A river ran through it...

I have twice had occasion this week to visit Cedar Rapids, the first time on Monday to welcome the new residents at a picnic, the second on Saturday to send off the graduating residents.

On Monday, for example, the path to the picnic led us across over the Cedar River by way of the Eighth Avenue bridge. Perhaps 50 feet south lies what was once a railroad bridge across the same river, but is now a twisted span that has become an oversized trap, one all too effective at catching every manner of trash flowing downriver, from the plastic bric-a-brac of lives that once were and are now forever changed, to tree limbs of every size, to entire parts of houses. Also imprisoned within the bridge’s contorted fretwork are fully laden railroad cars, parked intentionally on the span in the hope of stabilizing steel against what was two weeks ago the imminent onslaught of water. All too obviously, that ploy failed, and now those same cars are either, like some giant’s jewelry, spun within the same steel, or, discarded, like so much dross, bottoming the river.

The same path also had us veering here and there around road debris, usually unidentifiable in passing, although when we got to the picnic and learned that one of the residency staff had earlier slit a tire on a domestic roadside bomb of a boxcutter, I was glad to have given way to the river’s scattered last laughs.

Other sights: everywhere, in every direction, what were once sidewalks heaped with the detritus of the wants and necessities of modern life — refrigerators, furnaces, water heaters, lumber of every shape and size, boxes containing whatever once was worth saving and now was, like it or not, lost. Those people, who must also count themselves among that loss, were gone. The luckier of the lot, doctors’ offices, city hall, Mercy Hospital, other businesses, sported their relative good fortune in the form of vans, trucks and, in the case of Mercy, nothing less than a necklace of semis, courtesy of disaster clean-up companies that have, in the wake of the deluge, become their own kind of flood.

Most memorable of all on that Monday: the smell, so redolent, so inescapable that, to me, it gave new meaning to the word “stench.” Think sewage. Now factor in the olfactory herbage of garbage. Now layer in god-knows-whatever the river only knows. Imagine yourself, for this, this whiff of a moment, in a landfill heretofore unimaginable. Now, breathe, breathe deeply of what was weeks ago a city alive. You cannot, will not, forget.

Can I add more?

Only this: last night, after leaving the residency graduation, we drove south on I-380 through Cedar Rapids, midnight, more or less, and, more more than less, its own garden of evil. To my left the downtown Crowne Plaza hotel, on any other night ablaze with tumescent swooners or more-so honeymooners, the odd corporate-card layover or a weekending family or three, now dark, a single room on a penultimate floor inexplicably alit. Around it block after block of apartment buildings and office towers, and even the enisled city hall itself, all, all, in ink. Further south still, whole neighborhoods, power still out, the lanes between homes shadowed in streetlights, the homes themselves no longer homes, just houses, each one fronted by its own pile of debris (a ton per house, I read, some 300,000 tons overall), each with its red, yellow or green placard on the door whispering, respectively, to drive-by passers-by of doom, hope and the eventual return of owners. (To give you some sense of how widespread that doom and how spartan that hope, some 45,000 people in Cedar Rapids — fully one-fifth of the city’s population — have been displaced by the flood, and hundreds of houses are expected to have their own close encounter with the bulldozer. And that’s only Cedar Rapids; elsewhere in Iowa, the story is much the same, or worse.)

And, oh, oh, oh god, the smell, oh,no, the stench.

We here, Karen, me, the kids, are among the spared — and surely blessed — yet all too mindful of the many friends and co-workers who have lost some or everything. Whatever prayers you might want to loft, do so for them. We’re okay — and, again, surely blessed.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon