforts became more and more frantic, continuing into the night Wednesday, right under my window.  I took this photo from the steps to our hotel, while a myriad of giant roaches swarmed not far from my feet.  They looked seriously DISPLACED.

Confession: I had not been filling sandbags.  I had been drinking margaritas, instead. 

Thursday, and the finished levee on our side of the river… 9 feet wide and high.  The Iowa House/IMU visible at right.  Shortly after noon on Thursday, those of us in the Iowa House/IMU were finally told we had to evacuate.  Immediately.

Friday morning, after bunking with a stranger in the limited (and still accessible) hotel space available in the city, and this was as close to the IMU as the National Guardsman would allow me to get. The fresh-faced soldier from Ames told me that the river was now 5 or 6 feet ABOVE the ground here, with only the sandbags holding it back.  With the river expected to rise five more feet, he said the levee would eventually be breached.  It was now too dangerous to be near the levee, or make any further efforts to save the IMU or other arts campus buildings.

My more assertive friend Len (who would ever guess he’s an accountant?)  was able to bypass the Guard to take this picture of our former quarters.  The levee continues to hold, though water is now leaking through.  There’s a piece of paper taped to the bottom half of the right hand door to our hotel… that marks the level of expected flooding, when the river crests and the levee breaches. 

Iowa City is a few miles down-river from Cedar Rapids, which had the worst flooding in the state.  The airport, also in Cedar Rapids, became inaccessible from Iowa City on Friday afternoon, when I-380 was closed to all traffic.  The campus was entirely shut down then, too, including all of workshops for the coming week, and on Saturday I had the choice of either taking a 350 mile detour to the airport (a $500 taxi fare) to use my new ticket, or waiting it out in Iowa City until the following Saturday, when I’d originally planned to fly out. 

It was tempting.  Several of my newly-bonded-for-life friends offered me a cheap place to stay, and a handful of stranded writers planned to continue workshopping on their own.

However, the flood had yet to crest last Saturday, and reports were that I-380 would remain closed for at least another week.   I couldn’t afford any more airplane tickets, and didn’t really see myself spending the whole summer in Iowa.  A classmate offered an alternative… drive with him to the airport 100 miles away in Des Moines and fly home on stand-by, which I did, with no problems with flooded roads at all except when we got off I-80 once to find a gas station.  So I’m home a week early.  Those who remained behind have kept in touch. 

As of yesterday (Monday) The river has crested, and the IMU is now surrounded by water, and much of the University of Iowa’s campus is under water, as shown in this video shot yesterday:

I am terribly disappointed to miss the second half of my long-awaited workshop, of course, but the week I did have was wonderful, and at least I still have a house. There’s a lot of people in Iowa today who are no longer so blessed.

Just before I’d moved to New York, two historic events had occurred: the birth control pill had been invented, and the first Julia Child cookbook was published. As a result, everyone was having sex, and when the sex was over, you cooked something. One of my girlfriends moved in with a man she was in love with. Her mother was distraught and warned that he would never marry her because she had already slept with him. “Whatever you do,” my friend’s mother said, “don’t cook for him.” But it was too late. She cooked for him. He married her anyway. This was right around the time endive was discovered, which was followed by arugula, which was followed by radicchio, which was followed by friseé, which was followed by the three M’s — mesclun, mâche, and microgreens — and that, in a nutshell, is the history of the last forty years from the point of view of lettuce. But I’m getting ahead of the story.