Come a Flood

by Lisa Swanson Faleide

The winter of 1996-1997 was so mercurial on the northern plains, it became predictable. You could forecast a full-on blizzard about every two weeks, and you’d be right about 90 percent of the time.

I had a nursing baby at home on the farm that winter, and two older sons, one a teen and one almost. My husband was starting a new business now that we had folded up our farming operation, a business that took him away from home about when every other blizzard broke out. This left the boys and me to wait it out alone without transportation or snow-clearing Equipment —"excess" that had been sold at auction a couple of summers before.

But life had begun to improve since the birth of our third son just before Easter of the previous year. That red-haired, freckle-faced cherub I’d secretly longed for was the new life we all needed to help heal the scars of what was widely perceived as our farm failure. There is a photograph of our family taken after the Easter service at our beloved country church, our faces shining with hope, my body full and round, blooming with mother love. At least that’s what I see when I look at that photo in my mind’s eye. Memory is my reality.

An aura of joy long repressed is almost tangible in the photos taken a few weeks later of our complete family gathered in front of the hand-carved antique baptismal font, our eldest son in his confirmation gown holding his newly baptized baby brother. Another photo shows his four baptismal sponsors, close friends I have dubbed "the four prairie godmothers," intent on and content in their new role. All married to farmers, control over their own fortunes, like mine, has often been tenuous. Yet here we had all gathered to celebrate baptism and affirmation of baptism. New life, water, and word — we were renewed.

It was water — or not enough water, the drought of the late 1980s — that had been a principal cause of our losing the way of life we’d expected to continue into our dotage. In an ironic turn of weather, a baptism of another sort awaited many of our neighbors, my parents in particular. It surely wasn’t anything like the gentle, hope-imbued ritual we’d just celebrated. In the family-speak usually reserved for a long, pounding rain: Come a flood.

Water, ice, and fire
As the interminable winter was passing into memory and our little one’s first birthday brought more cherished photos, the Red River of the North melted too fast, got jammed with ice floes, and overran its banks along the entire North Dakota and Minnesota border and into Canada all the way to Winnipeg.

Just a few years before, my parents had decided to leave the farm for careers in Fargo. They found a great house whose large backyard ended at the banks of the normally placid Red River. One young grandchild upon first seeing the place asked, "Grandma, what I want to know is, is this a yard or is it a park?"

There was a floodwall protecting their walkout basement’s door, a hint of what to watch out for on a hundred-year flood plain. Not far away, a section of low-lying road would be closed for a week or two every year from seasonal flooding. For the most part, the yearly seasonal flooding was minor — easy to manage, dismiss, forget.

And then came the merciless winter of 1996–1997. There had been eight blizzards, each named in the style of hurricanes. A record 117 inches of snow fell on Fargo, 98.6 in nearby Grand Forks. The final blizzard, Hannah, added 6.3 more inches, starting with a freezing rain that weighed down power lines, making them droop in long curves from pole to pole alongside the roads. When high winds whipped across the state, the power lines snapped like thread. Hundreds of thousands of people were without power, some for over a week.

Uneasiness about that year’s spring floods had begun early, and by March, the whole region was crossing its fingers. And praying. The dramatic weather in the weeks leading up to April 16, 1997, made for prime opportunities for ice jams, and the worst happened despite all those hopes and prayers.

The cold water overflowed the banks of the river, and then the dikes, and then the sandbags atop the dikes. Thousands of people had to evacuate. For Grand Forks, the baptism by flood included not only water and ice, but fire, too. Those of us who had power watched our TV in horror and disbelief as downtown Grand Forks, with four feet of water in the streets, burned, some buildings down to the waterline. Movie screenwriters would have scoffed at such an implausible disaster.

Sandbags and a better future
The mild-mannered river behind my parents’ house in Fargo flooded the "park," of course, but the house stayed dry thanks to the hard work of friends and strangers who built a sandbag dike and to the good fortune of being just inches above the water’s crest. But the next three weeks almost exhausted my parents. My father’s constant vigilance over the pumps and the sandbags, and my mother’s worry over his health as she fed an almost continuous stream of helpers nearly wore them out.

Finally the water subsided and it was time to remove the sandbags. The task was accomplished in short order, though it seemed like a lifetime since they’d been placed there. That weekend, just as my poem says, a cup fell out of the cupboard and broke on my head. It took another two months for that experience of "enlightenment" to ripen into a poem.

Last year, the region celebrated the 10-year anniversary of life after the flood and reflected on how the sour grapes of adversity had fermented miraculously into fine wine. There is no experience like the communion of crisis to cement a community’s resolve to make a better future. We also reflected again on the miracle that not a single life was lost in the flood.

To give thanks
Yes, the water "altered forever the sacred home," but mostly for the good. My parents decided to allow their home to be razed in order to turn the "park" into a protective dike. We nostalgically drive by the spot now, realizing that if you didn’t know better, you’d think it had always been only grass and trees, just as it was before human settlement. While it would have been great for my folks to stay in that place, their new home is just as sacred as the first — because they are there.

Almost every other alteration has been good too. Grand Forks and East Grand Forks have experienced unprecedented rebuilding and new growth. The man who coordinated Fargo’s emergency and flood response (and kept most of the city dry through his competent leadership) has been elected the city’s mayor. Permanent dikes have been built where there had been none, and emergency plans have been perfected. Help for other disaster-ravaged communities has been mobilized smoothly when needed, staffed by compassionate people who remember how good it felt to help or be helped. Our identity as a good and godly people has been cemented. This alone is a gift of immeasurable worth.

I like the words that accompany the rite of baptism in Evangelical Lutheran Worship, both for their imagery and for their meaning:

"We give you thanks, O God, for in the beginning your Spirit moved over the waters and by your Word you created the world, calling forth life in which you took delight. Through the waters of the flood you delivered Noah and his family, and through the sea you led your people Israel from slavery into freedom. At the river your Son was baptized by John and anointed with the Holy Spirit. By the baptism of Jesus’ death and resurrection you set us free from the power of sin and death and raise us up to live in you." Come a flood? Come Lord Jesus.

Gravity
struck me
when a mug fell
from the cupboard
in my parents’ home
and broke in two pieces
on my head.

I’m quite certain it broke on my head
since a triangular piece
fell in front of me
and the large piece with the handle on it
fell neatly
right side up
into a ceramic cereal bowl
a few inches away.

It was my fault, really.
I had put the mugs into the cupboard
stacked two high
and didn’t take care
to balance them properly.
I left an opening
and was enlightened
painfully
by a force of nature.

I was at my parents’ house
with my family —
there to clean up after
the flood
they said comes only twice
in a millennium.
Eveyone else was out
un-sandbagging
while I stayed inside
to listen for my sleeping baby’s stirrings
and make coffee.

At this house
the fight had been won—
for the moment, anyway.
Three weeks battling
The capricious Red
hand-to-hand
saved the house which
may now be sacrificed anyway
for a floodway and permanent dike

And the greater good.
Downriver, to the north,
thousands fled,
abandoning houses
to a river that didn’t rage
but looked serene and patient
in the TV pictures,
quietly mirroring
disbelief and despair.

They’d tried to balance the cups,
to build the dikes,
to make their plans and carry them out,
but water’s whim still altered forever
the sacred home.

Gravity
and her companions
will have their way
despite
(or perhaps, because of)
our human striving.

What to do?
--Grieve faithfully.
--Accept
the gravity
of a river’s flowing malice
and the irony
of its healing baptism.

--Rebuild
--Rejoice.
Cups don’t break on our heads
very often.