Red River Rising Part 3

Our daughter Anna, Sourlie Bridge, Grand Forks 1979 flood

Sunday May 18
It’s dreary again, raining.  Jim and I meet Naomi, her daughter and Janette at Wesley United Methodist Church for 10 a.m. services.  The church wasn’t structurally damaged but the furnace isn’t working and electrical current is bornderline.  The carpeting is ruined and of course basement drywall gone.  Someone has improvised lighting with ubiquitous extension cords, essential in the windowless sanctuary, a common North Dakota church style--less expensive to heat.  Pastor James Persons leads us in prayer and song before reading letters of support from all over the country.

Then the lights conk out.  We sit there, numb in the cold dark sanctuary, with faint light filtering seeping in from the hall.  We were in a damaged church, in a broken city, with everyone somehow affected by the brutality of the flood.  Then someone lights the candles and the room comes to life.  Pastor Persons prays for us, the city, our future.  The electric lights flicker back on.  I never felt the presence of God so much as in that dark interlude.

During prayer requests, of which there were many, Naomi asks if anyone could help us tackle our basement cleanup.  That’s when we meet Jim and Mary Antes.  He’s a psychology professor at the university, she works for the public schools.  They agree to meet at our house at 1 p.m., after we have breakfast.

Perkins Restaurant is packed.  No damage, it’s on the right side of the line of the unflooded.  It’s a pretend world, so normal looking, so removed from the shrill blue porta potties, the trash.  It could have been any Sunday, in any city in America.

At 1 p.m. Jim and Mary were waiting for us.  They teach us their 50 gallon trash can clean-up method.  They’d already cleared out their own basement and several of their friends.  We all put on the stuff:  Rubber boots, gloves, face masks and extra long sleeve shirts and pants (it’s still cold, and the heat’s not on, because there's no power on in the basement, only 40% upstairs.  The temperature is around 45-50 degrees).  Then we descend into the moldy gloom to face the five foot high mounds of soggy drywall Jim’s spent the past two days hacking off the studs.

Cleanup routine, from a Minot ND blogger, except we used a 50 gallon plastic trash can to transfer garbage bags to the 'mound'

All afternoon we shovel drywall into the plastic bag-lined trash cans, then two of us take turns carrying it up the mountainous stairs and out to the berm.  About 4 p.m. I make us coffee in the kitchen and we talk of family and our lives like old friends at a cocktail party.  Then we put our gloves and masks back on and returned down to ‘Pit, which is what Jim’s now calling the basement, like a Yorkshire miner.  Jim and I would have quit after an hour of this dire routine but Jim and Mary keep us going.

We finish about 6 p.m. The neatly swept basement floor is empty of drywall.  not cheerful but progress.  We remove the filthy outer layer of our clothing wash our hands and hug goodbye.  Mary and Jim drive off into the fading day like soft-spoken angels.

Naomi and a friend of hers stop by.  We show them the progress in our basement.  Naomi’s house was built around 1900 so the basement walls are stone, so no drywall to remove but she lost her furnace, washer, hot water heater,  and most painful of all, most of her photo negatives, all soaked in floodwater for over a week.  One of the radio stations devotes mornings to the county extension agents answering clean-up questions such as what can and can’t be salvaged, how to clean silver, rinse negatives, old photos, clothes, etc. 'Wonder if the BBC had such advice during the Blitz?  Their voices are oddly soothing,-an-anything-is-possible-calming antidote to cold reality.

Monday May 19, 9 a.m.
There’s no way Jim and I alone will be able to rip out tons of waterlogged maple flooring, at least not within the next 6 months.  When I drive over to Sears to check on delivery of our new water heater I see a huge DISASTER RELIEF sign outside the Federated Church on 17th Avenue South.  Anna went to their summer day camp years ago.  I go in, passing the huge Disaster Response semi in the parking lot. 

There are dozens of neatly made sleeping bags arranged like spokes in the round sanctuary.  There are three people in the office, one answering the phones.  I explain my dilemma.  I talk to Southern Baptist volunteer Dan Vietto from St. Louis.  He shows me around their Disaster Relief semi.  it looks like an army troop plane, with fold down cots, a kitchenette, the works.  Dan tells me to call Wanda, also with the Southern Baptists, from Kentucky.  She’s in charge of matching volunteers with people who need help but we probably won’t see anyone until weekend, when most volunteers come up from the Twin Cities.  This sounds too miraculous.

When I return home Jim and I can't get the washer out of the basement. But I get an idea.  We’ll take it apart, and remove it in pieces!  We spend an hour just getting the top off, all the screws are rusted as it sat in floodwater for 10 days. We’ve no power tools. ‘Should have brought wrenches. I go upstairs for a drink of water and see an appliance delivery truck outside the minister’s house across the street, delivering their new washer and dryer.  I fly out the door and ask them if they can help us get our washer out of the basement after they deliver the appliances.

Bill and his buddy are young guys up from Chicago helping deliver 50,000 new appliances from Rollin’s Appliance Company.  With their dolly they look like they’re lifting a box of books as they haul the washer out of our basement and onto the berm.  I try and try again to pay for for being right outside our door when we needed them most but they refuse to take my money.  I wonder if they haveve any idea how long I will remember their generosity?

Our last visit with Janette, October 2016, at Perkins Pancake House.  Sadly the world lost one of its saints as Janette died this past spring.  We will never forget her generosity and calm cando

Tuesday May 20
‘Tried calling Wanda.  No answer.  I go to Piggly Wiggly for more food.  run into Naomi's mom, Janette, and she invites us to dinner.  Her place is full of her best friend’s silver, which Janette’s 'flood cleaning.'  She’s a retired public health nurse.  She’s lived most recently on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota.  She treats us to a real meal, not Red Cross food!  And sends us home with homemade bread, brownies and banana nut bread.  Also a Reader’s Digest How to Fix Anything book.

We go over to Mark and Linda’s to take a shower, as we’d arranged earlier.  We feel civilized again.  Hot Water!  Afterwards we have a beer in their living room, while we wash clothes--all the locals are a week ahead of us in cleaning up and getting back to normal.  We share the couch with Mark’s 10 point mounted buck.  Other trophies are scattered on every surface. There’s a narrow path through the living room, which has absorbed all the family room furniture.  It’s their daughter Kelly’s senior year in high school. Instead of a fancy party at home they’ll be celebrating at a local hotel on Saturday.
                                              

Our Grand Forks house basement before 1997 flood

Flashback 1978 During our first year in our brand new house on Fallcreek Court in Grand Forks we watched Linda and Mark’s good size rock collection grow along the edge of their driveway, carefully selected from the bumper crop at their nearby family farm. Those rocks became the focal point of their family room's floor-to-ceiling, hand-faced, stone fireplace that Mark built in their basement.  Flanking that fireplace was the old growth maple flooring that we gave them from our basement project, using reclaimed wood we located at a farm in Dorothy, Minnesota.

Salvaged clawfoot bathtub and pedestal sink, English wallpapered bathroom

 When we decided to make our basement into a family room in 1981, Mark did all the carpentry.  We put an ad in the Herald for used wood flooring, a claw foot bathtub and pedestal sink.  All of which we found.  The wood was the gem of the project:$100 for about 4000 square feet.  School friend Bob Nelson drove us out in his pick-up on a spring day to Boyle’s Farm, near Dorothy, Minnesota.  A more graceful pick-up ride I can’t recall.  That wood changed me

basement stairway

 The maple was from old growth Minnesota forests and was in the township’s one-room schoolhouse.  When that was demolished, Mr. Boyle saved the wood, removing all the nails, the hardest part, I suspect, of saving all that wood.  He stored it on wooden pallets and under tarps in his farmyard along with his retired John Deere’s, old Fords and washing machines--the farm's spare parts' mine.

Salvaged wood door frames and flooring

 Mark and his friend Gary salvaged three vintage doors and doorways from an abandoned farmhouse on a friend’s farm which was the finishing touch.  We created the quintessential North Dakota space--salvaged artifacts of the original European style architecture on the Northern Plains.  Of all our homes over the years, decorated houses, special rooms and gardens, this basement was the most ‘us.’  We worked the hardest to finish it, even sanded the floor, now that’s hard work.  It was our equivalent of Mark and Linda’s fireplace.  We gave Mark and Gary the left over wood, which was enough to finish their family rooms too. 

All the wood’s now gone with the flood waters. Mark and Linda are unable to use their fireplace.  There’s no way of knowing if the firewall was damaged and if it was, nothing short of removing a basement wall can fix it.  Floods erase everything.  Mike Jacobs, editor of the Grand Forks Herald, lost one of the finest collections in the state of first edition books about North Dakota history.  He helped the Herald staff earn the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service but I know he'd trade that in a heartbeat for his beloved books that chronicled the state's history.


Wednesday May 21
I get a hold of Wanda.  She hopes she can get a volunteer crew over to our house on Saturday.

Thursday May 22
Another day of toil and trouble in Floodville, plus Red Cross food.  After three or four hours of carefully picking drywall remains from the edges of the ceiling and scrubbing flood mud Red Cross food is starting to get rather tasty. It’s also amazing how the food line social scene enhances the grub.

Anna calls.  Molly’s sick.  She’s glassy-eyed and has a 101 degree temp.  I call good friend Allet, an RN.  She swoops into action.  Strep’s going around, so she runs over to check Molly out.  It’s after 5 p.m. so she takes Molly to Fair Oaks Hospital.  Yep, it’s strep all right.  Not much sleep this night.

Friday May 23
'Call Anna early. Molly's medicated and feeling better.  Now four-year old James isn’t feeling well.  By some miracle he’s o.k. by mid-morning, no more fever, back to bouncing off the walls.  Thank you God for small mercies and for friends and family.  It’s the Girl Scout Awards Ceremony tonight.  Our Grand Forks house phone’s not working.

Several businesses host a BBQ at the University football stadium.  It’s sunny but cool.  We share another outdoor meal with several thousand, and heartfelt prayers from wise pastors.  After we eat we drive downtown to the Security Building site.  Naomi and I became friends while doing a documentary project for one of Harley Straus’ photography classes, we spent hours photographing downtown Grand Forks. I find a stone dentil that’s charred from the fire, Naomi’s daughter wants to take it home, we gather other stones from the rubble, hand carved sandstone from another era, put them in the van then drive home.

Continued in Red River Rising, Part 4