And it’s frozen solid. I mean, because it was hardened to the ground before it was frozen—all that muck kind of created a mud mask over it. So if you did find something there, you’d really have to want it bad. You’d have to chip through things to find something, because the mud just caked over things; it just glued it to the floor and the walls. It was like a beehive-type thing that just kind of formed around there.
—TROY SIMON, FLOOD VICTIM1
The next time I met with Troy and Beverly Simon was in February 2009. I was curious to see what progress they had made in the last four months toward restoring their life. We met in the Cedar Grille at the Cedar Rapids Marriott, where I was staying In the vast atrium a pianist was playing from a Muzak song list that included tunes by Jim Croce, James Taylor, and the Beatles—the soundtrack of a baby boomer, a time warp of Top 40. The music was too loud, and I wished we could have met elsewhere.
Around Christmas the Simons had included me in their e-mail holiday greeting to friends and family The card was a mixture of optimism and understated realism:
My family and I wanted to wish you and your family an awesome Christmas! As you know we have had a very active year; we’ve grown a lot and have made many new friends, not to mention our great adopted family that has opened their home to us. We have had a chance to grow or whine about our circumstances [and] we’ve chosen to grow. OK . . . we may have whined a couple of times. OK maybe a lot. BUT . . . in the end we have grown and know our life is going to be more refined at the end of this trial. No decision has been made on exactly what we’re doing next except we are currently looking at a temporary rental till we have clearer direction . . . We thank you for all your prayers and support over this last year and are looking forward to the changes life has to offer in the New Year! . . . P.S. We lost our address books in the Flood. If you could forward your phone # and addresses for our records, that would be appreciated. Thanks!2
The postscript was the only direct mention of the flood that had turned their lives upside down.
Troy and Beverly walked into the lobby holding hands and looking as great as ever. Over wine coolers I asked what had changed since we last talked in the fall. Troy said that the city’s flood recovery momentum had come to a standstill.
“It’s just like everybody started praising themselves to a degree to where, on the outside, everybody thought, Well, they must be doing pretty good. I think everyone sort of patted themselves on the back too quickly, and then all of a sudden everybody on the outside said, ‘They’re fine. We need to go on our merry way, and they’ll be fine.’ Well, what happened is, everything stopped.”3
We discussed the public relations campaign that seemed to begin days after the floodwaters receded and whether that message (Cedar Rapids is coming back!) actually sent a message to the rest of the nation to collectively move on.
Troy felt that the city leaders should “Make sure that you’re keeping a reality check at the same time, and make sure you’re letting people know that this is a campaign. That we’re trying to keep that focus because people are hurt and people are struggling.”
As the weeks turned into months and then the first anniversary came and went, I heard much the same complaint from other flood victims. Public relations had trumped reality. And the disconnect between government and its citizens would only worsen. As Cedar Valley flood victim Ron Sims would later tell me, following the one-year commemoration of the flood, “It’s just been nothing but red tape and bureaucracy and everything holding everybody up.”4
The month after I met the Simons at the Marriott, city residents—by a 59 percent margin—approved a five-year, 1 percent local-option sales tax that would be used to help the city with buyouts of ruined homes along the river. Troy had opposed the tax and had even written a letter to Iowa’s Senator Grassley with the heading, “I PLEAD TO YOU MR. GRASSLEY.”
I will have to say it’s been an interesting 8 mos. This is hard because first I’m born and raised here. We lost everything. The city of CR is using the flood victims as a way to initiate a local [sales] tax to satisfy their own agenda on the River walk project, not to help flood victims as they proposed to the people of CR. They have not helped the victims UNLESS it helps their vision for leaving a permanent landmark for downtown River front project. I am a fan of the city of Cedar Rapids building a good infrastructure for the city [but] let investors bring their own money to the table to grow the city back!!! The basis of the sale of the sales tax was [that] we need to help the flood victims and this is not the purpose of what this money is going to be used for. It’s to help the riverfront project they started before the flood now they can get Fed/Tax money to make their dreams a reality. THE CITY NEEDS TO HELP THE PEOPLE AND BE ACCOUNTABLE FOR THE MONEY THEY HAVE RECEIVED AND WILL BE RECEIVING!!! . . . If this money is to help flood victims LET’S HELP THEM!!! PLEASE make sure they are accountable or give it back to the taxpayers they lie to!!! What ever happened to all the private donations to the city to help flood victims? . . . TRANSPARENT ACCOUNTABILITY PLEASE!!! I want the city to be strong again too! Without the lies.
FOR THE PEOPLE!!!
Sincere Regards,
Troy Simon5
On that night at the Cedar Grille in February, Troy said he simply didn’t trust the city to manage the tax money properly.
“How can I say this in a positive way—that the people don’t trust that that’s where it’s going? All the money that supposedly is coming in, they haven’t seen that, so why are they going to believe any tax money is going to go to help the flood victims?”
Flood recovery is a long-term, frustrating process, made even more frustrating by the impatience of the affected residents who are put off by the inevitable public relations campaign city leaders launch with good intentions. The mountains of agency bureaucracy, acronyms, and red tape that confront flood victims are crushing. No wonder the divide between government and community—the animosity toward city officials that still exists in the Time Check neighborhood, for example—only grows wider over time.
The flooding of Cedar Rapids was not the worst national disaster to beset the United States in 2008. Three months after “Iowa’s Katrina,” on September 12 at the ungodly hour of 2:10 a.m., Hurricane Ike devastated the Gulf Coast of Texas with its 145-mile-per-hour winds. Only two other hurricanes—Andrew and Katrina—were more destructive to the United States. In the Galveston area, more than one hundred people died, 17,000 homes and businesses were flooded, and damages were estimated to be around $24 billion. More than 5,000 of the families affected did not have flood insurance.6 I remembered what Shannon Meyer, president of the Cedar Rapids Chamber of Commerce, said when discussing how a city in the wake of catastrophe goes about getting the attention of the nation and the federal government.
“It’s a challenge because now natural disasters seem to be more prevalent. The hurricane in Galveston took a lot of attention [away from the situation in Cedar Rapids]. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the kind of competition we have.”7
In that context—the need for your city’s voice to be heard—a public relations campaign seems reasonable. But how do you explain that to someone who is displaced and living in a FEMA trailer?
When I began this book, the first phone call I made was to a city leader who will remain anonymous. When I told him my project, he sounded annoyed. “Look, we really don’t need any bad publicity right now.”
I had explained that the book was not investigative journalism or an exposé. I was not Mike Wallace coming at him with cameras running. I simply wanted to tell the story of the flood. He was unhelpful, so I turned elsewhere.
Additionally, in the face of global warming and the apparent increase in the number of natural disasters worldwide—and as our collective rate of exposure to viewing them 24/7 on our cable networks increases—just how special is a flood in the Midwest, or anywhere for that matter? With exposure comes acceptance and then disaster fatigue. And it will only get worse. (As I write this on January 18, 2010, the world’s attention is on Haiti, where an earthquake has pretty much destroyed that poorest of nations.)
Earnest Callenbach writes, “If the melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica continues to accelerate, it will raise sea levels enough to flood low-lying parts of California, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas, as well as areas of Bangladesh and other nations where millions of poor farmers live. In the world’s largest cities, about one-fifth of residents live in areas vulnerable to flooding.”8
Closer to home, Callenbach cautions, “We must learn to accept the natural recurrence of major floods, not imagine that we can prevent them—a lesson that has been learned by some towns along the flood-prone Mississippi which are relocating to safe, higher ground . . . We must also learn how to understand, accept, and work with the natural forces that shape our coastlines, to minimize the kind of destruction that Hurricane Katrina visited on New Orleans.”9
During our meeting, the Simons told me they were still living with Christian Fong and his family, but not for much longer. They had big news to share with me. That day the Simons had rented an apartment on the Cedar River, not far from their former home on Ellis Road. They would move in the following weekend. Some of their friends wondered if it was a good idea to be so close to their flooded home, but Troy repeated what he had told me in the fall: The river, with its bike route, bird life, and riparian beauty, was a comfort area for them.
“It really is our passion, just being there. I can get on my bike and be right there.”
As Troy spoke, I could sense some discomfort in Bev. Instead of looking happy, she looked distressed. When I asked her directly if she thought this was a good step, she said, “Yeah. There’s actually, well, we’ve gotten so close to the Fongs that . . . because I’m a girl, you know.”
I asked her if she would miss the sisterhood of Jenelle.
“Yes.”
But they won’t be far away, I offered.
“Yes. [But] being at their house was like having a safe haven, this little nest to go to. It was completely furnished and everything. Now that we are moving, we have an empty shell to fill. Then you kind of realize at that point what damage was done by the flood—that you literally have to start all over again. The emotion of that whole flood is coming back again.”
Her voice trailed off and Troy took over. “It’s like we look around and we don’t have this, we don’t have that.”
Troy described what it had been like to try to recover some of their possessions from their flooded home this winter. “And it’s frozen solid. I mean, because it was hardened to the ground before it was frozen—all that muck kind of created a mud mask over it. So if you did find something there, you’d really have to want it bad. You’d have to chip through things to find something, because the mud just caked over things; it just glued it to the floor and the walls. It was like a beehive-type thing that just kind of formed around there.”
The Fongs’ home had been a refuge for the Simons for more than half a year. The two families had grown close and, at the Fongs’ home, Troy and Bev could forget about their material losses and instead enjoy fellowship with Christian, Jenelle, and their three children. During that time, they did not notice that they lacked a spatula or a whisk or other essentials. Now that they were moving into their own place again, they were reminded that they needed everything. That reminder went beyond the material. Their grief also returned.
I thought back to something Janeta Tansey had told me about the ongoing grief of flood victims such as Troy and Bev. Does it ever really go away, and would the coming one-year anniversary make the grief worse? “Does it ever just become a neutral thing in the past? That it happened and gosh, that was hard, but we moved on as opposed to what many of them experienced? ‘I’m still remembering it, and I’m still distressed in remembering it. I haven’t fully resolved the grieving that went on with those losses.’
“I think, like many anniversary events, they’re times for remembering. They can provoke grieving that isn’t fully resolved, but there can also be kind of a trigger backup again, I think, because grieving can be such a long-term process. Even for those who have moved into a sense of peace and acceptance that ‘this happened; it was difficult’ can find themselves reliving what we sometimes think of as the early stages of grieving.”10
On the practical side of flood recovery, it had been years since the Simons furnished a house. They were taken aback at the cost. “[We’ve been experiencing] a little bit of sticker shock,” Bev said, “because we didn’t need anything for so long. We had everything that we had accumulated over the years. So when we looked [at home furnishings] it was like, ‘Whoa! I thought we could outfit a whole living room for $600.’”
They planned to drive up to the big IKEA store in Minneapolis and see what they could afford. But when it came to clothes, they were well supplied. Troy confessed that they probably overdid when it came to buying clothes. Bev said the clothes acted like a Band-Aid, a quick way to compensate for so much material loss.
Later in our conversation, I asked them what gave them pleasure. Bev asked Troy, “Can I say the first thing that comes to mind?”
Troy smiled and answered, “Go ahead. I’m sure it’s the same thing [I’m thinking of].”
“Clothes and shoes!” said Bev. “It’s really therapy right now. Clothes and shoes make a girl happy.”
Troy explained, “Yeah. She’s wearing me down a little bit. I’ve been indulging her a little bit because it’s what she wants. Before I would have asked, ‘Now, do you really need them?’ But after you lose everything, do you say ‘Do you really need them?’ It’s just the emotional factor.”
But now, for the first time in thirteen years, they had to furnish an entire apartment. There were budgets to write and adhere to. Troy said they would have to be stricter about those therapy purchases. Bev was quick to add that they were very good about sales and clearance shopping.
“It will be little by little, just like we did the first time. It’s OK. It took us thirteen years to get where we were, so . . . ”
Troy: Yeah, but we [won’t] have a wedding this time with all the gifts.”
Bev: “Right.”
I wanted to know how their relationship was faring in the midst of so many stresses. They had told me in October that although the flood had tested their marriage severely, it had made them in fact grow closer. But now the doldrums of another long eastern Iowa winter had set in. With so much going on emotionally and practically in preparation for the move, I asked how their relationship had changed.
Troy, as usual, took the lead in answering. “I still think we’re growing. I mean, I don’t care if it’s a business or a company or your relationship with your spouse; if you don’t work on it to make it better or keep it active and keep it growing, it’s going to die. [The flood is] a bad situation we’re in, but we’ve been really close. We have good communication. I think it’s actually helped hone some of those skills that we were developing, actually [made them better], if that makes sense.”
When I asked Bev if she agreed, she told about a recent morning when Troy was away on a business trip and she was at home thinking about all the people who had been talking to her about problems in their marriages.
“I was just sitting there thinking, I appreciate my husband so much. And at the same time, he’s in another state watching a TV show on marriage.”
Troy picked up the story from there. “It was the Today Show. They had some lady selling a book about marriage and how to please your husband or how to get your husband back. This lady was talking about things you do to help give your husband confidence in himself and, you know, sometimes he’s a little insecure, and this is what you do. They were talking about all these systems to help.
“Well, my wife does this. She doesn’t need to read a book. So I’m like: I am just so thankful for her. I need to let her know”
That day Bev sent Troy a text message telling him how much she appreciated him. About the same time, Troy said, he called Bev.
“But it wasn’t just ‘Oh, Honey, you’re so special.’ It was deeper. We feel fortunate.”
Regarding couples with problems, Troy said perhaps they need a flood to bring them closer together. “We don’t wish it on them, but maybe it could help straighten them out.”