A funeral in the time of the flood

In 1965 the flooding South Platte River wreaked havoc from Denver to Julesburg; in 1975, the Big Thompson River ripped its own canyon apart after record-breaking rainfall. In both floods, people died and the land was changed. Then, in September 2013, came a flood that combined the worst of those two. This is an account of the author’s very personal experiences of that time.

My wife’s mother died on a Friday. By itself, it was no more or less significant than the death of anyone’s mother, and we certainly weren’t strangers to the emotions and tumult that would follow. We’d already lost both of our fathers, my mother, and a beloved aunt within about a five-year period, so we knew the drill.

I was prepared to hold her, to feel her sobs on my shoulder, to tell her it would be okay (if you don’t count the vivid dreams in which her mom would be very much alive) and help her through this one last loss.

What I wasn’t ready for was the blow Mother Nature would deal her and her family. On the day Mom died, the northern Front Range was already reeling from unprecedented rainfall. Familiar vacation spots were blown away by the raging water in the canyons. Our youngest son and his family had been evacuated from their home by the flooding Big Thompson; further south his older brother and family were battling leaky ceilings and flooding crawl spaces. As the reality of her mother’s death sank in, my wife came to another realization: All of that water was headed our way.

By the weekend dire predictions were marching in advance of the relentless water. We watched, helpless, as Kersey, Orchard, and Weldona became inundated. Weld County seemed to disappear under a brown blanket, then Morgan County. Sunday morning we frantically filled sandbags and piled them against our garage, mimicking what we saw elsewhere, with no idea what we were really doing.
“It never got onto our property in Sixty-Five,” she kept saying, but we sandbagged anyway.

By mid-day Sunday the news got worse. Bigger than ever, people said, and even the official word was either grim or lacking altogether. (Not that the emergency management people shirked their informational duty; it’s just that when Hell is lumbering toward you, it takes its own time getting there and there’s not much to say.)

We saw the first evacuation notice go out. It was south of Highway Six. Maybe, we thought, that would be enough. My wife’s telephone kept beeping and warbling and tweeting and tinkling; updates on the river, updates on the funeral arrangements. Is it really twenty-four feet at Balzac? Can’t be, not possible, Brush would be washed away. Did somebody sing “Ave Maria” at Dad’s funeral? Who’s working on the obituary? Did Johnny’s place flood in Sixty-Five? Yeah, “Ave Maria” and “How Great Thou Art.” Did we sandbag enough at Mom’s house? Yes, and there’s a good berm. They didn’t have that in Sixty-Five. Is somebody going to deliver a Eulogy? Oh, God, if that ditch is running, we’re gonna’ get water! Check facebook again – are we going to be evacuated? Which priest will be have?
And so it went all day. We packed, we filled water jugs, we filled the dog feeder, we left keys in the cars, we got ready to leave, we braced to stay. Mom had died and the apocalypse was upon us. The mind and soul are taxed to cope with either; my wife was trying to handle both at once.

Finally, late in the afternoon, with the Broncos up by an almost embarrassing score, she couldn’t take it any more.
“I have to go,” she said flatly. I knew she wasn’t talking about evacuation, though that was the context. She had to get the hell out of there, to run as fast and far as she could before it all crushed her. I threw her bag in her car, kissed her and promised I would stay safe. She left for our son’s house in Denver. She left her lap dog Cocoa behind, much to the pooch’s distress.
I went back in the house and experienced a loneliness I have never known before. I wanted to call her back, to beg her to stay. I wasn’t going to abandon the home I’d spent eight years building and landscaping and planting and fencing; it’s mine, and if it’s going to get washed away, well, it will have to be washed out from under me!

That was silly, of course. Water never even got on the property in Sixty-Five. The floor of the house is nine feet above flood stage. I drove down to the river bridges to check. In the waning daylight it didn’t look so bad. The “middle channel” was running, the river was certainly full, but there was plenty of capacity left, wasn’t there?

I haunted the internet and Facebook pages. The people who are supposed to watch things lost track of the crest, that all-important gob of water that defines a flood out here in the valley. It was supposed to be here at eight o’clock, then maybe nine. In the night, nobody knew where it was or how big it was or when it would get here. Ten’ o’clock, where is the crest? Eleven o’clock, no news. Then, suddenly, it was at Messex, and then Merino, and then it was in Atwood, and in a flash the authorities doubled the size of the evacuation area. I looked at the map and looked again. There it was, the interstate on one side, the old highway on the other. And we were in the middle of it.

It wasn’t an order, actually, but it wasn’t an idle suggestion. The order would come later, in the wee hours of the morning, but it was going to come. Make a decision and make it now; get out or get trapped.

Water never even got on our property in Sixty-five, remember?

This is bigger than Sixty-five, they said.

I grabbed Cocoa, locked the front door, climbed in the pickup and headed for Denver. I was evacuating. I was being prudent. Maybe I was being silly, but if so, I’d be back home by noon the next day and at work by one o’clock.
Monday, while the river swallowed everything around our home, we walked our granddaughter to school. She told her teachers that Nona and Grandpa were from Sterling and they’d been “flooded out.” The teachers clucked and cooed over us, making sympathetic faces, and then we walked back to our son’s house.

The phone calls and messages started again, more of the same, funeral arrangements made from 120 miles away, juxtaposed against images of highways closed and bridges washed, our chances of returning dwindling by the hour. Cell phone batteries were exhausted and recharged and depleted again. There was a conference call with a priest, calls to brothers and sisters, text messages, emails, tweets, the full complement of modern telecommunications harnessed to keep a handful of men and women abreast of the latest developments. The music, the highway closures, the priest’s rules, the state’s regulations, the Gospel reading, the road conditions, bridges open and closed, flowers ordered, hotels available, relatives who could and would be there and the detours required for them to attend.

And then the game changer. A key pump in the wastewater treatment system was swamped and damaged and out of commission. No-flush. No way in, no way out, no way to tend to basic sanitary needs. The bad news was relentless; the electrical sub-station was inundated, maybe the power would go out, delaying the funeral another week, forcing them to close the casket. A very large clan was going to descend on our home in five days to bury the matriarch of the family, and there were no beds to rent, no restaurants open, no useable indoor plumbing anywhere in town. Back at our own house our toilets worked and we had fresh water, but the roads were cut. The wretchedness of the possibilities became clear.

By Tuesday things weren’t any better, but they weren’t any worse. We had to come home, had to see for ourselves. We piled all of our luggage and Cocoa into the pickup, locked my wife’s car, and headed for home. We were not prepared for what we found. The brown blanket covered our friends’ and neighbors’ homes. The road to our house was impassable. The affable police officer manning the barricade gave me all of the facts he had, including the fact that I was not going around his barricade. I respected that. A sympathetic CDOT worker took me aside and surreptitiously pointed out a “back way” around the barricade to where a dry road would lead us home. The affable police officer turned his back and studied his barricade. I climbed into the pickup and informed my wife that the truck’s four-wheel drive was about to become useful.

“What!?” she replied.

“Buckle up, Buttercup,” I said.

I won’t deny I enjoyed being bold and brazen and a little bit outlaw-ish, especially since the detour involved driving from open prairie into the sheriff’s office parking lot. In a few minutes we were home.

My employer was open and needing bodies, so I reported to work the next day. I don’t know what my wife went through, making the necessary arrangements over the next two days, but the value of her sisters’ assistance is incalculable. A brother-in-law conspired with a co-worker to get Mom’s burial clothes to the mortuary and another sister met my wife at the barricade to make the long trip through Atwood into town for last-minute arrangements. The three women, through sheer dint of their strong wills – inherited from their deceased mother – got the job done, even as the combined resources of local, state and federal authorities struggled to set their world aright.

The funeral was little different from all the others I’ve attended for my wife’s family. An unaware observer would have wondered at the priest’s comments about hardship and extreme circumstances. There was no talk of no-flush and only rare mentions of the inconveniences of having to rent motel rooms 40 and 50 miles away. At the end of the day it was clear that what I had watched was not so much a natural disaster as the hard determination of a family to render proper respects to its beloved mother, regardless of what Mother Nature threw at them.

The water will recede, the infrastructure will be rebuilt, and blessedly boring routine will return. But for my wife, things are irrevocably changed. She’s fled her home because it was no longer safe; she’s lost the last person standing between her and mortality. These things change a person. For her, life will never be the same.

The Greatest English Teacher Ever

School starts for me this evening. Shortly after supper I’ll venture again behind the steel fences and concrete walls of Sterling (Colorado) Correctional Facility, there to teach Humanities 121 for Northeastern Junior College to a score of inmates working to make something of their lives. And a week from tomorrow I’ll start the weekly drives to Morgan Community College to teach English composition. I’ve been teaching college English and related classes for over five years and it is one of the most rewarding things I have ever done. And every time I crack open an English textbook, I remember the Greatest English Teacher I Ever Knew. She was the teacher who first instilled in me the desire to teach (God, that I had followed that instinct she awakened!) and who sealed forever my love affair with the English language.

Her name was Catherine Hume, and she taught senior English the year Charlie Morris, Ralph Nelms and I were forced to take her class because … well, because it was required and we were seniors. I’ll never forget her leading poor Ralph out to the water fountain in the main corridor to run cool water over his wrists because he was falling asleep in her class. It was a nice effort, but didn’t change the fact that Ralph was working nights at his father’s business to keep it afloat. Things were not easy in a small prairie town in the 1960s.

Anyway, one day Mrs. Hume decided we needed to understand that William Shakespeare’s plays were not meant to be read, they were meant to be performed and watched. She was especially enamored of “The Scottish Play” (if you think I’m going to invoke Bill’s Curse by typing the name of the play here, you have another think coming!) and so decided to present to us high school seniors her version of Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene in Act 5, Scen 1 (not to be confused with Lady Macbeth's Soliloquy, which takes place, coincidentally, in Act 1, Scene 5.)

On the appointed day, Mrs. Hume directed us to arrange our desks in a huge circle in the classroom. She drew the blinds down on the windows (it was believed the lead-impregnated blinds would protect us from Communist A-bombs exploding over Denver) and turned out the lights. She draped herself in a shawl, lighted a candle (today’s school administrators would suffer a heart infarction at the mere thought!) and stepped into the center of the circle of students in that darkened room. Remember, our town is a farm/market hub in the center of America. Colorado, Nebraska and Kansas come together here. This was high school back in 1968. Ralph Nelms’ wrists hadn’t been adequately hydrated yet.

Try to imagine what we saw: A woman at the end of her teaching career, already a great-grandmother, who has reminded us that the only “accurate” depictions of this play present this scene with Lady Macbeth nude (now there’s a mental picture for high school seniors!) holds a lighted candle in the middle of a darkened classroom and recites, from memory:

Out, damned spot! out, I say!—One: two: why,
then, 'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky!—Fie, my
lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we
fear who knows it, when none can call our power
to account?—Yet who would have thought the old
man to have had so much blood in him?

Mrs. Hume left out the other characters’ lines, reciting only Lady Macbeth’s lines, while we followed along in our textbooks. When it was over, when she’d instructed all in the castle to put on their nightclothes and return to their beds, she blew out the candle. There was complete silence in the classroom. Her next words were, “Jeff, please turn on the lights.” I jumped when Lady Macbeth said my name. Even Ralph was still awake and paying attention.

Mrs. Hume cast off the shawl and set aside the candle, then spent the rest of the period drawing out of us ideas about the power of the throne and the true power of those behind the throne. It doesn’t compare with the discussions of Shakespeare’s plays I’ve seen in graduate school, but it was the first time it ever occurred to me that what William Shakespeare wrote about was more than just a naked old queen sleepwalking in a blood-drenched castle. Mrs. Hume’s performance awakened in me a curiosity about what Shakespeare was really writing about.

Years later, while fulfilling my undergrad requirement for a BA in journalism, I happened to take two sections of Shakespeare in one quarter. It was an exhausting immersion in The Bard, and toward the end I struggled to keep straight the plot lines and character lists. But the result has been a lifelong love affair with William Shakespeare’s work and the way he used language to evoke emotional responses from audiences.

I took those classes because Catherine Hume went far above and beyond what was required to teach English lit to us High Plains seniors. Every time I attend a Shakespeare play, every time I laugh at the antics of Elbow or shed a tear at the fate of Ophelia or tremble with rage at the connivance of Iago, I remember that day when Mrs. Hume put on her shawl and lit her candle. That simple act of educational courage opened my mind to my native tongue in a way no one else ever had.

If I am a successful English teacher, it is in no small part because of Catherine Hume’s devotion to the idea that even we South Platte Valley high school seniors could appreciate one of the greatest playwrights of all time. I can’t speak for Charlie and Ralph, but as for me, she was right. And that’s why Catherine Hume is, to this day and forever, The Greatest English Teacher Ever.