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A voice calls out from the devastated Iowa wilderness

8/18/2020

1 Comment

 
Charles City Press, Aug. 18, 2020

It’s me, Iowa, calling out to the rest of the world. Hello?

Are you out there? Do you remember me? I could use a little help.

I didn’t even know what a derecho was until last Monday.

Honestly, I’d never heard of it before. It sounds like it might be something delicious you could order at a Mexican restaurant. It’s not that.

Last Monday morning, here in Charles City, I was getting some work done, typing away. Outside a thunderstorm rumbled and rocked, but it was nothing I’d never seen before. Actually, it was kind of relaxing. We needed the rain.

My phone vibrated. I was receiving a text message from an old buddy in Cedar Rapids, who was spending the morning with his teenage son, Owen.

“CR just been devastated by worst storm I’ve ever been in,” the message said. “Much of city looks like combat zone. Owen and I were in truck and barely made it to safety.”

An alarm went off in my head. Something is amiss. My friend is not one who over-reacts or exaggerates. He’s in his 50s, and seen his share of bad weather events. He said this is the worst storm he’s ever been in. He said Cedar Rapids is “devastated.” Something really bad must’ve happened.

I checked my news sources and my social media. I was seeing reports from everyone, from all over the state. The messages were frightening. The photos I saw were chilling. Faces torn off buildings. Cars flipped on their backs. Entire fields of corn flattened. Trees down, piled 30 feet high. Homes demolished. It wasn’t just Cedar Rapids, it was the entire middle third of Iowa.

I checked on my sister in the Quad Cities. She was alive and unharmed, and so were my nephews. Some damage. A tree was down in her yard, and her area was without power. Little did she know they would be without power for five entire days. Thank God no one was killed, she said.

That seemed to be the line of the day. “I can’t believe we’re still alive.” Nearly everyone I contacted counted that blessing at the end of their extensive damage report.

Messages continued to come from my buddy in Cedar Rapids and others, from all over Iowa.

“Can’t even drive on most streets and area is out of power.”

“Windows out of many homes and biz. 100+ mph winds.”

“Roof blew off girlfriend’s house, they lost everything. Many roofs blew off all over.”

“Counted 14 semis down leaving CR.”

My buddy was getting out of Cedar Rapids, to stay at a place in northern Iowa, away from the devastation. It wasn’t until that evening that he had time tell the full story of what happened to him and to Owen Monday morning. He told several of us via Facebook Messenger.

“Owen and I were near Westdale having lunch. We just finished when the sirens were going off. Still calm and sunny, but dark to the west. Sky started turning green, so I told him we better get home before the rain started.”

The rain was going to be the least of my friend’s problems.

“Got on road and within 200 yards it was blowing so hard I could hardly see and drive. Huge limbs and trees were falling into the road and debris was flying everywhere. Several power lines fell near us and one exploded on the street right next to driver-side door as we met another car. If I hadn’t known the way, we couldn’t have seen well enough to continue.”

My buddy decided he didn’t want to risk driving his truck over the bridge, so he began looking for somewhere else to stop and seek shelter.

“We got to the Cherry Building, where my old studio was, which is a huge brick building and I felt was the safest place. I tried to pull up as close as possible to the back door so Owen could run to the door, but a bike rack kept us about 30 feet away.”

My friend said that at this point, the wind had to be over 100 mph and “debris was airborne everywhere.”

“Owen could barely push the truck door open, so I decided I’d just leave the truck where it was and help him to the door. We could barely stay upright, and several people inside the building helped open the door to let us in. We sheltered there in the dark in the basement for about an hour.”

“The parking spot I was going to use after letting Owen out had large trees in it when it was over. We had several guys helping to move the logs so I could back out. All the side streets were full of trees … it took us over an hour to drive three miles to the house.”

My friend’s story was not unique. In the week since the Iowa derecho, I’ve read and heard dozens of similar tales. Tens of thousands of people were without power for five or six days. Thousands are without homes. More than one-third of Iowa’s corn crop is gone with the wind.

It took four days for the governor to activate the national guard to help. It took a week for the governor to request federal assistance. The vice-president was in Iowa last week, but strictly for a campaign stop. The damage and devastation was not surveyed — it was barely mentioned.

As I write this on Monday, I just heard that the president is going to make a stop here, presumably to check the damage and offer support.

Better late than never, I guess.

A year ago, there were more than two dozen political candidates running all over our state, telling us how much they loved us, asking us to caucus for them. Until Sunday, I hadn’t heard a peep from any of them regarding our inland hurricane.

I’ve heard many Iowans complain that there has barely been a mention of this in the national news. The damage to Iowa is far greater than the damage administered by any of the storms and hurricanes that have hit the coasts this year — and some of those storms received days upon days of national news coverage.

I realize there’s a whole lot going on in the world right now, and all of it deserves news coverage. This is a big story, though, and almost everyone — from elected officials to mass media outlets — has failed to recognize that. It’s been largely ignored outside our borders, and that’s a problem.

If you don’t get coverage, you don’t get attention. If you don’t get attention, you don’t get assistance.

We’re Iowans. We’re tough. We’re kind. Iowans are resilient. We look out for each other. Our right-wing nuts will stand right next to our left-wing wackos and together they’ll work and sweat and fix things and comfort one another. Hawkeyes will help Cyclones, and Cyclones will help Hawkeyes, Panthers will help everyone, and we will prevail. We’ve done it before.

We can clean this up on our own, we can take care of each other without all that outside aid. And we will, if we have to.

But it sure would be easier if we got a little help.

Hello world? It’s me, Iowa.

1 Comment

The imperfect vision of 2020

8/4/2020

2 Comments

 
Charles City Press, 8-4-20

We should have known it from the start.

We should have known there was going to be something wrong with 2020 the first week of the new year.

I know it seems like 10 years ago, but if you’ll remember, for the first few days in January, every time we had to sign and date something, a very helpful cashier or receptionist would remind us to use four digits for the year.

“Don’t just write 20, you need to write 2020,” the person would tell us.

This was because, it was explained to me, that just putting “20” on paper made it easy for someone to come along and change the date on the signature. Someone could just write a “19” or a “21” next to my “20,” and the entire year would be changed and perhaps my signature would be legally meaningless. Chaos and anarchy would be sure to follow, and possibly some mild personal inconvenience.

I heard this explanation several times, and each time I listened and nodded my head. “Seems reasonable,” I would say to myself, as I made sure I wrote “2020” next to my signature, instead of just “20.”

I felt, for a moment, like I was privy to some exclusive secret survivalist information. Those dirty-dealing scammers weren’t going to get me, I thought to myself. I was on to their little con game. Did my mama raise any dummies? No, my mama most certainly did not.

I’ve been writing “2020” on everything I have to sign and date ever since, not just “20.” It wasn’t until a few minutes ago that I asked myself “why?” Why would someone go to the trouble of nefariously changing the date on my signature? What would a person have to gain by doing that? Is there some kind of strange mental condition that compels people to change dates on signatures, just for the thrill of it? How thrilling could that possibly be?

I’m buying $8 worth of batteries. How would underhandedly nullifying this transaction work to anyone’s advantage or disadvantage? I don’t even understand how the date by my signature would even come up — I cannot imagine a situation where someone would feel the need bring into question the exact year that I decided to buy $8 worth of batteries.

“I know you claim you bought those batteries in 2020, sir, but your signature tells me otherwise. I hereby offer proof that you indeed, bought those batteries in 2021, a full year later. You, sir, are a liar, and you thoroughly disgust me. Off with his head!”

Despite the poignant absurdity of it all, I’m still just going along with it. I write “2020” next to everything I sign, because several months ago, a nice cashier who seemed to know more about these things than I did told me it was a good idea. Why rock the boat? Go along to get along, that’s my motto.

(That’s really not my motto. I don’t really have a motto, but if I did, I’d like to think it would be more interesting than that.)

What I’m saying is we should have known back then that something was up. We should have known in January that 2020 was going to be nothing but trouble. We should have made our stand then, before things got out of hand.

Since that time, we’ve had an economic collapse, a deadly, rapidly-spreading pandemic that made the economic collapse worse, lockdowns and quarantines, racial strife and violence in the streets, the cancellation of all major events (and many minor ones), mass unemployment, businesses shutting down, a frenzied rush to close down schools — followed by an inexplicable demand to open them back up — and, of course, the swarms of Murder Hornets.

If you haven’t heard about the Murder Hornets, I honestly am not making them up. They are out there, we just haven’t given them any attention because there’s so much other crap going on. In a normal year, the Murder Hornets would have most of us wetting our pants in fear. You know it’s a bad year when people hear about something called Murder Hornets and everyone just shrugs their shoulders and says “no biggie.”

I’m not even mentioning all the personal struggles I’ve had to go through, and the terrible pain and anguish many of the people I know have had to endure this year on a personal level, unrelated to all the widely-reported problems.

And to top it all off, Regis died, folks. Regis. Who didn’t love Regis? I already miss him.

With all that said, the most awful thing about 2020 is simply the fact that there are five full months left before it’s over. And if things don’t change, 2021 is standing there at the end of it all and saying, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

We don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s the year of Murphy’s Law. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

I know it sometimes feels like we just have to sit and take it. I see helplessness out there, and I see rage and anger, and I see sorrow, and I see dread. And sometimes I feel all of those things, and I don’t have an answer.

2020 has taken a lot of things away from us, and it’s going to take even more before it’s done.

But it can’t take away laughter, it can’t take away hope, it can’t take away love.

Those things are in our hearts to stay. Sometimes we have to look hard and deep for them, because they get buried beneath piles of all the other junk. But they’re still in there, I promise.

Find them. You can do it. Help your buddies find them. Help your enemies find them, too.

Find them every day. Make it a habit.

Make it so you do it without thinking, without questioning, without wondering why.

Like writing 2020 next to your signature.

2 Comments

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