Mother Nature’s Revenge

I graduated from college and was then faced with the dilemma of what to do next. Taking my fore-mothers as my example, it seemed a logical thing to get married. In hindsight it wasn’t logical at all, but at the time I somehow thought it was something I was supposed to do. I couldn’t imagine life without some male figure making me miserable, so I said “yes” to an offer from a man who would become an army lieutenant in the October following graduation.

I had just a few months to throw together a wedding in the D.C. area where both my fiancé’s and my parents happened to live. Why rush in? Simple. He was to leave for Oklahoma in October, and everyone knows that good girls don’t live with men before they are married! I had dated him for eight months and I couldn’t just drive off into the sunset with him unless I was legally bound and gagged to him, could I?

I wasted no time and requisitioned my parent’s house for the reception, found a pianist and a caterer for the event and bought a size two wedding dress off a tiny window mannequin at the local bridal boutique for $200. The tailor cut the bottom three feet of fabric off the dress, sewed in a huge amount of stuffing where my breasts should have been and I was good to go.

In barely more than an instant I was married and off to Oklahoma. Oklahoma was… OK. I didn’t love it but I didn’t hate it. I learned my duties as a military wife (barf) and attended the officer’s wives meetings on occasion. I worked at a crummy local day care center for lack of “real” jobs in the area. My husband was only stationed there for six months, so it was barely worth sending out a hundred resumes to all the local establishments. In Lawton, Oklahoma, the busiest industry at that time dealt in dancers of an exotic nature, and was not exactly my stiletto of tea, anyway.

I had brought my horse Super Mario from college, and we acquired a Boston Terrier and two more equines while in Oklahoma. My non-horsey husband simply could not be outdone by his wife and had to have a steed or two of his own. At least the extra horses gave me something to do once I quit my job at the crummy day care.

After the Oklahoma stint was done, it was on to the lovely state of Kansas. All I knew of Kansas prior to moving there was that it was flat and that without prior warning one could be whisked off in a tornado to a strange Technicolor parallel universe inhabited by musical animals, vegetables and minerals. In its defense, certain good fairies with annoyingly high, wavering voices, have thought it wise to send lost girls back there, so it couldn’t be too bad, could it?

I was pleasantly surprised to find that the north east portion of Kansas actually has rolling hills, real trees and no portals to other worlds. Even better it was the country life-style I had always longed for growing up in the D.C. and Philadelphia suburbs. It was easy to find our “starter home” with almost four acres and a barn. It was the first house we looked at and it was perfect!

The house was barely one thousand square feet, but it had everything we needed. We went to the closing and started signing our way through the sky-scraper of paperwork. I distinctly remember laughing upon finding out we could add flood insurance for a whopping twenty-five dollars a year. “You don’t need it,” the lender advised us but for that kind diddley amount we figured it would be fun to purchase just for the heck of it.

I had once seen an aerial photograph of our quaint little house and its land. I noted that our house was nicely nestled in a picturesque spot in the “Y” of the Blue River and the Missouri River. Other than finding the area strikingly lush, I never gave the geography of local irrigation a second thought until the summer of 1993.

Having tried my hand at car sales and selling men’s fragrances at a local department store, I had moved on to selling very “hip,” hip-hop clothing to adolescents and their forty-year-old parents with the Peter Pan syndrome. One afternoon I was exercising my brainpower to the max, making certain that all the team logo sweatshirts were folded in exactly the same way when the store manager called me over to tell me I had a phone call. As many of my co-workers were adolescents or suffering from the Peter Pan syndrome, there was a strict “No personal phone calls” rule that I was overtly breaking.

My manager stood glowering at me as I picked up the phone. “We’re being evacuated for a WHAT?” I slammed the phone back into its cradle and looked my manager in the eye.
“I have to go home now. The army reserves are evacuating us because there is going to be a flood.”
My manager clearly did not believe a word of it. It was made clear to me that I would most certainly be fired if I was making this up to go to a concert.

I rushed home to find military vehicles blocking off the roadways to my house. After showing my driver’s license to a uniformed male who probably didn’t shave yet, I was allowed to continue homeward. There were no outward signs of rising water what-so-ever, yet we started the task of moving everything off the ground. We stacked photo albums and books on chairs and the chairs on tables. We stuffed garbage bags full of clothing and necessities. We were in the process of throwing everything into the cars when we had to stop and wonder. Where were we going to take all this stuff?

We also had two cats, three horses and four dogs to move. The horses were taken to Kansas State Veterinary Center who had generously offered up stalls to animals misplaced by the flood. A veterinarian at the school offered to take our Great Pyrenees dog. That left us with just the smaller dogs and the cats.

The sofa and love seat were hoisted into the hayloft of the barn. All other hatches were battened down to the best of our abilities before the “get out” deadline hit. Making one last pass through the house was like leaving a dog at the vet to be euthanized. It was a beautiful evening when we said “goodbye” to our starter home.

Within days the house and barn were standing in four feet of sewage-laced water. It was truly an adventure canoeing home to visit the carnage. For safety reasons, no one was allowed to venture into the swollen river. Army Reservists were strategically positioned around the once-inhabited neighborhoods to prevent residents, thieves or thrill seekers from entering. We cleverly outsmarted the reservists by sneaking down to an empty corn field to launch a boat. Canoeing through corn stalks is odd enough, but it became truly surreal when we started boating past the houses of our neighbors and friends.

The first thing we noticed aside from our new indoor swimming pool was that the trees were full of every kind of critter imaginable. There were feral cats, mice, rats, bugs and even snakes seeking refuge in the branches. The flora was now about thirty percent fauna in my estimation. A kitten clinging to a Styrofoam cooler lid had washed up in a corner of the house by the back door. She had an insect infestation the likes of which no veterinarian has ever seen. There were grasshoppers in her ears and roaches covering her back. I wasn’t going to leave her there, but I sure as heck didn’t want to touch her! As cruel as it sounds, I upended the small, populated island with a stick and dumped the kitten and her residents into the water. As the kitted surfaced, I grabbed her and swatted off the remainder of the bugs. Though angry, frightened and wet, the kitten never thought about trying to jump ship on our way back to safety.

My husband and I had taken up temporary residence with some local college students. They gave us a room and allowed all our pets into the house too. After a few weeks when it became clear there would be no moving back to our own soggy house, my husband found the nastiest, trashiest, most dangerous trailer park in all of Junction City Kansas to move us to. The single-wide trailer was approximately sixty years old, but luckily it had been redecorated in the early 1970’s. The carpet was a lovely thread-bare, burnt orange, brown and green shag, though it more resembled the head of a burn victim. The trailer came fully-loaded, with holes in the floor (air-conditioning) and a leaky roof (shower).

I know somebody else in the trailer park had keys to our new abode because each day while I was at work, the sticky-fingered elf would pick a few things to permanently borrow. There were train tracks within fifty feet of the trailer, but luckily there were about thirty trailers in between ours and the tracks. That helped cut the noise down from the hourly trains. There were lots of children in the park, though I rarely saw any adults. Things like that always made me wonder.

We lived in that trailer for about three months. I say “we” but my husband was away for much of that time playing “soldier” with his army buddies. He assured me I’d be just fine, and even adopted yet another dog from the pound to “protect” me. The dog was huge, not house broken and barked non-stop for the entire three months. On a positive note, nobody ever complained about the noise. I doubt anyone could hear it over the roar of the trains!