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Flood - A Mom's Eye View
Full disclosure: even though the date on this blog post is September 22, I am actually writing it on December 30. I want to preserve the histoical accuracy of the event, even though it took me this long to be able to write about it. Oh sure, Jake the Zebu was able to blog about his flood experience. His cow's eye view is significantly different from the mom's eye view.
On September 21 Brian and the younger boys woke bright and early and headed to Kansas to visit our oldest son at Benedictine College. That morning we had our septic tanks pumped and assessed. As uninteresting as that little tidbit my seem, it was quite providential considering what happened later that night and into the next morning. Rain. Lots and lots of rain.
It started raining in the evening about 6pm. We put the cows into the barn, gave them feed and hay and fresh water. It was still raining when we all went to bed. Sometime in the wee hours my phone beeped with a flash flood warning. I went back to sleep. At 5am another beep. Flash flood warning. I went to the window and looked out. The screens were too wet to see through. I opened the winow and wiped the water off the screen. Pretty moonlight seemed to reflect off of the pasture. My sleepy head took a moment to realize that it was still raining and therefore the moon would not be shining on the pasture. I squinted. I peered. Was that water? Was that, in fact, standing water in the pasture?
I went to the back porch. It sure looked like water, but it was still dark. I grabbed a raincoat, umbrella, and my phone and trudged out into the back yard. Before I reached the back fence I was in ankle deep water. Back inside I went and upstairs to see if I could get a good view from the girl's bedroom window. It was impossble to see through the water, rain, and darkness.
Delaney got up and together we went out to the back yard. It was still dark. The water had receeded so that the backyard was now just squishy. I opened the gate to venture out into the pasture and as soon as my hand touched it I pulled it back in disgust. Slugs, grasshoppers, all kinds of bugs covered the top of the gate like sprinkles on a sundae. Delaney and I walked cautiously out to the barnyard door. We shined our flashlight on the door and tried to open it. It was stuck. The post had shifted and the latch would not release. Delaney suggested that if we got it open we would not be able to close it. I said we could just bar the door with the wood plank. But where was the wood plank?
We shined our light to the cattle gate where the plank was usually propped. No plank, but worse than that, no cattle gate. It was gone. Gone too were the other cattle gates and half a dozen cinder blocks that had held them in place. We decided to go to the side of the barn to peek in and check on the cows. As we turned to walk around the fenced barnyard we realized the fence was no longer standing. There was a pile of wire fencing tangled in a rope attached to a tire lying on the ground. As we turned our light to the barnyard we saw only an open space guarded by that ominous door that now led to nothing.
Delaney and I were in shock as we approached the barn, but we were not prepared for what we saw next. Hoping to see a trio of scared zebu in the corner of the barn, our flashlights revealed the back barn wall had been blown wide open. Twisted barn metal, splintered wood, and a clear path to the trees and creek behind the barn were what we saw.
I wanted to look for the cows, but Delaney was afraid we would scare them with our flashlights. We decided to go back to the house and wait for first light. I debated texting or calling Brian. He had completed an 8 hour drive the day before and I didn't want to wake him with alarming news, especially when there was nothing he could do from so far away. So we waited.
At about 6:45am there was enough light to go back out, look for the cows, and assess damage. Miraculously, the three zebu were casually grazing near the garden fence. Delaney led them into the back yard to keep them safe. Then we started to get the full picture of what had transpired.
An enormous brush pile had been deposited in the corner formed where our backyard and pasture fences meet. Our pasture fences along the east and west sides had been laid flat. The missing cattle gates and cinder blocks were found hundreds of feet from the barn. Pallet crates full of manure had somehow made their way around the barn, and to the far corner of the pasture. The trough from inside the barn was on top of a leaning section of wire fence. Several sections of wooden privacy fencing were stacked in a neat pile on top of the downed western fence. Random debris including dozens of cardboard boxes and a couch (complete with throw pillows) lined the south fence.
As we were assessing the damage our neighbors came out to see what my cryptic FaceBook post (Flash Flooding. Major damage to
barn & fencing. Waiting for the sun to rise to find the cows. Prayers appreciated.) had been all about. Realizing that Brian and the boys were away, they sprang into action. One went to buy stuff for clean-up and fix-up. Another brought his truck over to move debris. Together we cleared and hauled and even erected a new fence to section off the pasture and keep the cows contained.
It was a messy, muddy, surprising, exhausting, mentally draining day. All of us involved in the clean up said, 'I can't believe it' about a dozen times each, but commented even more frequently on how grateful or lucky or blessed we were that things were not a whole lot worse.
Our animals were safe. The house hadn't flooded. The cow's feed somehow survived the waist deep water. It had been stored in the barn in a rubbermaid tote. The hay was also spared, at least temporarily. But the barn was a soggy, unliveable mess so we decided to give the cows shelter on our back porch until we fixed up the barn or built a new one. That was going to take much more than one day.
We waffled a bit on whether to repair the barn or replace it. Each time we would talk about fixing it up we would head out to the old barn, poke around a bit and remember all the repairs we had planned to do before the flood. Then we would add up all the new damage, and multiply it by the fact that where the barn sits is just too close to the creek that *never* floods - and downhill from our septic field - and admit that the time had, in fact, come to build a new barn.
