The Flood – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
In the last week, I’ve learned about the impermanence of things after a flood struck our house.
I had just finished writing last week’s blog post titled “Olympic Optimism” when I started to hear the beeping noises around our house. This usually was a sign that the power was being tripped in some place, or that one of our smoke or carbon dioxide detectors needed new batteries. I checked outside, it’d been raining for a while so perhaps the power lines behind our house had suffered some damage. Seeing nothing in the back, I turned to my left toward the door to our basement garage and opened the door.
Our garage tends to flood anytime there’s a heavy rain, but it will barely be enough water to cover the soles of our boots. Still, it’s often enough water to require work cleaning up the mess. We live in an old house; it’s century mark will come in two years, and the stone walls of our basement garage, common for houses here in Kansas City built through the middle of the last century, tend to seep water when it rains like that. This time though, there was something different about the water that I saw, for it could not have rained so much as to produce a flood some 8 inches deep to the point that the car charging in our basement was partially submerged. I shouted to my Mom, who was finishing her lunch as we prepared to go out for the afternoon, and she came over to me quickly at the sound of concern in my voice. The sight of it all gave me a sort of thrill at first, as I thought about how dramatic this all looked.
I gently walked down several steps, not touching the water itself as I was sure there could be live wires submerged in that pond. I looked past the car and saw our trash and recycling bins on their backs floating in the surf. The entire basement was submerged, no part of it beneath that 8 inch mark was dry. I returned up the stairs, and went into my room where I kept a pair of snow boots that rise to a bit below the knee, and laced those up, figuring they were better than my usual shoes and went out onto our block to see what the damage was elsewhere.
As it turned out, the entire block on our side of the street had flooded. The city engineers arrived a while later and confirmed that the water main which they had replaced a year before had broken and flushed all of this sewer water into our basements on the downhill side of the block. The further down the hill, the worse it got. When we have disasters like this on my block, we develop a sense of solidarity. I remember the microburst of high winds, thunder, and rain in Spring 2018 that struck our street and toppled many of the trees on this block, crushing several cars beneath them, and causing considerable damage all around. We all banded together, and even some friends from neighboring blocks came to ours, as we learned which guys in which houses kept chainsaws handy. This time, we frequently wandered into the street at the same time, conferring how the damage looked in each other’s basements. There were other houses that had it a lot worse than us, for one our driveway neighbors’ basement was finished until this flood. Yet it wasn’t a difference between mopping up an inch of water in ours compared to several inches in theirs.
The damage from this flood was severe, destroying nearly everything that was on the floor. Thankfully, as of writing the car was deemed to be safe by its manufacturer, but so many other things were lost in the flood. Some of the last physical memories of my Donnelly great-grandparents were lost as my great-grandfather’s blanket chest partially flooded. I took photos of all the pictures we had to throw out, my eyes were the last ones to look upon the originals. Hereafter, we will have my digital copies, but it’s still not the same experience. My Dad lost plenty of power tools that he had collected over the last three decades and beyond. Many of my Mom’s personal mementos, her crafting goods, and gardening tools were lost as well. There was an old heavy wooden side table that my Dad bought in college which was ruined, and some wooden stools that I remembered from our first years in Kansas City that were also deemed unsafe. I found camp photos from my Boy Scout years in the 2000s that needed to be thrown away, all ruined by the flood.
In the days after I found myself drained of energy, beleaguered by a sense of uncertain loss. All of these things, I suppose, were tangible memories that I expected would survive until their materials degraded. We historians are able to study far older objects than the ones lost in this flood because they have survived long after their makers have returned to dust. Just two months ago, I was sitting in the Department of Manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s Richelieu building in Paris holding a volume that contained André Thevet’s handwritten translation of the Travels of Benjamin of Tudela. For the first time in the five years that I’ve studied Thevet, I got to feel paper on which he wrote his own name, on which the impressions of his hand and his thoughts could be seen. Thevet himself is long gone, his tomb in the Convent des Cordeliers likely destroyed during or after the French Revolution, yet there in that grand room I was able to touch something he touched, something upon which he left a part of himself with his words and ideas.
Any hope of experiencing that with these objects left by my great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, and by my younger self that were on the lowest level of storage in our basement are now gone. The experience spoke to me of the impermanence of the physical world, how as Persephone said to Orpheus in the Jim Henson retelling, “everything dies.” This past weekend, I found myself yearning for my childhood again, hoping that I might restore in my mind some of the memories of these artifacts that they might imprint themselves in my thoughts before my memory of them slips away. I could remember how those two wooden stools, light brown in color, felt when I sat on them for too long doing my homework or during meals. I could remember taking that camp photo with the couple hundred other Scouts from around Greater Kansas City and beyond, and how we all gave at least a half-hearted effort at the official photo before giving our all at the silly picture to come. The flood widened the gulf between this present time and all those things which embodied the memories of my past and my family’s past going back to the turn of the Twentieth Century. It made 2024 feel far more removed from 1924 than I’ve yet felt.The one good thing to come out of this flood, if anything, is that we can start anew and learn from the mistakes that led to such widespread damage this time. I expect there will be a next time, that same water main breaks at least once a year, though this is the first time it flushed sewage into our basements. I suspect we will not store anything on our basement floor ever again. Everything will be raised off the floor by at least 10 inches or more. I even suggested installing metal ramps strong enough to hold the car so that it too would never be susceptible to a flood like this again. That is the way of things: we are a reactive people; we see a problem and we don’t prioritize it until it hurts us. I wish we could be more proactive and avoid more of these problems, yet the trials and tribulations of life require that we learn from our experiences, and how can we measure the good moments of life if we haven’t experienced the bad?
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 