The Words "National Disaster"

I'm sorry I haven't been posting. I have been very busy and out of ideas. Finally, in desperation I turned once again to some of my old journals. Interestingly I found a void. It's where this story takes place.Oh and Grace, I'd be interested in hearing your perspective on this--especially if you think I was accurate. After all, I'm not the only one who's lived through a National Disaster! :)

What do you think of when you hear the words “National Disaster”? Big, scarred eyes, houses thrown all over the place, FEMA performing dangerous rescue missions? Something that happens to those people, way over there?  So did I until one knocked on my back door.

I was ten at the time and living on farm attached to the side of a hill in Southeastern Kansas. A hill? Yes, I said that right, there are hills in Kansas. In fact my town had a whopping two hills.

I didn’t think much farther than that I was glad the drought was over when one afternoon the sky opened up and started drenching everything within sight. After delightedly splashing in a few mud puddles, life went on. I still had baby and grown goats to feed and milk plus eggs to hunt for, there was nothing new. The next morning things were a little more exciting. We had gotten so much rain that our creek and the creek between us and town a mile away, had both flooded and covered the road that ran by our house. That happened every spring though and after a few days it would go down and we could once again get to town. There was one unusual difference, my Dad was out of town and due back that day—could he make it through the water in our 4-wheel-drive pickup?

Being ten I didn’t worry much about my all powerful Dad until later that night when I climbed, dripping, out of a hot shower and looked out the window. It was still raining dogs and cats and there was water pouring off our hill in torrents. I had never seen that before and obviously my older siblings hadn’t either because they were standing outside in rain coats watching it with frowns on their faces. I put on my pajamas and went back to the window. Water was pouring off the hill as fast as ever, in fact, it was filling up the creek so much that our entire field was flooded and the wet brown line was creeping towards the machine shed. Now that was a lot of water.

My siblings came in shedding water droplets with their rain clothing and discussing whether or not they should move or ancient tractor “Alice” (an antique and cantankerous Alice Chalmers)and other machinery out of the machine shed and into the rain or leave them be and hope the water didn’t get as high as the machine shed. If they took the tractor out it would have to be left unprotected on our driveway where it could rust even more than it already was. Besides, the water was still three or four feet away from the base of the shed, it was extremely unlikely that it would get high enough to do any damage to Alice. They wished my Dad were home to make the difficult decision for them but that could not be helped. He wasn’t expected home until pitch dark, ten. Then they informed me they had moved the baby goats, which were largely my responsibility, out of the field to higher ground. I thanked them and said good night.

I climbed into bed that night happy to hear the rain on the roof; such a wonderful way to be lulled to sleep! Pitter, patter. Pitter, patter. The thought suddenly ran through my mind “Great Scot! Is it ever going to stop?”

Granted the rain stopped eventually. Sometime in the night even, but there are more than a hundred people who would have appreciated it stopping sooner. Five of those were my family.

I woke up first the next morning which was unusual. 6 A.M. was not my sunshine time especially on a Saturday morning when I was allowed to sleep to the unheard of 7 A.M. but something told me I should wake up and check on things. I looked out my window and gulped. I must be having one of those dreams where dreamed up woke up and began my day and then I really woke up to find myself still in bed. Oh well, there was always the old pinch test. I applied it to my thy and yelped. I was awake after all.

My heart started beating, were my eyes telling me the truth and was I really the first to discover this or had the rest of my family all seen and simply gone back to bed. I tiptoed down stairs and peeked out our large glass doors.  Uh-huh. Not cool. I went back up stairs across from my bedroom to my parents. My Dad ( who I forgot to mention, I called “Papa”. ) had made it through in the night and there he was sleeping peacefully. He didn’t know, I was sure of that.

“Uh, Papa?” My voice cracked as it’s still liable to do in tense moments. I cleared my throat as he rolled over and slowly opened his blue eyes that matched mine. “The machine shed is—ehem—er—flooded.”

He flew out of the bed and before I new it was hoping around with one leg in his pants.

My Mom sat up. She was a light sleeper and had heard it all.

“What do you think you’re going to do Lane? She said it’s flooded. Isn’t it too late?”

“Well, maybe I can still get the tractor out, you know it’s a long ways off the ground.”

“Uh—“ my voice cracked again. “I can barely see the roof; I don’t think you can get the machine shed out.”

He stared at me. I was ten but not prone to exaggerate…well, not too much.

“Show me.”

I obeyed.

“She’s right Marcia.” Was all he said.

So what do you do when half of your land is under water and as far as you can see so everything beyond that? My family had a rule which said, “If you’re not working on Saturday then you need to be doing school.” There isn’t much work you can do if 9 of your acres are under ten foot of water—we did school. No big scarred eyes from this disaster.

About two that afternoon the water was still rising somehow though the rain had mostly stopped. We had checked on all our neighbors who shared our island hill and looked curiously in the direction of town but there wasn’t much else to do so we just sat in our dark house reading. After a while we saw a boat with some black clad guys go zipping past our hill and slow way down. Across their backs were the letters F-E-M-A.  They seemed to be hesitating and after a little bit turned around and went back towards town. Interesting. FEMA is here. That means this is pretty bad…I wonder if anyone is in danger… We could see the others were all thinking the same thing and I got up and went to the glass doors gazing Westward across the expanse of brown water. A small movement on the brown surface caught my eye and I called my brother over to look at it. He shook his head and went to get the binoculars. It was a jet ski pulling a row boat with some people in it. It was coming from the direction of a house hidden behind some trees. We looked at each other. That would be the *Breaders. They would rig up something like that and go rescuing their neighbors. Good for them!

My brother and sister were soon bored with the inside life and began brain storming who on our hill had a canoe. They located on and paddled to town.

“What are you kids doing!!” they heard the angry voice of a man great them as they stepped on to dry land at the edge of town.

They looked up startled to see several FEMA guys and a television crew.

“Um—“

“What are you kids doing back there? Don’t go back there you hear me? You don’t know what’s back there! That’s no place for kids.” It was a FEMA guy.

“Um—“ they looked at each other uncertainly. “We live back there.”

All eyes turned on them.

“You live back there? You mean there are still people back there?”

“Uh—yes.”

“Why didn’t you evacuate?”

“We didn’t know we were supposed to and besides, our houses are all safe. There’s probably thirty of us back there including the people who live in that—“ pointing to a completely submerged house “—family. They are in their camper on our neighbors land.”

“Ah. Were glad to know that they got out safely. We didn’t want to go back there and risk hitting a barbwire fence and scratching the bottom of the boat.”

“The bottom of your boat…—Yes well we’re all safe. Thanks for asking.” They hopped back in the canoe and began rowing away. No dangerous FEMA rescues here. Nope, it was a neighbor who rigged up something to get an older couple off their roof.

“Hey! You kids seen on your TV this has been declared a National Disaster?”

My siblings looked at each other. Our power lines were under water and we were very much out of power. No, they hadn’t seen it on TV.

To make a long story short, no houses were thrown around; they just all got free remodeling jobs. Brown carpets, brown walls, brown stripes on their outsides, ect. Everything was brown except for some very delighted trees and plants. And guess what? It didn’t happen to those people over there. It happened to me, normal everyday me.

*Some names have been changed to preserve the privacy of these individuals.