A Floridian Flooded with Iowa Irony

We have more than merely a passing interest in the great Iowa floods. Among other things, we have an emotional investment in a painting that was hanging, at least until this week, in the foyer of Clapp Recital Hall on the campus of the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

The subject comes up because a Pensacola Beach friend writes to ask, 'Is any place safe?' This is our answer.

Quite a few years ago, we commissioned as a memorial a large acrylic painting depicting three of our family members. Our dad, our mom, and our brother. Each had died too young, each of different ailments. All three had been professional musicians for much of their adult lives and very well known locally in their day.

The artist we chose was Byron Burford. He had personally known each of our relatives very well and for a very long time.

Byron is highly regarded in Midwest and more academically oriented New York art circles. He studied under or alongside such notables as Grant Wood, Marvin Cone, Thomas Hart Benton, and others of the regionalist school. Indeed, until his retirement nearly two decades ago, he was a professor of painting in the same department that Grant Wood chaired for many years at the University of Iowa.

As the artist in charge, what Byron Burford conceived was a large painting depicting each of our loved ones at various ages -- just as he had known them himself over several decades. But he depicted them as if they were different people of different ages, all gathered together in a single nightclub jazz band.

We loved that painting. It hung in a prominent place in our home for many years before we relocated to Florida.

Eight months after moving to Pensacola Beach, Hurricane Opal (1995) struck. Our beach home weathered that storm relatively well. Better than most of our neighbors, in fact. But for the first time it dawned on us life-long 'Yankees' that hurricanes always would pose a potential threat to our lives and property as long as we lived in Florida. So, we took stock of what we couldn't bear to lose and made suitable arrangements.

One of those arrangements was to remove the canvas from its frame, carefully roll the painting, and store it away in what we judged to be the safest place in the house. Grabbing that rolled canvas when the time came for hurricane evacuation was always near the very top of our list -- right after saving the spouse and the dogs.

When Hurricane Ivan hit Pensacola Beach in 2004, we were shocked at how close we could have come to seeing the painting totally destroyed, anyway. Like most islanders, in the dismal aftermath of the storm we grew depressed and worried, wondering what to do with all the stuff we had managed to save, where to live next, what if anything to take with us if we decided to move, or whether to chuck all the books and the art and the nick-nicks and change our life style entirely.

Eventually, we decided to donate the painting to the University of Iowa in Iowa City. That's where our family members had been so well known, even locally famous, for their musical work and other prominent positions they held in the university community. We also figured that Iowa is just about as far away from hurricane country as one can get.

So, two years ago we had professional slides taken of the painting for our own use, in case we ever want to make a very large poster print. Then we paid for reframing it in a fancy "security" frame and sent the painting off to Iowa City after completing the usual charitable paperwork.

The university decided to hang it in the foyer of the new Clapp Music Hall which was being dedicated that Fall as the latest in a large complex of new music and art buildings on the banks of the west side of the Iowa River. Although we haven't been there yet to see it, we were told it was very prominently placed in the new entry hall and everyone was thrilled.

It was a huge relief to transfer the painting into safe hands. It lifted our spirits tremendously. Not only were we able to bask in the glow of certitude that the painting we loved so much was now safe, but we were surprised to discover that in giving it away our own load suddenly seemed so greatly lightened.

Today, we read that several of the music and art buildings on the University of Iowa campus, including Clapp Recital Hall, are threatened with severe and destructive flooding. A press report has it that at least one very rare, autographed concert piano already has been declared a total loss. Engineers there are worried that two or even three bridges may collapse, causing damage beyond comprehension.

We do not know what has happened to the painting. Almost all contact with university personnel and old friends there has been cut off either because they're out sandbagging day and night or because the raging river has overwhelmed local communications.

Moreover, the worst is yet to come. According to early Sunday news reports, water levels now inundating Iowa City aren't likely to crest until next Tuesday.

The irony is plain: we gave away a much beloved painting to save it from Gulf Coast hurricanes, only to watch helplessly as flooding Midwest rivers threaten to destroy it. If there is any obvious lesson in this, it is that nowhere is truly safe from the vagaries of nature or, for that matter, life itself. That might be the best answer we can give our beach friend.

But there is a subtler lesson, too. Quite likely, Thoreau had it right two centuries ago: one should own no more than the minimum necessities of life.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meagre life than the poor.

Maybe the 'consumer culture' America has created is beginning to consume us. As we learned after Ivan, and Iowans will learn after the floods, even one's most precious sentimental belongings matter not at all, really, compared with the lives of friends and loved ones and the memories we have of those we have loved. Things possessed matter not at all, in the end.

We know this intellectually, of course. And we treasure our memories. Yet, for some reason, we still can't help wondering what has happened to that painting.

Thoughts About the Deluge

The Iowa floods are truly of historic dimension. Even Digby is wowed.

"Far be it for me," she says, "to bring up the Obalglay Armingway, but this seems really bad."

Indeed, it is. Pensacola residents, with their recent history of violent hurricanes fresh in mind, can relate. But the kind and extent of flooding we're seeing in the Midwest is, if anything, even more devastating than Ivan and Dennis.

Iowa (from the Mesquakie word for "beautiful land") is blessed with many rivers and streams, as the NOAH map, above, illustrates. We happened to be hanging around there in '93 when the worst floods in that state's recorded history inundated Iowa and neighboring states downstream along the Mississippi River all the way to New Orleans.

For a very long time that year Des Moines, a metropolitan area at least three times the size of greater Pensacola, lost all of the most basic municipal infrastructures we tend to take for granted: electric power, passable streets and bridges, sewer and garbage service, readily available food, and potable water. Without those, surviving became a huge challenge every day.

Ironically, it was the lack of potable water that quickly became the most frightening. The Des Moines municipal water plant was knocked out for ten days back in 1993. For a week and a half, nearly half a million people had only what rainwater they could catch and occasional Army Reserve water distribution trucks ("bring your own containers") for all their needs. Half the city took showers outside, under the eaves. The other half didn't take them at all.

Judging from news reports, the flood levels in most Iowa communities this year are twice as high as in '93. Although it may be true, as one local described it to us today, that the Des Moines water plant is now a "fortress" that cannot be inundated again, other cities haven't had the foresight or the means to protect against renewed flooding of the biblical dimensions they're seeing today. They have to extemporize.

And when extemporizing, one can get desperate. Among the strangest stories of the Great Iowa Floods of '08 is this, from the Cedar Rapids Gazette:

In hopes of keeping the raging Cedar River from washing away a railway bridge, on Tuesday evening local railway company officials "placed about 20 rail hopper cars loaded with rock on the span." The river rose, and rose, and rose some more. Then --

The Cedar Rapids and Iowa City Railway Co. bridge downstream from the Eighth Avenue bridge collapsed into the river at 9:43 a.m. *** The hopper cars are in the river now, too, the railway reports.

Here's a photo of the aftermath:

Northwest Florida residents can relate to what's happening in Iowa perhaps better than most. Severe hurricanes disrupt and threaten life in much the same way. So, too, can out of control fires in the West. And, for that matter, killer blizzards in the North and East.

Now that it's evident we're all in this together, can we at last dispense with the pointless carping about the "moral hazard" of living here, or there, or over yonder? No one is proof against disaster, whether natural or man-made. Everyone is as likely as not to be in need of help from his fellow citizens at some time or another.

Today, it's our distant fellow citizens in the Midwest who need an extra hand. Tomorrow, it could be us.

Watching the Iowa Floods

FEMA Destroyer Visits Gulf Coast

Joe Allbaugh, who took a wrecking ball to FEMA two years before Hurricane Ivan devastated the Pensacola area, visited the Gulf Coast yesterday. He is shown, above, standing expectantly behind Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani (photo by PNJ photographer Ben Twingley).

At FEMA, Bush appointed a close aide, Joe Allbaugh, to be the agency's new director. Allbaugh had served as then-Gov. Bush's chief of staff in Texas and as manager of his 2000 presidential campaign. Along with Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, Allbaugh was known as one part of Bush's "iron triangle" of professional handlers.
* * *
By ignoring the logic of fully funded mitigation and other preparedness programs, Bush's first FEMA director earned some scorn among emergency specialists. "Allbaugh? He was inept," says Claire Rubin, a senior researcher at George Washington University's Institute for Crisis, Disaster and Risk Management.

Allbaugh later left what remained of the agency and helped advance his former college roommate, the incompetent Michael Brown, to the head of FEMA. Allbaugh himself went on to rake in millions on government consulting contracts in Iraq and New Orleans.

Giuliani is notorious in his own right. He hired mob-connected Bernie Kerick (now under indictment for corruption in New York) as city police chief and even recommended Kerik to head the newly created Department of Homeland Security.

Judging from yesterday's photos, there were more Bush administration crooks and cronies meeting with Giuliani in Gulf Breeze than Florida voters.

End of the FEMA Line

Why Now? has the essence of the story:

"FEMA signed a contract for debris removal that pays $23/cubic yard, but by the time it went through multiple layers of subcontractors, the people who are actually removing the debris are making $3/cubic yard."

Read - "Corruption, Cronyism, & Incompetence."

Shorter Joe Scarborough

From Bill Maher's September 9, 2005, HBO program "Real Time":

[Joe Scarborough]: Now, people have been talking about the need to appoint a hurricane czar. I was asked, “What do you think about that?” I said, “Well, we do have a hurricane czar, and it's the director of FEMA. When Bill Clinton was president, we had somebody named James Lee Witt. He was a great FEMA director. I flew around the Gulf Coast with him three or four times when hurricanes hit down here ... and when you have the right people in place, it makes a big difference.

To which there is this reply:

[Bill Maher]: He would have been better at handling this during sex than George Bush was.