Impossible to ignore the rain

Walking or driving around, one pays little attention to small rises and falls in the landscape. In Waseca, I am aware the library is significantly lower than the courthouse and the downtown area. In New Richland, had I been asked, I could have described that the city park and Highway 30 past the school are lower than the business district.

 

One needn’t pay much attention however, because on a day-to-day basis, those differences in elevation are incidental, essentially irrelevant.

 

On a day-to-day basis, there is no reason to consider how fundamentally important those changes in elevation are when the town fills up with water.

 

I live about five miles north of New Richland. The rain gauge on our weather station claims we got between two and three inches of rain on Friday and overnight into Saturday. As it got dark on Friday, it was impossible to miss the lightning and thunder, but I was not looking at radar, so I was oblivious to the long, narrow band of heavy, heavy rain that was sliding past only a few miles south of me.

 

Instead, I saw its aftermath as I drove into New Richland Saturday morning thinking I was going to the post office.

 

I should have been somewhat prepared for what I saw–on my drive into town, first my usual way was blocked by water overflowing a bridge. My first alternate route was impassable because a wide band of water covered a gravel road. When my third route brought me into New Richland from the west on Highway 30, my first dramatic introduction to the flooding was two flashing firetrucks parked at each end of a giant pool of water.

 

It wasn’t long before I realized I was no longer simply running an errand.

 

Instead, I had wandered unawares into a catastrophe.

 

At the back side of the school, I could see people in wheelchairs being brought off a bus and rolled inside. At the front, water filled the street and covered most of the sidewalk, but wasn’t quite touching the building’s lowest entry doors, the “lobby” to the main gym. Looking east and north from there, the city water tower seemed to be presiding over a lake rather than a town.

 

The more I saw, the more surreal it all became. 

 

Inside a disaster, the human brain retreats to collecting information, taking in impressions. I kept looking for pictures that could convey the gravity of the circumstances. In some places, there were flurries of activity as people tried to control the water’s advance, especially keeping it from going inside doorways or setting up pumps to remove it from basements. In other places, there was no hope of control. One fellow in waders came polling out of a storage building on a flat, motorless boat. Nearby stood a car almost up to its windows in water.

 

As I moved around taking pictures, I would realize my jaw was hanging open, or that I was shaking my head in dismay. One person pointed to the water in her yard and mentioned she had lived in this same house for the two previous flooding incidents over the past five years, but the water had never come as high as it was now; only the high wooden platform of her children’s swingset was showing above the water. Nearby, two colorful “noodle” floats bobbed against the grass. An older couple of grandparent age stood in water calf deep on their front yard.

 

When I eventually found a route to the business district of town, a large group of people of many ages was filling sandbags. Their busy activity sent an impression of good-willed determination to do what they could. Downhill from them, the city-operated care center was surrounded by water.

 

I snapped one picture of the group, then realized the battery in my smart phone had died. Though that made me want to howl in frustration, it was probably a good thing that circumstances forced me to stop taking pictures.

 

Had I been 50 photographers, I could not have taken enough pictures to record the loss, the bravery, the sense of being overwhelmed, that was Saturday morning in New Richland.