Red River Rising Part 1

Sourlie Bridge, Grand Forks, ND (Grand Forks Herald)

September 4, 2017
As I write this, clean up has begun after Hurricane Harvey dropped  50+ inches  of rain on Houston, TX (the fourth largest U.S. city, population 2.3 million).  I am reminded of one of the most significant months of  my husband Jim and my life.  We spent it cleaning up after another flooding disaster, one affecting a much smaller population.  It was April of 1997.  We left northern Virginia in the full flush of spring with a heavy heart as we headed north to the disaster 1800 miles away.  

Over the course of a month we learned much about catastrophes.   But the most important lesson was the silver lining: God provides, even when everything is lost.  We met so many Christians during our 30-day sojourn, whom with the grace of the Holy Spirit willingly and lovingly helped us do fiercely awful work.  We will never forget our time among the Saints. 

The following is a diary I kept during the clean-up of the little duplex we lived in and loved for nearly 10 years but rented out when it didn't sell when we moved East:

Centreville, VA Friday April 18, 1997 6:40 a.m EDT
“Carol, I don’t want to alarm you but I think it’s the middle of the night and the sirens are going off.  They’re evacuating people from Lincoln Park,” my college friend Naomi tells me in a frightening pre-dawn call from Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Her voice is tense, fear creeping in at the edges as she listens to the radio news.  She holds the phone to the open door--I hear the sirens repetitive wail then the radio blaring evacuation orders.  How devastating it must be for everyone there.  Surreal.  Lincoln Park is one of the lowest parts of the city, two and a half miles from our rental house. 

The 1996-1997 winter was one of the worst ever in the Dakotas.  There was a particularly wet, ground drenching autumn followed by a record snowfall of 100+ inches of uncharacteristically wet snow.  By December the weather people were naming the blizzards.  The last blizzard was named Hannah.  A quick thaw followed by a final April ice storm set the stage for record flooding.

One of the 1996-97 North Dakota blizzards

7:15 a.m.
It’s time to get daughter’s Molly, 6, and Claire, 9, up and ready for school in Virginia.  The daffodils are in full bloom and I’m struck by how disconnected I feel from the spring beauty here and the disaster unfolding to the northwest.

Needing to get a better handle on things I call the Grand Forks Herald newspaper at 9:00 a.m. (8:00 a.m. CDT) to order a daily subscription, first class.  “What’s happening there?” I ask.  “Oh, it’s bad, real bad.  They’ve just changed the the crest to 50 feet (flood stage is 28 feet).  The Lincoln Park area’s been hit real hard, and they’re workin’ on the dikes non-stop,”  the subscription clerk tells me.

Why didn’t we get flood insurance?  The National Weather Service was predicting a crest of 49 feet.  The most recent severe flood, in 1979, crested at 48.81.  The city had since built a water diversion channel for the English Coulee so our house should be o.k.  But...

I call and leave a message on our renter’s answering machine then call Mark who looks after our place there.  Yes, he reassures me, the drain plugs are in which should protect us from sewer backup.  The sump pump’s working so we should be o.k., he says.  Mark’s done this for us every spring since I can remember.  He and his wife Linda were moving things out of their basement, just in case.  she has to go to work.  Odd, I thought, making people go to work when they need to be taking care of their homes.  Everything must be o.k. if you have to go to work.

The evening news has dramatic footage of the Lincoln Park evacuation.  I’m reminded of the 1979 Flood, waking up on a Saturday morning to our duplex neighbor pounding on our door asking if we had 3 feet of water in our basement too?  We did.  Outside we could see the overland English Coulee creeping our way, about half a block away.

Several neighbors were contractors so they organized construction of a dike with no city involvement.  For awhile, we were our own little duchy while the city fought the Red River.  “Ha! Get down here to Riverside Park if ya’ want to see water,” the public works office admonished when we called City Hall.  Later the National Guard set up a patrol in front of our next door neighbor’s until the water receded.  Three homes were completely destroyed by the raging Red River in the 1979 flood but at least 700 basements were damaged in our neighborhood, causing millions in property damage.  The English Coulee is usually a dry stream bed, unmarked on many maps. 

When Claire and Molly get home from school they have a snack then Claire gets her camping gear ready for her Junior Girl Scout troop’s first real camping trip, to Camp Cole in Stafford County, Virginia.  She’s so excited.  We take Molly to an unused road by the Ellanor C. Lawrence Park to practice her bike riding.  It’s a bit cold but sunny.

Centreville, VA, Saturday a.m., April 19, 1997 6 a.m.
I devour the Washington Post’s page two story.  The photo is of the oldest part of Grand Forks, near the river, in thigh high water.  That’s not the kiss of death for our place, we’re maybe seven to 10 feet higher on Fallcreek Court.  ‘...enforced evacuations for much of the eastern part of the city and voluntary evacuation for the rest of the city,’ the paper says.  Our renters left Friday evening, leaving the key with Duane, who owns the other side of our duplex.  The crest was bumped up to 53 feet, on  Saturday.  I call Linda again.  No flooding and the power’s still on.  She had the oddest thing I’d ever heard in a North Dakota voice: Defeat, a dread the worst could happen.

“How could they not have known how bad it would be?” she said.  “There’s been so much wet snow, it will be higher than 53 feet,”  She was still moving things out of her basement.  She said she loved us then I lost contact with her. 

Finally around 10 a.m. I get a hold of Duane.  His wife and son have evacuated but he was manning both our sump pumps.  Not much going on, most folks’ left.  He planned on staying.  The weather’s sunny. “What if the water gets to Fallcreek Court, I speculate?,” “Then all the houses will be flooded,” he deduces.  We laugh, not nervously, but wildly, raucously, at such  absurdity.

I imagine Duane in his kitchen, the mirror image of our half of the duplex, smoking a Marlboro, in an old flannel shirt and work pants, untied work boots at the door, wrenches and power tools scattered on the counter, looking out the window,  for any sign.

Downtown Grand Forks, ND April 19, 1997 (St. Paul Pioneer Press)

3 p.m.
I call Duane again.  “Yeah, I’m still here.  It’s looking bad.  There’s a fire downtown, they’re trying to put it out.  (Grand Forks Air Base) helicopters going over like crazy, non-stop, evacuating people near the river, I guess.”  I hear the helicopters beat the air as he talks.  “City’s asking everyone to leave.  Nope, no water yet, sump pumps' workin’ fine.  I’m stayin.”

“You take care, Duane. God bless.”

Over the next 24 hours a near total evacuation takes place of 60,000 people in two Midwestern cities flanking the Red River of the North on the Great Northern Plains. The record breaking crest was 54 feet, 26 feet above flood stage.

Flashback 20 years earlier: Grand Forks, ND November 1975
Jim meets our oldest daughter Anna and me at the smallest airport I'd ever flown into, in Grand Forks.  Two 'gates' and you could park at the door if a space was available.  Jim had arrived two weeks earlier to start work at the Microbiology Department, University of North Dakota Medical School. 

Anna has on a red English snowsuit and knit hat and mittens, lovingly made by Jim's mum.  I’m wearing a Scottish sheepskin coat, bought specially for our North Dakota adventure.  We’re emigrating back to the United States, from Jim’s native country, Great Britain.  We have three suitcases.  Two trunks, a crated Swedish pine dining table and two wooden bookcases that arrived by air freight two days before.  We’re ready for a wilder place.  Materially it is the lightest period of our lives, psychologically the most free.

A weatherman friend we meet that first year in Grand Forks told us about a new hire who showed up in January for a job then turned around and got the next plane back to L.A.  For us though, North Dakota was a good fit.  We didn’t have a car for our first winter so we went downtown often, to family owned department stores and a little bakery where we would get muffins and hot drinks.  Children gave Murphy the bus driver homemade cookies at Christmas.  We walked the eight blocks from our flat to the University, Jim to work, me to school.

There were days of unspeakable cold and wind but others so crystal clear the sky seemed bluer than any other place on earth.  The snow was dry, difficult to make snowballs with but good for cross country skiing.  And come summer we rented a garden plot from the University, near the Coulee, and discovered the richest soil in North America, along with the largest mosquitoes.

We bought a car in April 1976.  That first weekend we drove to Turtle River State Park, 15 miles west of town.  The snow was thawing.  We’d packed a picnic with a thermos of hot tea.  Anna found raccoon tracks in the sand near the river and we were in awe of the emptiness of the place, the antithesis of the English countryside.  We saw no one on our back trail hikes, it was like being at the edge of the world.  I look at photos we took that day--there’s melting snow still covering everything but we look so happy.

Centreville, VA Sunday April 20, 1997
The Washington Post gives Grand Forks a good size photo on page one, above the fold, of a lake of water across the flooded city's downtown but the Cass Gilbert depot still looks dry.  However the Security Building went up in flames.  I dig out my Grand Forks university architectural photography negatives and find a photo of it.  It was a turn of the century, down-at-heel building with redeeming Romanesque arches.  My fellow photog student Naomi and I photographed its basement barbershop years ago.

9 a.m.
I try calling Duane.  No answer. Jim, Molly and
I go to church. Claire gets home at 4.  How grown
up she is that she can go sleep in the woods
without us.  On the news the Grand Forks hospital 
is being evacuated by Air Base helicopters. 
Our house is two blocks closer to the river. 
We know now.  We just don’t know how bad.

Centreville, VA Monday April 21, 1997
‘Call FEMA and fill in application for a Small
Business Loan.
                                                     

Naomi, outside Grand Forks Security Building basement barber shop 1981

Wednesday April 22, 1997 12:45 p.m. 
Naomi calls from her uncle’s in Minneapolis.  Naomi,
her daughter and mother Janette had a terrible time
getting out of Grand Forks.  They managed to walk
a quarter of a mile through incredibly cold, calve high water from her mother’s condo to their car--no one by this time was parking in the underground lot.  That design feature saved Janette a devastating cleanup of her apartment.                     

They wound their way out of the city, avoiding flooded streets, having at one point to go east, toward the river, to get to a dry westward street.  They got as far as Manvel, 15 miles west of Grand Forks.  Stayed there two days until Manvel, too, was threatened with flooding, then drove the 75 miles south to Fargo, ND, to find a bridge open to cross the Red River.  Because the Red flows north, it had crested a week earlier.  She was thankful they were safe and of Grand Forks Mayor Owen’s handling of the evacuation.  Also for the free Grand Forks Herald newspapers now being distributed all over the Red River Valley. 


Centreville, VA Thursday April 23, 1997 9 a.m.
After the girls leave for school I drive over to the U.S.Geological Survey headquarters, in Reston.  I need a topographic map.  The USGS Map Store people are very helpful. Needless to say, there had been a run on the Grand Forks County maps.  An information specialist takes me to their website and the GF hydrograph.  Lots of numbers...Until April 10 there’s still ice cover on the river, by April 16 the flow’s nearly tripled, April 17 still ice, mostly clear with VERY HIGH VELOCITIES, April 19 BREAK OUT FLOW GOING OVER LEEVES AND THRU CITY.  That’s the scientific equivalent of a 96 point headline.  And 60,000 people's lives turned upside down.

The Grand Forks Herald arrives that I’d ordered a week ago.  It seems as if it’s from another century.

Centreville, VA Tuesday April 29, 1997 9:30 p.m.
Duane calls.  The water’s receded enough so that the city allowed homeowners to return for a few daylight hours.  We have seven feet of water in the basement.  Funny, but this is good news--we don’t have first floor damage!  The electric box and hot water heater are dead and the basement will need ‘gutting,’ flood parlance for ripping out everything but the concrete walls, wiring and studs.  But less likely to be condemned.

Duane plans on returning tomorrow to begin the slow job of getting the equivalent of  three swimming pools of flood water out of both our basements.  It has to be done in stages, so walls don’t collapse from a sudden change in pressure.  The average person in Grand Forks must, overnight, become structural engineers.  Duane said the National Guard came through the neighborhood about 5 p.m. on April 19 and told everyone to leave.  There was no water yet, but people left.  He returned an hour later --the water was coming.  That’s when he gave up.

It will take weeks for the city to get the contaminated water system operating.  The power and phone systems are also damaged.  We set a time table for ourselves:  We will leave for the ‘Forks as soon as the city water’s turned back on.  I begin to gather and borrow things we’ll need: extension cords, a vacuum cleaner, a wet vac, several industrial fans, tools, rubber hip boots (we kept them from the last flood!) my photo equipment.  It feels as if we’re going on an expedition up the Amazon.  In fact I forget crucial things, such as electric room heaters, camping flashlights, a transistor radio.  We also should have gotten a cell phone before we left. 

The really crucial things I don’t forget such as arranging for our oldest daughter Anna to fly up from Galveston, TX, with our two grandsons, Sebastian, 5 and James 4.  The boys will have to miss the last two weeks of preschool.  But Claire and Molly will be able to stay in Virginia. Our network of friends and neighbors all offer to help Anna, who's agreed to suddenly take care of four children in an unfamiliar place.  And this is just the beginning...

Continued in Red River Rising, Part 2. https://carolwsbooksandflicks.blogspot.com/2017/09/red-river-rising-part-2_21.html

Red River Rising Part 2

Flood and fire damaged downtown Grand Forks, one block from the Red River  May 1997

Heading to North Dakota, via St. Louis, Missouri 
Thursday May 16, 1997

 
We visit my mother in St. Louis on our way to the ‘Forks. She’s recovering from cancer surgery

. 

We also visit my brother Mark, a master carpenter, who will join us in Grand  Forks to rehab after we get the basement gutted.

As we neared the North Dakota border we became part of a huge convoy of power line and telecommunication trucks, lumber, plywood, Walmart and grocery chain semis, etc., all heading for the damaged cities. 

Grand Forks, ND Thursday May 16, 1997

We arrive in Grand Forks about 2 p.m.  Dreary and overcast. As we drive through the newer western part of the city, farthest from the river, we pass motels, a lumber yard, strip malls and Columbia Mall. They all look dirty, like there had been a terrible dust storm, caking everything with North Dakota gumbo, but as soon as we turn onto Columbia Road heading north we see bright blue porta-pottys at almost every corner, then by 17th Avenue South we see the trash--a long snaking curbside mountain range lining every street like a macabre highlight pen, outlining the whole city.  Welcome to Floodville.

We get behind Army Corps of Engineers dump trucks and pay loaders scooping up couches, sandbags, water heaters, bathtubs and baby beds. Finally we turn onto Fallcreek Court and see our house.  It has the ubiquitous trashy highlight but otherwise it looks oddly normal.

Two Grand Forks Herald’s spill out from the storm door, like we’ve just gone away for a holiday weekend.  Then the first evidence hits us--a city electrical inspection form stating that the power box has been replaced. We’d arranged with Duane, to pay $1200 for a 200 amp box, the flood rate.  We open the door and see a trail of black mud caked on the beige carpet to the basement door.  Our renter’s furniture is stacked neatly along the far wall of the living room.  We step in.  The basement door is closed.  Think B horror movies when the audience shouts, “No! Don’t open that door!”  We open the door, just like they always do in the movies, and down the stairs we go.

It’s dark, cold too, and there’s a heavy moldy smell. This is what a dying building feels like.  No boogy man leaps out to grab us, it’s more pernicious than that.  If the devil had an ice box this would be it.  We walk around in the half light.  At the south side of the house the tongue and groove maple floor is raised up, like a fun house floor, further disorienting us, we bounce on the bubbled floor, it’s a good foot higher in the middle than the rest of the flooring.  We say nothing.

We go back upstairs.  There’s a beeping outside, it’s the Red Cross Mobile Chow Van.  We line up with neighbors, they know we’re just back.  We receive meal packs and they tell us where to get clean-up kits, and free water.  We try eating the food but it’s awful.  There are Oreos and potato chips too, that the Red Cross woman calls comfort foods.  We're not used to eating that either.
                

Jim receiving Red Cross clean up kits, Grand Forks Armory parking lot

We go to the Piggly Wiggly grocery store and buy a dozen yogurts, bananas, apples and oranges.  Thank you! semi supply convoys! Next stop: the Armory for the Red Cross buckets and clean up kits plus a case of bottled water.  We don’t drink any city water for the next month, bottled water’s available free all over town.  We find a pay phone and call home.  We talk to each child.  Their voices are excited but calming, we step into their world, like slipping into a warm bath.  We put on our Mommy/Daddy/Grandma/Granddad hats as we ohh and ahhh over small victories and help arbitrate territorial disputes, plus getting the low down on who’s been to visit.

When we get home Jim goes downstairs and begins whacking out soggy drywall, which lightening up the basement, so it’s no longer so dark.  I cannot go back downstairs.  Instead I wet vac the mud trail 10 times over the next few days, boiling pots of water for each application.  I obsessively clean the upstairs until it reaches a hospital operating room sheen, anything, so I don’t have to go downstairs again.  It’s a completely schizophrenic house with a hyper clean upstairs, death’s door devastation downstairs.  Around 6 p.m. we change clothes and drive through Lincoln Park on our way downtown.  Those houses are like our basement but above ground, times 30 square blocks.  It looks like photos of bombed out Beirut.  Others are walking around taking photos too.  This journey through the carnage is something I repeat every day for the next month.

Grand Forks, ND Saturday May 17
The newspaper says there will be a big Missouri Cattleman’s B-B-Q at  South Forks Mall this evening, Salvation Army entrance.  Naomi and her daughter pick us up and we head over.  Grace is said for hundreds of people snaking around the mall in a long queue, manned by incredibly well-organized Missourians.  We see folks we haven’t seen in years.  An announcement squawks over the p.a. that the buses are now leaving for the airport for hundreds of Twin City volunteers Northwest Airlines flew up to help out, gratis.  

Continued in Red River Rising, Part 3

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

Agate hunting Marquette, Michigan (Upper Peninsula) September 2012

 

From novelists Moberg to Mankell: the muscle and bone of Swedish History-first posted Aug. 20, 2009

 

The Road Less Traveled

  ...Two roads diverged...and I
  I took the one less traveled by,
  And that has made all the difference.
                               -- Robert Frost

Some novels work like the muscle on the bone of history. Take Vilhelm Moberg, born in Sweden in 1898 and Henning Mankel, writing today.

Muscle first: Moberg’s The Emigrants and Mankel’s mysteries bookend 160 years of Swedish life, a journey from poverty to capitalism to socialism to varying degrees of socialism and capitalism.  These two writers capture the zeitgeist of those years as newspaper accounts and history texts cannot.

In The Emigrants Karl Oskar and his wife Kristina emigrate to America in the 1850s because of famine in Sweden. Through extraordinary hard work they become wealthy in Minnesota but suffer the loss of roots, family and faith.

At the start of the story, in rural Sweden, they face a brutal winter following a poor harvest, 
        “Kristina baked famine bread; when the rye flour did not suffice
        she added chaff, beechnuts, heather seed and dried berries of the
        mountain ash.  She also tried to grind acorns...however much they
        stretched and added, all the bins...would be empty long before the next
        crop was ripe.” 

After much soul searching Kristina and Karl Oskar emigrate to America. But their homeland is always with them.  In The Last Letter Home, Karl Oskar writes a poignant letter to his sister living in Sweden:
        “My thoughts often wander to the Place where I was born and where
        kind Parents helped me grow up.  Sometimes I think I would like to go
        back for a Visit.  But I could not see Father and Mother in Life, only
        their Tombstones.”
When Kristina was dying, she tastes an apple planted with the seeds she
brought from Sweden, and says, in her last breath,
        “Our apples are ripe.  I’m home...”

Fast forward to the 1990s, to Henning Mankell’s homicide detective stories featuring Detective Kurt Wallander who lives in a now prosperous Sweden. In Sidetracked, Wallander ponders:
        “What kind of world was he living in?...He decided they were living
        in the midst of an era that could be called the Age of Failure. 
        Something they had believed in and built up had turned out to be
        less tenable than expected.  They had thought they were building
        a house, when in reality they were busy raising a monument to
        something already gone and half forgotten.
        
        Now all of Sweden raged around him...People lived so they could
        forget, not remember.  Houses were hiding places rather than cozy
        homes..”

Mankel describes a fellow detective in One Step Behind:
        “Martinsson walked over and stood by the window.  Wallander could
        see how shaken he was.  Once upon a time, he had been an eager
        young recruit with all the best intentions--and at a time when
        becoming a police officer was no longer seen as something noble.
        Young people seemed to despise the profession, in fact.  But
        Martinsson held fast to his ideals and genuinely wanted to be a
        good policeman.  It was only during the last few years that
        Wallander had noticed his faith starting to slip.  Now Wallander
        doubted that Martinsson would make it to retirement.”

Detective Wallander is a divorced dad of a floundering but talented daughter, has a 10-year old car, a ho-hum apartment, diabetes, a senile father.  He navigates a complex police bureaucracy and barely copes at times, plagued by the pettiness of communal washing machine rules, family and job responsibility and elusive affairs of the heart that can gut the soul.

Now the bones:
The Swedish model - Washington Times
More Than Just a Saab Sister
August 2009 by Richard Rahn

STOCKHOLM
Do you think America would be better off with a Swedish-type welfare state?  This question tends to evoke strong reactions from both left and right, yet few understand Sweden’s economic history and the revisions it has been making to its welfare-state model in recent years.  Sweden was a very poor country for most of the 19th century.

The poverty of those years caused many to emigrate from the country, mostly to the U.S. Upper Midwest.  Beginning in the 1870s, Sweden created conditions for developing a high-growth, free-market economy with a slowly growing government sector.  As a result, Sweden for many years had the world’s fastest-growing economy, ultimately producing the third highest per capita income, almost equaling that in the United States by the late 1960s.  Sweden became a rich country before becoming a welfare state.

Sweden began its movement toward a welfare state in the 1960s, when its government sector was about equal to that in the United States.  However, by the late 1980s, government spending grew from 30 percent of gross domestic product to more than 60 percent of GDP.

These policies and outcomes greatly diminished the incentives to work, save and invest.  Economic growth slowed to a crawl.  Other countries that avoided the excess spending, taxing and regulation of Sweden grew more rapidly, leaving Sweden in the dust.  Sweden is still a prosperous country, but far from the top, and its per capita income has fallen to just about 80 percent of that in the United States.

Most Americans know of Swedish socialist policies.  But Sweden’s economic success was achieved with a capitalist model.  Sweden has vacillated between the two for the past 70 years

The Keynesian model of big government appeared in Sweden during the Depression, like the United States, and planted the seed of the Swedish Model or the Middle Way, mixing a robust private industry with an large strata of publicly funded social services.

Sweden today has one of the highest tax rates in the world, starting at 57% on very low incomes. Until 2007 it exported half of what’s produced.  But like the rest of the world Sweden’s suffered steep decline since 2008.  Sweden voted against linking their currency to the euro in 2003.

Sweden’s population is just over 9 million.  Its the 88th largest country.  The  U. S. population is 307, 212,123 and is the 4th largest country in the world, according to the CIA  World Factbook. 

My Shan-gri-la

Carol, Peak District National Park, England Photo Jim W. 1975

While internet surfing the other day I found a story about the village of Bonsall, one of the UFO centers of Britain.  Wow!  I’ve been to Bonsall, in its pre-UFO days.  Memories of that visit flood back...

My all time favorite car was  an orange 1970 Volkswagen station wagon we owned in England, dubbed the Orange Freeze, after my favorite Steak & Shake milkshake.  It had the most tactile knobs of almost cartoon proportions.  For the most part it was a steadfast car for motoring about England in Germanic simplicity. 

The Orange Freeze’s only breakdown was a memorable one.  We were returning from visiting Jim’s sister in Leicester, to our home near Stockport, south of Manchester in 1975.

Peak District (Derbyshire) National Park

We left Leicester later than planned that Monday afternoon, June 2. The most dramatic part of our drive was through the  Peak District National Park, an almost treeless region of uncultivated heath of heather, gorse, coarse grasses; we passed Chatsworth House (where the 2005 Pride and Prejudice was filmed) and had tea in Bakewell, home of the famous culinary tart.  Upon reaching Buxton it was snowing!  Jim marveled that the Lancashire-Derbyshire cricket game was still in progress, even with snow on the pitch.*

Cat and Fiddle, altitude 1690 ft.    photo: Wiki

A full moon rose, casting a blanket of silvery light on the snow dusted moorland, making for well-lit driving, a good thing as long as the roads stayed ice free.  A mile past the Cat and the Fiddle something clanged in the innards of the Orange Freeze and we came to a resolute stop. Jim bundled up for the walk back to the Pub.
The pub was still open. Jim called emergency road service.  About half an hour after he got back to the car we spotted a small van’s lights weaving toward us from the east on the A537.  Our mechanic.

For the next two hours Lewis Hart and Jim tried to start O.F. while Anna and I sat in his van, snuggling up for shared body warmth. The fuel pump was busted. Lewis drove us home to Cheadle Hulme, arriving at dawn (about 4:15 in June). We invited him in for tea.  We had cups of piping hot milky tea, bacon, eggs and big slabs of toast peppered with jolly stories about Lewis’ life on the moors. Drawing a map before he left, we agreed to collect the O.F. on Wednesday after work. Then Jim left for work.  At 8 a.m. his mum called relieved we’d not sailed off a cliff. She was up half the night worrying when we didn’t answer the phone, after seeing the weather report on the news. 

Jim couldn’t get off work early Wednesday so I asked a friend and her husband Neil to take a picturesque afternoon drive to Derbyshire now that the forecast was sun, sun, sun. We left Cheadle Hulme about 3 p.m., passing the outer Manchester suburbs, then the edge of the Cheshire Plain before rising to the more rugged Peaks. 

Bonsall, Derbyshire    photo: Wiki

Turning onto narrower and narrower roads we were in different country -- where if we asked for directions the dialect would be as difficult to translate as Urdu.  We slowed for a herd of milk cows then later became deluged by a flock of newly shorn sheep.  The road climbed and wound, dry stone walls the primary landscape feature.  As my enchantment grew Neil’s lessened.  He’d agreed to make a straight zip to point B and I’d dragged him back to the 18th century.

About 6 p.m. we drove slowly into the village of Bonsall, behind a farmer’s truck laden with live chickens.  Bonsall looked--magically--more Italian village than English, sans marble, with first a fountain then a thirteen-step obelisk topped with a diminutive cross--the market square, and at last the garage!

We leaped out of Neil’s car to the welcome of Lewis’ wife Edwina’s kitchen garden riches.  I bought us fresh eggs, salad greens, clotted cream.  After settling up with Lewis he invited us to share tea and fresh scones.  I began to burble a delighted yes when Neil said, in a tone that was either class consciousness or rural fatigue, “Impossible. Carol’s following us home in case there’s another breakdown.”  Ugh. Caught between two accidentally generous souls, world’s apart.

We never saw Lewis, Edwina or Bonsall again.  By week’s end Jim left for a scientific meeting in Italy and Anna and I flew to St. Louis, our first visit home in over three years.  When we returned Jim accepted a position in Grand Forks, North Dakota.  We forgot our Derbyshire adventure in the moving flurry. 

Had this happened in 2009 we’d have exchanged email and website addresses but not then.  Then we were ships passing in the night.  The internet changes that.  Knowing where to look you can tease back the onion skin layers of the past.  In our case the Orange Freeze’s Derbyshire Caper.

Derbyshire 1975      photo: Carol

Postscript:
Right before our return to the USA we sold the Orange Freeze to a prosperous looking couple needing a second car for the wife.  They arrived in their Rover on a rainy Saturday afternoon.  We exchanged paperwork, a check then keys. Cautioning them about our tricky driveway I offered to back O.F. out but the husband said no problem.  He proceeded to accidentally ram the passenger side door into the fence post, denting our poor Orange Freeze.  O.F. no doubt started missing us too.

*Parts of northern England also had a taste of winter yesterday. ... The most significant June snowfall in memory came on June 2, 1975, when sleet and ... More famously, the match between Derbyshire and Lancashire at Buxton was called off. .... After rain, sleet, snow, ice and even a full moon

Summer 2016

                               The earth laughs in flower  
                                   -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Peter Rabbit and Friends

Peter Rabbit was a big part of our children’s literary lives.  We’ve often read all but one* of the 23 stories to our 3 daughters and grandchildren. (*The Tale of Little Pig Robinson is too long & the last published, 1930.)  Potter’s characters use large vocabularies.  They have fun names such as Babbity Bumble, Mrs. Tiggy Winkle, Mr. Alderman Ptolemy Tortoise, Mrs. Tittlemouse, etc. They often get into scrapes but live to tell the tale, although Squirrel Nutkin lost his, tail that is.

Beatrix Potter (1866-1943) first tried to establish herself as a mycologist--the study of fungi.  In her 20s she was the first to observe the symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae.  Her uncle presented her paper to the Linnean Society as women were barred from attending.  She was also rejected as a student to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.  The Linnean Society issued an official apology in 1997, acknowledging her contributions mycology.

These closed doors led to the opening of others, however.  Sixty-seven years after her death Beatrix Potter’s 23 illustrated children’s books are still in print world-wide. The start of her success was the publication of an illustrated letter Potter sent to her ex-governess’ son, Noel Moore, as he recovered from an illness. The Tale of Peter Rabbit is about a rambunctious bunny who can’t resist poaching veggies from Mr. & Mrs. McGregor’s impressive cottage garden, barely escaping the fate of his father, who ended up in a pie there.                                                           
Potter created a bevy of Peter’s relatives and fellow woodland inhabitants in 22 other diminutive books published by Frederick Warne.  Although her finely drawn hedgehogs, rabbits and fox strut about in human clothes their animal nature is always near the surface.

“Thank goodness my education was neglected.  I was never sent to school.  it would have rubbed off some of the originality,” Potter said of her childhood.  Governesses and nannies were the norm in her upper class London home. Although haphazard, her education was finer than most moderns. 

Growing up in the world’s richest city exposed her to great opportunity.  She was keenly aware of other women artists; knowledgeable about publishing and art movements.  By attempting to join one of world’s scientific epicenters illustrates how fast her society was changing.  The quest to categorize the plant species of the world was the prequel to the Human Genome Project today.

As a child Potter developed an intense interest in the wildlife of Kensington.  One can only presume her mother was as laissez faire with her domestic help as her daughter’s education for frogs, newts, ferrets, a pet bat and two rabbits lived at various times in their Kensington home.  She was a keen observer, sketching her charges so enthusiastically that by her 10th birthday her favorite present was the book, Birds Drawn from Nature by Jemima Blackburn.

In her early 30s her life changed when several of her illustrated letters were accepted by Norman Warne, publisher.  The instant success of The Tale of Peter Rabbit was Potter’s path to financial independence, She later planned to marry Norman, despite objections from her parents because they saw him as lower in status. He developed pernicious anemia and died before the wedding. 

Also against her parents objections, she used her income to buy Hill Top Farm in the village of Sawrey, the Lake District in then Lancashire, now Cumbria. The farm’s old stone farm house appears in many of her stories. Potter established herself as a respected farmer, sheep breeder and conservationist. In her 40s she married William Heelis, a local solicitor.  She died December 22,1943 and bequeathed her beloved 4000 acre Hill Top Farm to the National Trust upon her death.

 

    

 __________________________________________________________________