All day long, I’ve been distracted and worried by the situation in Fargo-Moorhead, where the flood is getting worse literally by the minute, as a check of Twitter or the “Valley Flood Watch” website reveals. Thirty hours before the expected crest (sometime on Friday night or Saturday morning), the river is already past 39 feet, which was about where the 1997 flood crested.
My sadness and concern is mixed with some outright anger at idiots like the two talking heads on CNN at noon who laffed their way through a half-witted graphic purporting to show how much of the White House a forty-foot flood would cover and who then, by way of segue, gravely informed us that if the dikes fail, the people of Fargo will just have to head to higher ground. Higher ground where? Fracking Montana, you #&%ing dolts? Less offensive but still quite oversimplifyingly stupid is the way most of the media coverage covers the flood in “Fargo,” rarely mentioning the sister city, Moorhead, which is a pretty respectable burg in its own right and which stands to suffer just as much as Fargo.
Far more than typically bad media coverage of the disaster, my horror at the situation in Fargo-Moorhead mounts because I can clearly picture it all. Water creeping over the coffeeshop patio where the four Tassavas had a lovely outdoor snack last summer. Water lapping at the doors of Moorhead’s wonderful public library, then sneaking in to soak the carpets where my girls have enjoyed numerous storytimes. Water surging over Fargo’s famous dike, the only serious incline for miles and thus the only real sledding hill in town. Water ruining the wonderful outdoor theatre at the arts camp that was an important part of Shannon’s childhood and where I saw an impressive amateur performance of Les Miz a few summer ago with her. Water wrecking all the great little shops in Fargo’s lovely downtown – the candy shop, Zandbros variety store, the cool running store, the restaurants where I’ve always meant to have dinner.
It’s horrible to contemplate, and it’s happening more or less right now. Like the Bottle Rockets sing, “There ain’t nothing you can do to stop it/Just hope for the best/And mop up the rest.”
Exactly how I felt last summer watching my much loved Iowa City go underwater. Helplessly watching everything my family loved, and all the places my toddler twins played, go under murky mud. I’ve been thinking about those folks and sending as much good kharma as I can. My girls and I are traveling to Decorah next week for a few days of Spring Break, and I was telling them this morning that we really SHOULD be driving north to help with sandbagging.