Voices from the Flood

from the introduction by Eliot Glassheim
used by permission

AFTER THE FLOOD, whenever friends or even casual acquaintances ran into each other, the first thing they did was to tell their stories. How bad was the damage, where did they go, what was it like leaving town, what did they take with them, how long were they gone, had they known in advance it was going to flood, how were the children taking it, what about pets, where were they staying now, were they going to rebuild, was the city helping?

But even after they had told their stories many times, people still wanted to tell the next person they met. One had the impression of a city of ancient mariners, "stopping one of three" at a wedding, compelled to tell their haunted stories to purge the experiences from their minds. And, for the listeners, we never tired of hearing the stories told over and over again. They were a way of expressing a shared bond, of saying how we were a part of the same event, an epic event so large in our lives and so broadly shared that it required telling.

One of the stories I found most astonishing was that of a woman who begins by revealing, to herself and to us, that she wants to leave town because she feels betrayed (By the city? By the river? By life?). In the course of the interview, she engages in an on-going dialogue as she reflects on other people's attitudes towards the flood. She reacts to a letter to the editor claiming that God sent the flood in retribution for our sins; she reads the Biblical story of Job; she draws cheer from the miraculous newspaper clipping about a Cherokee Indian prisoner from the east coast who sent his $12 monthly cigarette allotment to help Grand Forks flood victims any Indian knows that you don't put your tipi by the river. At the end, she seems to be almost reconciled to the fact that the water didn't mean to hurt her personally and, simultaneously, to realize that as she takes the disaster less personally, she feels less betrayed.

Many of the stories resonate with images that still seem fresh after many readings:

• Stranded in a truck surrounded by four or five feet of water, a man lassoes a garbage can and telephone pole which were floating by, and lights a fire to keep warm in the early evening and then to signal helicopters to rescue him from the dark, cold night.
  
• Not evacuating when the power and water are shut off, a high school senior and his family live in a state of nature for two weeks; he fishes off his back porch, canoes down a main street, visits abandoned houses of friends, and brings home food and generators in the canoe.
  
• Fireman wake a college senior up and hustle him out of his apartment with no time to collect his wits or a novel he's been writing; because his sense of smell was lost in a recent accident, he has no idea the building next door is burning and no idea, until later, that the fireman have saved his life.
  
• An elderly couple who married when each of their spouses died of cancer several years ago, have no time to prepare for grief when their home, which had taken water to the rooftop, is bulldozed down without warning; the machines run over tree in their yard which officials had not allowed them to give to their children for transplanting.
  
• The city sees itself differently because it was the object of national attention; as one person whose parents were interviewed on national television put it, "You'd think that we were in some small place on the earth and then all of a sudden everyone's here and all the things you see on TV are at your house."
  
• Before the grown children who come back to help leave town, a family gathers at their ruined house with their priest, who performs a formal ceremony to help them find closure; later they bury a time capsule in the yard, under the evergreen tree they planted twenty-four years ago.
  
• After evacuating, some people sneak back to their houses, possibly risking their lives to take what is important to them: a wife's wedding ring, some valued art works, one by a long dead relative.
  
• If she can't save the piano given to her as a farm girl by her grandfather, one woman if going to plant the brass piece in her yard for morning glories to climb on.

BEYOND the images, those interested in human nature can hear these stories in a broad range of raw emotions. Moments of fear, courage, foolhardiness, neighborliness, determination, greed, love of family, stoic acceptance, anger, compassion, blaming, selfishness, generosity, self-pity, and grief all present themselves directly, unmediated by conscious narrative technique. Most of the classic virtues and deadly sins reveal themselves in these miniatures.

The North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks has collected stories of the 1997 flood in the book Voices from the Flood as part of an oral history project. For more information on books from the North Dakota Museum of Art, call (701) 777-4195.