If you're going to panic, panic before everyone else does

Whew...it's been quite a month. On May 14, we were still in our house in Vancouver, Washington, preparing for a cross-country move to the Cedar Rapids area. We left the evening of the 18th. The neighbors threw us a barbeque and even gave us a card, signed by all the families we knew. I didn't find the card and read it until we were in Iowa, surrounded by the chaos of half-unpacked boxes and family and friends coming and going. I wanted to cry, but after a four-day trip across country, I had no emotions left.

Then the tornadoes hit. Our new house (which I love, by the way) was surrounded by crashing lightning, booming thunder, and wailing sirens. There was a couple of nights where we could hardly sleep for the noise and light. It looked like a strobe light was going off outside our house. Then we discovered two cracks in our basement (which turned out to be very minor, thank God--but it was still unnerving to move into a house and discover any need for immediate repairs). Dean rushed out and bought a weather radio so we could keep informed while huddling in our cold, unfinished basement. "Welcome to the Midwest," our friends joked. The damage reports from the tornadoes, while they did not hit our immediate area, were of course not funny.

Then that spate of storms passed, and everything seemed OK again. We continued to unpack, and took a couple of day trips to visit Dean's parents and old friends. I was hitting all the garage sales I could, seeking replacements for all the items we had had to leave behind (thank you Joe and Angie for putting up with that!). We made arrangements to repair the basement and were busy getting digital phone services hooked up. The day after the basement was fixed, rain poured down again. There was a flash flood warning for Cedar Rapids.

Then everything kind of went quiet. The rain came down. The thunder boomed and the lightning flashed. No sirens. I flipped on the TV halfway through that Thursday looking for weather updates, and I didn't see anything but ordinary TV. We don't live in CR, by the way. We live in Marion, a small town to the NE of Cedar Rapids, with its own history and its own services, and its own life.

We had seen some sandbagging going on downtown on Tuesday. We swung through the area to file for our Homestead exemption and to pick up a bundle of meat from Polehna's Meat Market, in the Czech village, a block-long string of shops capped off by the Czech and Slovak Heritage Museum. We drove back across the bridge and took a wrong turn, upsetting some people who were assisting a sandbagging effort in a neighborhood close to the river. We must have looked like utter cads, with our maps and sunglasses, carelessly barrelling around an area that people were very concerned about.

But by the evening it was obvious that things were going south real fast. The water was rising, and it didn't stop until--and this shocked me the most--the island upon which our government buildings sit, the building in which we filed our exemption, the little meat market, and that unfortunate neighborhood was completely covered with water.

More to come...