Dog days...

In Iowa, this time of year, heat hangs heavily.

You can see it in the trees, slack-shouldered, knees to the ground, sweat all but dripping from the drooping leaves. The grass, too, so recently eager to roll out its green carpet in that remembered blush of spring, now staunches its once-and-future youthful enthusiasm in favor of a more seasoned approach to summer. And everywhere, flowers, the sun-worshippers among them anyway, bare all, petals akimbo, stamens and pistils all but whistling at bees that might be up for a buzz. Those blossoms more demure, sidelined by choice to shade or chance to shadow, Mona-Lisa from the background, their modesty draped in a well-placed sepal or three.

In any other year, you could also drive down any back road of your choosing, your wheels churning a dust-devil of gravel and powder to chart your passage against a sky-blue sky, with the road itself rimmed on either side with corn high as the nearest elephant’s eye. This year, however, floods have stemmed the corn’s tide, so much so that Iowa’s seasonal sea of corn, rising and falling on a groundswell of hill and hollow, is, in most places, a foot or two shallower. Not so, though, the layer of haze above, as all those acres of corn pump up the already amped humidity, thickening all the more the gumboed summer air.

Across a more charted, more Atlantic ocean, the rain in Spain may still fall mainly on the plain, but, l’air en France, or at least in that part of the country known as Cognac, is the better for the “angels’ share,” that surprisingly large percentage of alcohol lost in its aging by the local eaux-de-vie to evaporation. Not to be out-proofed, however, those who care about such things have also shown that Iowa’s humidity owes much to the transpiration of mega-acres of corn, conjuring images of the entire state heaving on inspiration and blurring the horizon with the first morning breath. Still, it beggars the same imagination that any angels of any persuasion, perched wing-to-wing on a fence rail in some Iowa that is truly heaven and not merely a field in someone’s dreams, are huffing corn when there’s headier cognac to be had, but, hey, whatever rings an angel’s bell.

Me?

I’m no angel, especially when it comes to taking the heat, since my inner thermostat tops out at 80 degrees — anything above might as well be a hundred, just ask the woman who shares my life and who suffers the consequences on these, the most howling of my dog days. Toss in humidity to fire up the heat index, and I’m the unhappiest bowser you can imagine. Indeed, I have been known to enter the locally famous beer vault at John’s Grocery in Iowa City and pipe to any who would listen, usually and only that same long-suffering bride, that you could haul in a desk and maybe punch out a window, and I’d be in hop heaven. Back at home, though, under less air- or, for that matter, cask-conditioned circumstances, I am the one long-suffering, known to lament often and aloud, much to the chagrin of the purgatoried souls around me, “I’m Irish, built for cold, bleak islands,” an observation bolstered by the fact that while I’m stripped to shorts, and still complaining, everyone else is shivering under blankets.

Back in those fresh-from-Vermont, new-to-Iowa days when we lived in West Branch on the outskirts of Iowa City, back when I was still in med school, our own backyard butted against a cornfield at the town’s eastern edge. On those dog days of those first summers, made junkyard-dog days by the added heat of med school itself, when there was no beer vault anywhere around stocked well enough to slake my discontent or cool enough to temper my distemper, I was known to ramble to the fence line separating the crew-cut grass from the rank-and-order corn beyond. I’d stand there, still as the stalks themselves, face to the field, feet rooted, haloed myself by the academic haze du jour, whether it was anatomy or path, micro or pharm, and would watch, literally, the corn grow.

It was an intentionally mindless activity, demanding little more than observation on any voluntary level and as little obligatory perspiration as I had to muster. No fathoming the function of kidneys at a cellular level, no cramming the kinetics of this or that analgesic, no mapping the neural comings and goings of the brachial plexus. Only the horizon inching higher, seemingly by the hour, the corn in a cloudless sky breathing in and breathing out, leaves splayed in the sun, tassels tossed to the breeze, and, as the weeks wore on, the field itself all ears, attuned to some distant and timeless melody, its rhythm the rhythm of that summer and every summer before and since.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

Slouching towards Bethlehem...

You could spend a lifetime straddling stools in bars from the bay side of Isle au Haut to the far side of Tillamook, and every once in a bottle of Blue Moon you might find yourself squinting through rivers of neon and smoke, tucking your beer a bit tighter to hand and leaning into the voice beside you, all at once aware that what you’re hearing might well pass for wisdom, even, and this, a true test of wisdom, the morning after.

More often, of course, all that beer breeds only so much blather, all of it as frothy and evanescent as the foam trimming the top, none of it relevant, if even remembered, in the fog of a morning after.

But try as you might, in that same lifetime of jockeying bar stools, you’d be hard-pressed to hitch that voice of lagered palaver to a face, and to have that face belong to a wise man of dubious wisdom with the unlikely, but, oh, so mellifluent name of Melchior.

So imagine, for a moment, my own good fortune, when, a week or so ago, after a couple of hours fielding riffs from the grassy bleachers at the Iowa City Jazz Festival, Karen and I popped into a local watering-hole, angled for the empty corner of the bar and, while Karen headed to the ladies’, I swung into the saddle and took the lay of the land.

To my left the jukebox, the empty stool saved for Karen to the right and, just beyond, another empty, with a pack of smokes and a proverbially half-empty/half-full glass laying claim to what was obviously temporarily abandoned territory. The owner — a gallon of a man in a pint container, a tree or two on the shady side of 60, the brim of a ball cap topping a head given to a comical bobbling — returned before Karen did, slipping easily into the saddle of his own seat and immediately crossing the divide with a good-natured dig at the recently implemented ban on public smoking in Iowa.

“It’ll never last,” expounded the man who would soon enough introduce himself as Melchior, in story the name of one of the wise men, in legend the one who bore the gold, giving me, suddenly all ears, the gift of writer’s gold. “They’ll repeal it before the summer ends. You just watch,” he sputtered, the words whistling between missing teeth.

I nodded, far less in agreement, given the welcome improvement in oxygen content since the new law had gone into effect on July 1st, than in politeness, then watched as Karen cantered toward, then slipped between us, Melchior brightening visibly at the suddenly lovelier horizon, and almost immediately registering his improved prospects with the downing of the dregs of what might, under less fortuitous circumstances, have been his last call.

After that, all I had to do was listen.

He had grown up in the Poconos, spent a decade and then another, not one day of which he could ever live to regret, in the Navy, some of that stint, if I close-hauled his wake, in a dreamily remembered Hawaii. Along the way, he had met, married and later ex-ed the woman who had been his wife. At some point, too, and somewhat incongruously, he had studied art in the company of Andrew Wyeth. And somewhere two more roads had diverged in a wood, and Melchior had emerged by the one more traveled by, piloting the business end of a semi while another pair of decades slipstreamed by.

I’m not sure when he picked up the pilot’s license, although he was quick, and we’re talking in the next breath, to invite me up for a spin.

Now, I left out the part where Melchior related how he’d not so long ago given up riding a bike to the bar after he’d taken a tumble on the way home. Better, I suppose, to walk, wobble and make whatever headway against a beer-and-bourbon tide than to ever again do a header over those handlebars.

It would also help you to know that the only times I had ever enjoyed travel by air was when Ireland had been the destination. I can’t explain that, other than by some dead-reckoning of the soul that had, on those many ocean crossings, led me reassuringly home. Except for that, every other flight, almost always of a business persuasion, owed much to wing but more to prayer. Not only that, but a life detoured by all this recent education, had meant a life without much in the way of vacation, the upshot of which is that I’ve not been on a plane in 14 years. Yet here Melchior was, having walked away from a boozy bike wreck, teetering as precariously now on a bar stool as he had that accidental night on a bicycle seat, and going Frank Sinatra on me with his own version of “Come Fly with Me.”

So I did what you’d do and ignored the invitation.

As luck would have it, nature, in the form of a nicotine break, called, and Melchior, more deftly than I would have predicted, fingered a smoke from the pack, snagged his lighter with his other hand and followed temptation and the brim of his cap to the great outdoors.

A bit more luck, and any memory of that invitation would have been just that, memory. Instead, no sooner had Melchior remounted his bar stool when he tried again.

“Anytime you want to go up, you just let me know.”

I looked at him, took in the bobbling cap on the bobbling head, the merriment in his eyes, remembered in that instant all he had already told me, and, even as I reveled in the wonder, the utter and unexpected wonder, of the moment, dropped any pretense and bared my manhood.

“I’m not one for planes,” I confessed, choosing not to add, “unless Ireland’s on the far end of the flight path,” lest he trump my petty ante and offer to ferry me by air to Shannon.

With the grace born of long years of marriage, Karen, right on cue, vouched for my midair derring-don’t, grounding for good any further flight of fancy on the part of our newfound companion. The three of us moved on to talk idly of other things, then, at some point, Karen and I huddled a moment to share a thought, only to look back to see that Melchior, this time cigarettes and all, had himself become night and memory.

Wisdom is, often as not, a wistful thing.

You can, if you listen, hear it in Springsteen and, if “Thunder Road” is what you’re listening to, catch it in passing in the rear-view window of your own life. You can read it in the likes of a Whitman or Agee, sense it on prayer mat or pew, encounter it in proverb or, even better, the script for “Bull Durham.” And sometimes, just sometimes, when you’re entirely unaware, when you’re slouched on a stool, with the namesake of a wise man at your elbow, each of you bound for your own private Bethlehem under some distant and brighter star, wisdom, in its wisdom, bellies up to the bar and buys you a round on the house.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

Friday's child...

For a guy who started out on a Friday the 13th 57 years ago today, I really can’t complain. After all, I’ve mostly sidestepped a more or less equal share of adversity, created opportunity where often there was none, been luckier overall than most, and if I’ve not quite lived the life I planned, I’ve certainly lived the life I wanted, at least in retrospect.

Oh, sure, I do seem to have a disproportionate number of what I call “Charlie Brown” moments, where, whether by whim or wile, the football of life is yanked away just as I’m about to send it toward the goalpost. But those moments, while seemingly frequent, are minor in impact and importance, and always more inconvenient than ever incapacitating.

Nor, perhaps in deference to my Friday the 13th start in life, am I a betting man, although, truth is, my caution has more to do with a long-ago San Gennaro Feast in New York’s Little Italy than it does to any ill-omened birth. Back then, at a time when I earned scarcely $13,000 a year writing copy for Doubleday and was supporting not just myself, but my mother, father and youngest brother, I allowed myself to be swindled by an unscrupulous street vendor running one of those ubiquitous games of chance, mistaking early luck for good fortune and not for the set-up it was. In the end, I lost about $100, maybe half a week’s pay, surely a week’s groceries, probably a big bite from the month’s rent, at a time when even the cost of a subway token to take me to Karen, whom I was then dating, was a luxury.

Since then, I’ve not wagered money, unless you count the thousands lost on houses that only rarely and only briefly let us capitalize on investment. I have, however, been somewhat profligate with time, betting months on a stint in Ireland intended to be a lifetime; months more on this or that writing project in the days when I was a hired pen; and entire years on graduate school, med school and residency, all in the name of affirming the writer I’d always been and becoming the physician I always dreamed to be.

Has it been worth it? Again, I’ve lived the life I wanted. But certainly those gambles on time have come at a cost, especially this last decade devoted to tacking that MD after my name.

I’ve already lamented to some that those ten years are ten ghosted years during which I seldom wrote a word, let alone the poetry, articles or books that might better have bricked a life’s work and mortared a legacy, that might, in the end, have built a happier life. The greater cost, however, has been exacted on my family, each and all of whom have dearly paid for my career change in laughter never shared and memories never made. Several of our children have, in this same lost decade, grown into adulthood, and no doubt too often recall their father as the worried med student prepping for the next exam or the wasted resident sleeping off a long night’s call. For Karen and me, too, full too many of our middle years have been years of unneeded stress and struggle. Nor can I argue that I am, as a physician, the better for my family’s sacrifice, since the practice of medicine, for all its inherent idealism and altruism, is today less practice than it is process, done at the behest of hospital employers, insurance and pharmaceutical companies to whom productivity, as measured in patients seen and prescriptions written, and efficiency, as charted in procedures avoided and dollars saved, is what makes the stethoscope go around.

The nursery rhyme would have me, as Friday’s child, loving and giving, and over the course of this lengthening life I have tried, I have really tried. That much I know. But I also know that I have too often failed. And to those who have paid the price for that failure, those I love most and to whom I have given much but not enough, my gift to you, on this my own 57th birthday, is, even if papered in heartfelt regret, the equally sincere hope for brighter days to come.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

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

By way of explaining...

In Shetland, that scattershot of islands at Scotland’s far northern edge, there is in the midst of a midsummer’s night a half-hour span when the day in its dying leaps the horizon, only, in an instant, to change its mind and to shinny again up the cliff face, renewed and ready as ever to gild a dawn. It is a twilit time, neither light nor dark, neither day nor night, a time somewhere between and known to locals as the Simmer Dim.

Back in 1989, back when I was a comparative lad of 38, I was myself in a kind of Simmer Dim, a somewhere-between time that was, admittedly, as much frame of mind, one occasioned by my family’s desire to move back to Ireland, a move stymied then and forever by a house in Vermont that we couldn’t sell, owing to a well contaminated by road salt. Eventually, the problem was remedied; eventually, the house sold, albeit at such a loss that the seed money that would have bankrolled the move and allowed us to sink new roots in the Old Sod had gone, all too literally, down the drain.

It was in that summer of the salted well, with a planned solo jaunt to Ireland providing the excuse to hopscotch Scotland to Shetland, that I visited this Ultima Thule of the ancients, lured largely by a longstanding, but otherwise inexplicable, tug in that direction, and partly by a writer’s more understandable desire to stand entirely alone and at the edge of the world.

In fact, in the course of that visit, I would do exactly that, abandoning a hired car in the car park at the Hermaness Nature Preserve at the northernmost tip of Shetland’s northernmost isle of Unst, striding two miles and more to cliff’s edge, then, with not a soul to be seen or heard, stood staring north, beyond the rocky scarp of Muckle Flugga, to a far and imagined polar cap; east, more or less, to Norway; west, by some compass of the mind, to Greenland. And still, all these years and miles later, how easily I recall myself there again, how comforting once more the solace of all but unbroken sea and all but endless sky.

Think of it…

There I was. Absolutely and utterly alone. My feet having traversed a long length of moor and bracken, my entire being at long last at land’s end. Before me now a ragged edge of earth, grey sky overhead, grey ocean beyond, and, as I drew nearer the brink, gulls and guillemots skimming near rock and farther foam.

Some twenty years later, the mind’s eye all too tauntingly allows me to see my younger self at that particular precipice, not knowing then what I all so well know now. That life would lead me again, back from that latest cliff, back to the relative safety of Vermont, and, later still, after Notre Dame and graduate school, to Iowa and to the edge again, this time, at age 49 and with five kids in tow, in the form of medical school. Graduation meant only another cliff, with the roiling sea of residency beyond, and, still farther and yet finally, to harbor again, not so much as a physician, but as an adult. Indeed, throughout medical school, I had dreamed often of days to come beyond its puerile, boot-camp-like atmosphere, while throughout residency, I had teased myself forward by the unabandoned notion that at its end I would again be the adult I’d been a decade earlier, free once more to chart my days as I wanted to chart them, with nary the shoal of a rotation nor the shelf of some requirement to put to lee, even as I sped then, as I speed now, full sail forward into this, our shared Simmer Dim of unknowing.

(If the spirit proverbially moves, I will tell you more of my decades-long transition from salaried penman to freelancer to physician, but, for now, do permit me passage.)

For those so inclined, here’s a poem from the past, regrettably without its original line breaks (the vagaries of Blogger remain frustratingly vague to me):



In the Simmer Dim



I.

Night falls and catches itself
before hitting bottom,
leaving light enough to still be light,
light enough that
midnight here is only midnight
on the clock, but not out there,
not there where Shetland’s barrowed
isles speedbump the Atlantic
and once-drowned Jarlshof
slumbers again at Sumburgh,
its spectral sentries listening still
to the lapping of ocean, the licking of sea.




II.

Water
ran everywhere that first morning,
running in rivulets on the green sponge
of Stanydale, running tea-brown
across my shoetops and wanting now
only to be boiled into whisky.


Beyond that rise rose a gate,
and beyond the gate gaped a hole
where once a temple stood
and true believers, wetted much
as any field or stone, had cowered
then in the fear of faith.


There is wind here,
there is always wind, the scent of salt,
the spittle of sea and little else. Neither
farm nor farmer. Sheep nor shepherd.
Boat nor boatman. Time circles,
hovers, wings away.




III.

I had come because I had
always wanted to come.
Because a finger traced once
across a map had led me
to this fringe of island fringe.

To Thule, the ancients called it,
to the edge of the world.
And now I’m here. Straddling
past and present. Scanning
the sea of the coming time
and seeing only sea. Lost.
Lost in the simmer dim.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

The view from the porch...

From where I sit, the flag on our porch droops in the late afternoon of this Fourth of July.

One can’t look at it for more than a moment without reflecting, as have many before me, on its meaning and its cost. Wars, causes, lives, the hopes that sugar forward both the life of a nation and the lives of its citizens, the declaration, that singular Declaration of Independence, that all those years ago set it all in motion, commemorated today, as it has been for two centuries and more, in the words of the prescient John Adams, “with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other” — all measured in what is right now, on my porch, on this July 4, 2008, a languid field of red, white and blue.

Some in Washington some years ago saw in that same starred banner a call to arms, counting more on ruse than right that those easily led would sheepishly follow, and, more cynically still, that those easily swayed would saunter behind. All too unhappily, they were at once right and so wrong, and as a people we all bear the consequences, in the form of diminished respect among our friends, increased hatred among our enemies, a loss everywhere of the uniquely human hopes and dreams woven into every inch of the fabric that is our shared history.

The current resident of the White House can, in language both verbal and physical, bloviate, as he so often does and did so again today from the portico of Monticello, about the virtues of liberty. But he himself, who in his youth so famously signed in liberty's name only to infamously sidestep its defense, lacks virtue. Easy it is to wrap one's cause, however ill-imagined and self-serving, in a flag reddened by lives lost in its name; easy it is to snatch from the world its shroud of sympathy in the wake of 9/11 and to use it, callously, to shroud one's own oedipal quest for glory. Harder still to lift from its ashes a nation wronged, to rise above the hatred that so obviously fed that wrong, to twin grief to what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature," to truly make might equal to right.

Instead, here we all are, deep in the afternoon of this Fourth, long in the coming night of this most disappointing presidency, many, if not most, of us contemplating a different dawn.

And perhaps, just perhaps, the way forward lies in, of all things, following the flag.

Now by that I do not mean the blind adherence to the jingoism that has led us into this, our current, epochal dead end. Rather, I mean a new beginning, not just a blind eye to our historical inheritance, but a re-dedication to the sacrifice inherent in stars, the values intrinsic in stripes — to nothing less than a rebirth of liberty bought at such a cost by those before us, of whom so much was so often asked, by whom so much was so often given.

All of us, you, me, our families, friends, neighbors, can, if we wish, be the people those vaunted forefathers wanted us to be; can, if we want, subscribe again to what Jefferson termed the "unalienable rights" of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; can, if we we choose, remind ourselves, as the author of the Declaration did, "that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."

I exhort you, my friends, to wish, want and choose, and to do so wisely.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon

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