Ted, Mr. Johnson, and the flood

Farming and shepherding tasks are dictated by the rhythm of the seasons and the vagaries of nature. The planting and harvesting of crops; the breeding, lambing, and shearing of sheep—all of these are part of the organic flow of activities that naturally blend into the seasons’ progression. Birth, growth, and reproduction; life and death—all happen in their own time and season.

The day-to-day life of the shepherd with a small flock hasn’t changed significantly over the past two thousand years. I spent a large part of my days walking over the hills and through the woods, checking on the health and welfare of the flock and tending to its needs. Following the age-old shepherd’s routine was like tapping into the very essence of life. All the unnecessary waste and hurry and turmoil of modern existence were pared away, leaving a soothing balm of fundamental well-being.

This harmonious state contrasted sharply with the fastpaced, high-tech world of government grants management into which I’d been catapulted. My consulting work was usually challenging, sometimes exhilarating, and often stressful. I was driven by relentless bureaucratic and seemingly arbitrary deadlines. When not up against a specific deadline, I sometimes spent entire days filling out endless copies of government forms to be submitted quarterly, in triplicate. The never-ending paperwork was a real pain, and it seemed that every page of each report required excruciating detail. Nearly every week there were new procedures, new forms, new regulations with which to comply, and these changes required frequent upgrades in technology.

We reluctantly decided to upgrade from our old dial-up Internet service to a wireless provider. But the wireless companies in our area couldn’t provide service because of our remote location. Our only option was to install a huge, ugly antenna on our roof to receive a signal from a transmitter tower on a hilltop miles away.

Two technicians spent an entire afternoon mounting and adjusting the wiry behemoth on the roof. The sheep were wary of this new development. Rosie, Ada, and the others watched as the skeletal object began to take shape. One by one, the sheep stopped grazing. They gathered curiously along the fenceline to watch the proceedings. Unblinking, thirty sets of eyes followed the men as they walked back and forth from van to house and up and down the ladder.

When the job was done, the men loaded their equipment into the van and drove away. The sheep continued to stare at the house for a long while. For the next few days the entire flock seemed to be watching and waiting for additional alien life-forms to alight on the roof in response to whatever invisible signal was being transmitted.

By the end of April, the pace of my consulting work had picked up considerably. There were no more lazy days of sitting at home with the cats, spinning wool, or doing routine paperwork at my card table.

One might assume that the working hours of a grant writer/grants management consultant are spent sitting safely in a climate-controlled office, far from the scene of any action. That was not the case for my fledgling enterprise. My workdays were sometimes fraught with danger, intrigue, and suspense. Two of the most extreme hazards proved to be disgruntled clients and natural disasters. I had the misfortune to encounter both in the course of one long day that April.

The day was darkly overcast with occasional gusty winds. Over four inches of rain had fallen overnight, contributing to a rapid snowmelt, and towns to the west of our farm were flooding. Western Minnesota is prairie country, with small towns scattered across a mostly flat landscape. I listened closely to the news and weather reports before going outside to do my morning sheep chores. Two of the western Minnesota communities threatened by flooding were my clients.

Lately, my consulting work had evolved: in addition to grant writing, I was now administering a grant-funded housing rehabilitation program that helped residents of a poor, rural county make repairs to their homes, and I had appointments that morning with three homeowners on the western edge of the state.

One, a typical participant, was an elderly widow, living alone. Her only income came from Social Security, and it was less than $6,000 a year. She could barely afford to live on that income, let alone update her old electrical system or reshingle her roof. The roof had been leaking for years, and finally the ceilings were starting to collapse. Deteriorating rapidly, the home had become a health and safety hazard. The county public health department asked for help from our program.

It was a good match: the program’s purpose was to rehabilitate homes such as these. The elderly widow’s roof would be shingled, the ceilings repaired, the electrical system upgraded, and other updates made to the plumbing and heating systems. When the work was finished, the home would provide a safe and secure dwelling for the woman as long as she lived there, and after that, it would be a good solid home for another family. A lien was recorded against the property so that when the home was eventually sold the grant program would be repaid. The repayment would then be used to repair another home.

Without programs such as these, many homes in rural communities fall into disrepair because the owners can’t afford to maintain them. After a decade or two of neglect, most houses deteriorate beyond repair. And once those existing homes are gone, the cost to replace them with new construction is prohibitive for local residents. Eventually, a housing shortage develops, and without adequate housing, new families are not attracted to the area, population declines, and rural communities dwindle and die.

Many of the old houses in western Minnesota still have their original wiring from the 1930s and ’40s, when the only demands on the electrical system were a few lights and a radio. In winter, it’s still common to find low-income people using old, unsafe electrical and propane space heaters scattered throughout their homes. It’s a disaster waiting to happen, and it seems every winter at least one fatal house fire in our area is caused by improper use of space heaters combined with an overloaded electrical system.

These programs leverage tax dollars in ways that pay back. They help elderly and disadvantaged people to stay in their homes, which is far more cost-effective than moving them into nursing homes or building more subsidized rental units. The programs address whatever is a problem: they remove lead paint hazards from the homes of young children, improve accessibility in the homes of elderly and handicapped people, and preserve affordable housing. They enhance the local tax base, and ultimately, they save rural communities. These housing rehabilitation programs were some of my favorite consulting projects because they simply made sense. I almost didn’t mind the huge volume of paperwork they required.

Though my grant writing activities were usually hazard-free, grants administration could get hairy. Most of the homeowners—like the elderly widow—were cooperative, pleasant, and very grateful for the program’s assistance. It was difficult to come away from a home visit without a plate of freshly baked cookies or some other homemade gift forced into one’s hands. But sometimes disputes arose between construction crews, dissatisfied property owners, and project management. When tempers escalated, situations could turn nasty. Such was the case with the other two appointments I had that morning.

Arriving at the home of a low-income couple who needed help in working through a misunderstanding with a construction company, I saw the contractor’s truck already parked beside the house. I rummaged through my mobile filing cabinet—i.e., plastic milk crate—and located the file for the Arnegaard home repair project.

The thick stack of incident reports already in the file outlined the Arnegaards’ history of disagreements with the contractor who had been hired to repair their home. As I stepped out of my car, I heard slamming doors and loud, angry voices. Things were not going to go well.

I climbed the three steps leading to the front entrance and raised my fist to knock on the outer door. The screen door flew open, missing my nose by mere inches. In the doorway stood the man of the house, wearing a crazed look in his eye and little else. The small, wiry man was shirtless, and he wore a tattered kilt-like undergarment. I didn’t get a good look at the unique outfit because he was leaping and twirling madly about the room. Judging from what I could see of the face beneath his bushy, foot-long beard, he was about sixty years old.

The Charles Manson lookalike held a steak knife in his unsteady hand. He paused in his swirling, leaping dance long enough to grasp my right arm, yanking me roughly into the house. Once inside, he maintained his viselike grip on my wrist. All of the window blinds were closed, and though it was midmorning, the room was almost totally dark.

“Let her go, Ted!” a woman’s voice yelled from somewhere inside the dark house.

But Ted wasn’t ready to let go. Ted was stronger than he looked, and in one quick, fluid move, he pinned my arm behind my back, bent me over his kilted knee, and fixed the serrated edge of his knife against my throat. Ted thrust his grizzled face to within inches of mine and spat, “Gotcha, you damn socialist!” He pressed the blade hard against my jugular. The blunt edge pushed deeply into my flesh. The pressure alone didn’t break the skin, but now Ted raised his elbow as if to draw the knife across my throat.

Then he was gone. After what felt like an eternity bent backward over his bony knee, I was able to breathe, and I struggled to my feet.

Mrs. Arnegaard had seized Ted from behind, and she effortlessly lifted his rancid, near-naked weight off me. Ted’s better half was a far more substantial individual than her husband, and she disarmed him easily.

Acting as though nothing unusual had happened, Mrs. Arnegaard hauled Ted along as she graciously showed me into her kitchen, where she, the contractor, and I were able to resolve the construction-related dispute. Throughout our discussion, as we sat decorously around the kitchen table, Mrs. Arnegaard held her thrashing, cursing, purple-faced husband in a firm headlock.

“How about a cup of coffee?” Mrs. Arnegaard suggested to the contractor and me when our business was finished.

“Oh! Look at the time! Sorry—I’d love to stay, but I really need to get to my next appointment.” Both the contractor and I stammered out excuses as we backed our way to the door. Neither of us dared turn our back on the barbarous gaze of Ted, whose head was still tightly wedged between the doughy arm and ample bosom of his wife.

Leaving the Arnegaards’ house, I collapsed in my car, weak-kneed and still shaking after the close call with Ted and his steak knife. I jotted a note to myself to draft yet another incident report for the Arnegaard file.

I needed to make a phone call before my next appointment, but I didn’t want to stay parked outside the Arnegaard home any longer than necessary. A few miles down the gravel road, I pulled over and glanced into the rearview mirror, half expecting the tartan-clan avenger to appear over the top of the hill, swinging a machete.

Paging through my notes, I searched for the phone number of a heating contractor who had installed a furnace for another homeowner. I was hoping to meet with the contractor and homeowner to mediate a long-standing dispute.

Roy Johnson—an elderly, handicapped man—had called me several times in the past weeks to complain about the furnace that had been installed through our program. He said after the new furnace had been put in, his home often dipped below freezing temperatures at night, even with the thermostat cranked up to 85 degrees. Certainly, he said, something must be wrong with the furnace.

I had never met Mr. Johnson in person, but judging from our many phone conversations, I pictured him as a sweet, defenseless old man. I hated to imagine him sitting in a cold house because of the contractor’s refusal to repair or replace the furnace.

But when I called the contractor to get his side of the story, he swore the furnace was operating perfectly. He said that he and his employees had met with the homeowner and checked the furnace many times, yet they were not able to satisfy the man. Each time, the contractor claimed, it appeared that Roy had been fiddling with the thermostat or adjusting some dial or other, causing the furnace to malfunction. When the repairmen reset the controls, the furnace would kick in and work fine. But still Roy complained. He claimed the furnace was a worthless piece of junk, and it didn’t provide enough warmth to heat a henhouse.

The contractor told me, “There’s nothing wrong with the furnace, but there sure as hell is something wrong with that old man. The guy is crazy. My installers are afraid to go out there again.”

How could that be? I immediately slipped into my advocate mode and rushed to the homeowner’s defense. “Certainly he can’t be that bad! He’s nearly ninety years old and uses a walker. What can your crew be afraid of?”

I’d left quite a few phone messages for the contractor, asking him to try once more to make things right for Mr. Johnson. I told him what time I’d arrive at Roy’s place, and asked him to meet me there, too. Surely we could resolve the problem through a face-to-face meeting.

But for some reason the contractor wasn’t returning my calls. After leaving the Arnegaards’ I tried calling him one more time. Finally, he answered.

“Can you meet me at Roy Johnson’s place in half an hour?” I asked.

“Forget it!” He said. “I’m not setting foot over there again, and if you have any sense, you won’t go either.”

“But I’ve already set up the appointment! He’s expecting us both to show up.”

“Well, you’re on your own. If you’re still determined to go over there, take my advice. Sneak around to the back door. Don’t walk right up the sidewalk to the front door, because he’ll see you coming.”

“Oh, come on now! He’s an old man. You’ve got to be kidding!”

“Just take my advice. Don’t let him get a clear shot at you.”

I continued on my way, sincerely hoping the contractor’s comment was just a bad joke.

Mr. Johnson lived in the wilds of western Minnesota. It took me half an hour to get there from the Arnegaard place, and the directions Roy had given me were pretty sketchy. I drove up and down winding gravel roads, looking for some sign or landmark to indicate I was nearing the Johnson place. He had said his home was on a hilltop, at the end of a mile-long driveway. I slowed the car to a crawl in the area where I expected to find the turnoff, wondering if I had made a wrong turn somewhere. Then I rounded a sharp curve and saw a long dirt track snaking up a steep hill.

I knew without a doubt I had found the right place when I spotted something lying at the base of the hill, blocking the driveway. It was a twisted, smoldering heap of sheet metal riddled with bullet holes. Roy’s new furnace, exactly as he had described it. A worthless piece of junk.

Just then my cell phone rang. It was Doris, the city clerk of Mansfield. “Did you hear about the flooding?” she asked. “How soon can you get over here?”

My heart sank at the prospect of yet another stressful adventure, but at the same time I was relieved to have an excuse to postpone my visit with dear old Mr. Johnson.

Just after I started my consulting business, I landed a job writing grants for Mansfield, a small Minnesota village that had no formal office facilities. The only city-owned building in town was the municipal liquor store, and I kept the grant project’s administrative records in a filing cabinet in the back room behind the bar. There, in a clearing amidst cases of whiskey, vodka, and wine coolers, I sat at a desk consisting of a wooden plank on top of an empty beer keg.

When Terry’s friends asked him how my consulting business was going, he entertained them with tales of his wife sitting at a municipal liquor store two days a week. He didn’t bother to explain that I was working on my grant files in the back room.

Mansfield sometimes flooded when there were heavy rains and a rapid snow melt. The streams and rivers along Minnesota’s western border flood frequently in the spring, leaving homes damaged or destroyed, roads washed out, and towns stranded for days at a time. The citizens of Mansfield were used to coping with the inconvenience of temporary road closures and wet basements, but this year there were dire predictions that the flooding was going to be worse than usual.

That’s what Doris, the city clerk, told me when she called that morning. “Can you get over here right away?” she asked. “The water’s rising fast, and it looks like the whole south end of town is going under. If you could pick up your grant files, you can work from home until the water goes down.”

Normally, Mansfield is just over a half-hour’s drive west from Roy Johnson’s place. But that day, it took me nearly two hours to get there. As I neared the state’s western border, I was forced to zigzag across the countryside, hitting dead ends where the roads disappeared into swirling floodwaters. Each time that happened, I had to backtrack and try another route.

The water was rising so quickly that the county highway crews couldn’t keep up. They weren’t able to mark or blockade all the flooded roads, so drivers traveled at their own risk. The farther west I drove, the less traffic I met. Eventually, the sparse traffic dwindled away completely. I had met no other cars on the road for more than ten miles.

Speeding down the abandoned highway, I finally reached a point where it seemed all of the main roads heading west were impassable. Taking a chance, I headed south on a narrow gravel track, hoping to find a minor road that might still be open to the west.

At first, my race with the rising floodwaters was exhilarating, and the adrenaline rush kept my spirits up. But about two miles down the gravel track, I came to a stop, overcome by a sick feeling of apprehension.

As far as the eye could see, there was water. Looking into my rearview mirror, I saw that the water that had been lapping at the grass verge a moment ago now completely covered the road. The road in front of me was covered by a rippling current. Its depth was difficult to gauge, since the entire surrounding landscape was submerged. It could be six inches of water, or six feet. There were no telephone poles, no road ditches, nor any road signs visible. It was virtually impossible to judge the depth of the ever-expanding lake.

All around me, in every direction, were dark expanses of angry, churning water. Then—to top it all off—the gray and sullen clouds overhead split open. Fat raindrops plopped onto my windshield and obscured the surroundings, which actually didn’t matter, since nothing but water was visible in any direction.

Driving in western Minnesota, one can go for miles without seeing any signs of civilization. My cell phone was useless; it had no service west of Hoffman. I was stranded between two submerged stretches of gravel road with the water still rising. My chances of being rescued were slim, since no one knew exactly where I was, and I feared I would be stranded for days. Or worse—drowned.

After sitting in the car for a few minutes, thinking over the situation, I realized there were no good alternatives. I made a decision.

I shifted into drive, and the car crawled forward. Gusts of wind rocked the vehicle and sent whitecaps racing across the watery surface of the landscape. Wave after wave washed over the hood and up onto the windshield, but the car kept moving slowly forward. Miraculously, the engine didn’t stall, and the car stayed on the invisible roadway.

I inched along for about a quarter of a mile this way. Midway through that nerve-racking voyage, I thought I could see solid ground ahead. Like a mirage appearing between passes of the windshield wipers, the shape of a gravel path emerged from the wall of water ahead. I nearly wept when a dry stretch of road rose up to meet the car’s tires.

Huge waves of relief washed over me as the car climbed onto solid ground. I had happened upon a segment of the road that was not yet submerged, and from there I could reach Mansfield.

The town’s main street was covered by axle-deep water, but it was still passable. I parked the car and waded across the street to the municipal liquor store. Inside I gathered up the files I would need to manage the grant program from home. As I was piling the last folders into a box, water rippled over the threshold of the building and fanned out across the floor.

I met Doris on the main street as I was carrying my final load to the car. “Did you get all the grant files?” she asked.

I nodded. The rain pelted down hard on us, and the wind nearly took my breath away.

“Great. Good job,” said Doris. “Now get out of here.”

“I can’t just leave you here to deal with all of this.” I gestured toward the mountain of water-soaked boxes and piles of city records still sitting on the curb.

“You’ll do us a lot more good if you get those grant files to a safe place and keep the program up and running.” She sent me on my way with a firm admonishment: “I mean it. Get out of here while you can.”

As always, the citizens of Mansfield bore the flooding stoically. Though it was rarely a life-threatening situation, the near-annual flooding caused a huge mess and massive property damage.

A deputy sheriff’s car cruised slowly down the waterlogged main street. I waved him down and asked, “Are there any roads open going east?”

“Yeah. If you leave right now, you should be able to get out on twenty-seven.”

“Thanks!” I yelled. I sincerely wished I’d known that earlier.

I waded back to the car and drove slowly out of the ever-expanding lake that was downtown Mansfield, heading east toward home.