After the deluge...

Last Saturday, Karen and I went into Iowa City for the Jazz Festival, a three-day annual affair made more celebratory this year after the June floods that devastated eastern Iowa, including Iowa City.

Strolling toward the Pentacrest lawn, venue for the Jazz Festival, across the higher ground of the city’s east side, you’d be hard-pressed, as we were, to find evidence of the Iowa River’s mad slosh through Iowa City: the odd poster trumpeting a flood-relief benefit; here and there tiers of sandbags buttressing walls which, in the end, never saw water; and, only if you had paused in the library lobby on the way, a display of FEMA clean-up booklets.

Not unless you were to amble across the Pentracrest and around the Old Capitol to the portico fronting the building’s west façade and overlooking the river would you get a glimmer, and even there just a glimmer, of the deluge that was: ductwork funneling fouled air from the bowels of the university’s new journalism building; strands of yellow police tape, even from this distance spiraling in the evening breeze and warning the curious from the recently swamped Iowa Memorial Union, where, photographs attest, the river had had its way with the lower-level food courts and university bookstore, ransacking the place to the envy of the most frenzied burglar and swirling the ensuing mess into a sodden mass; the Iowa Avenue bridge, normally four lanes and doing a kind of limbo beneath the bar of a railroad bridge, now bottlenecked to two lanes, courtesy of a sinkhole the river had gouged from the eastbound lanes; and all around and everywhere the brickwork of buildings sporting the high-water scars of the Iowa River’s grimy embrace.

Although not within view from the Capitol portico, things were worse still on the river’s west bank, where the university’s arts campus, including the nationally renowned Hancher Auditorium, scene of concerts, graduations and regular visits from the likes of the Joffrey Ballet, was all but drowned a few weeks ago when the river leaped, all but laughing, the half-mile-long sandbag dike intended to elbow the flood away. A short drive away, Dubuque Street, one of Iowa City’s main approaches from points north, remained closed as of the weekend. At high tide, Dubuque had bottomed the lake the river had become, and the street’s usual course could then be traced only in the outline of streetlights, the poles stilting the river like a flock of outsized flamingos.

But that was then, and the Jazz Festival was now, with the Iowa River itself, like some sated ogre returned to its cave, in most places again back in its banks.

Coincidentally, the evening we were there one of the headlining groups hailed from New Orleans, its members undoubtedly more intimate with the effects of water than they’d ever dreamed to be. Regardless, the music was memorable, the weather, at this point in an Iowa summer for an Irish guy whose inner thermostat tops out at 80 degrees, deliciously pleasant, the audience of several thousand rife for people-watching. Here were kids for whom every tree was an invitation to climb; there, lovers, still courting high school as much as each other, their eyes, smiles and occasional, socially-acceptable caress a reminder, to any not too hoary to have forgotten, of youthful summers past; and everywhere families, friends and couples, like Karen and me, forgetting, flood and all else, for this shared moment on a summer’s eve.

Many of these same people would also have been among the army of sandbaggers, who, a month ago, sought to keep a river at bay. On that mid-June Saturday, Madison Street had been lined with anthills of sand, each crawling with volunteer workers scooping, bagging, tying and stacking. A fleet of trucks, Bob-Cats and front-end loaders scurried from hill to hill, back-up beepers announcing their unscheduled comings and goings, their business ends hefting and hauling bags by heaps and hundreds to the waiting receiving lines of sandbag slingers, Karen and me and two of our children among them, who would then pass the bags hand to hand to the river’s edge. I read later that 100,000 sandbags were laid in the course of that single Saturday, a testament to the hundreds of people who rallied that day to the cause. Indeed, even in the face of imminent heartbreak, it was heartwarming to see so many do so much in so short a time, all in the name of saving the city they love.

In the end, the river pulled its punch, but not before a historically telling blow, cresting on June 15th at 31.53 feet, a foot and a half lower than expected, but three feet higher than the previous record set in 1993. Nor was the Iowa River in any hurry to leave, unlike the Cedar River farther north, which crested on June 13th and slinked back below flood stage eight days later. Instead, not until July 7th, some three weeks after cresting, did the Iowa slip again below its own flood stage. And, as impressive as that might be, upstream along the Iowa River at the Coralville Lake Reservoir, the flood called it quits only after topping off at a bit more than 717 feet, water as deep as a 70-story building is high, the top five of those feet tumbling for days over the spillway at the rate of tens of thousands of cubic feet per second. The word biblical comes quickly to mind.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon