Excerpt:
My little Minnesota town mostly tolerated the river. The Red, eleven months out of the year, was kind of puny and babyish. Sure, it was banked by shady trees, and it was a lazy place for a waterside picnic. But it was no Missouri.
Once a year, though; that one month in the spring, the Red River turned into a hysterical, sobbing woman. When
all the ingredients got stirred together just right; the ice jams, the melting
snow creeping across the flat plain, the up-up-upping of the thermometer; well,
then the Red wreaked vengeance on those who ever dared call it puny.
Sherlock
Park, home to the town
swimming pool, and the corny bandstand, where oompa-oompa bands serenaded
clumps of families sitting in the shade; was but mere blocks away from the Red;
but it seemed so much further away to us kids. At least until the flooding
began.
The First National and Sacred
Heart Church
and the American Legion Club were only two blocks down and one block to the
right of the Louis
Murray Bridge,
give or take. My town was a little town, and it took its nourishment from the
skinny waters that confusedly wended their way north, instead of south, like a
normal river would.
Every spring, my big brother got out of classes to help
sandbag. High school kids are inherently altruistic, especially when they have
the opportunity to get sprung from school.
It wasn’t just the Red that flooded, though. Every body of
water that was man enough to call itself a “body of water” lurched like a
drunken sailor and went knocking on doors. That included the coulee across the
road from my farm.
What that meant for me was that the school bus dropped me
off at the top of the hill, and set me on a journey of red rubber galoshes
busting through banks of sloppy snow, as poor little me finally made my way
across the field and to the waiting arms of my front door.
It wasn’t bad enough that the country kids (I say
derisively, although I was one) made
fun of my name, and called me “Bushy Tail”, as I sat, grumpily bumped up
against the vibrating school bus window, all the way to town.
But I hated winter, and I hated post-winter; with its
stinging slap across my face, taunting me with a squinty-eyed vision of
someday-wildflowers bursting through hillsides that were currently drenching my
snow pants up to the knees.
