Tempers Flare as Flood Takes a Mental Toll

The river won here weeks ago, and in the 25-foot camper trailer that is home for now, Butch Granneman has time to remember, to replay every mishap and mistake.

The county official who could not locate equipment. The train that blocked a truck hauling sand to the levee. The delay in getting the railroad’s permission to drape plastic over the berm topped by the tracks.

His eyes, reddened from exhaustion and a couple of beers, moistened with frustration and rage. “I want Santa Fe’s ass!” the 37-year-old howled while his mother tried to hush him.

His wife passes around photographs of their half-submerged house, its screened porch and white stucco archways set off against the green-tinged Mississippi River.

This is limbo time in the flooded zones of the Midwest, when the waiting and uncertainty erode the human spirit as surely as the rivers ate away the levee walls. The adrenaline of the battle and retreat has faded. The cleanup can’t begin until the waters decide, in their own good time, to shrink back into their banks.

Cigarette and alcohol consumption are up. Tempers flare. Nightmares loom. Some people go back each day to their inundated homes but cannot bring themselves to go in. Others return and cannot bear to depart, holing up in the muck and filth as health workers entreat them to leave.

They seek solace in dark humor and impromptu parties--in the yard where the Grannemans have parked their trailer, burgers sizzle on a grill and a man plays the blues on an acoustic guitar. Comfort also comes from volunteering to help others and in toting up the aid received from family, strangers and all manner of government officials.

From the Dakotas through Iowa, Missouri and Illinois, a flood victim’s day is spent figuring out which agency is where, filling out endless forms, moving soggy goods or refugee livestock, making excuses to the boss and, sometimes, getting fired.

The dreary rounds leave hours on end free for brooding.

“It’s just such a sense of futility,” said Jerry Phillippi, a psychologist in Madison, S.D., who has been on call for the American Red Cross to counsel those caught in flash floods along the Big Sioux River and the streams that feed it. “When human beings feel they’re not really in control, that’s pretty devastating. And it’s lasting so long, so much longer than a tornado or a hurricane.”

The emotional fallout may take as long to repair as the physical damage inflicted by the floods. Judith Wells, a trauma psychologist coordinating the Red Cross mental health response in Des Moines, estimates that the healing process will last anywhere from six months to two years.

The counselors in Des Moines say they have noticed a pattern. “Whenever you walk up to someone, it just pours out,” Wells said. “They need to talk, they need to vent. But the first week, they needed to talk about the flood, the incident, what they lost. The second week, they’ve been telling their life story.”

This suggests, she said, that people are beginning to recognize how long a dislocation they will have to endure. “They’re re-establishing their identity,” she said. “They need a background to hold on to.”

The reactions, she said, are all completely normal in these very abnormal circumstances.

Jeff and Robin England, for example, have been bickering, though they’re good-humored enough as they describe their snappishness. Their children, Mike and Amanda, have been at each others’ throats as well. “We have one friend who left his wife because of all their stress from the flood,” said Robin England, “and I think they’re worried we’ll do the same thing.”

For a while after the Skunk River took their home in Colfax, Iowa, 30 miles east of Des Moines, their major comfort came from chocolate: candy bars, HoHos, Ding-Dongs.

Who could blame them? The flood was just the beginning of their trials. When they drove to the local shelter at a high school in the wee hours of that first morning, the building was dark and locked. They slept for awhile in the car, then cruised the neighborhood until they noticed others had parked near the elementary school. The shelter had been moved there without notice.

For another six days, they stayed with friends. “Things got really strained,” Robin England said. Their hosts had different eating habits and traffic jams developed at the bathroom door. With the help of some federal aid, they found a room at a motel and, finally, an apartment.

The Englands called the Federal Emergency Management Agency hot line the day after they fled their home. “They took my name and got me a control number,” Jeff England said. “They said they’d call me back, but I never heard from them, wherever I moved. I’d go to the Red Cross and I kept asking: ‘Should we go down to the local office?’ and they said: ‘No. Wait for the call.’ And then our friends kept telling us they heard about people getting helped when they went down.”

Every day, they have returned to their ruined house. Robin England sprained her ankle retrieving sodden possessions.

So she took three days off from work as a debt collector. Consequently, her employer fired her. “They just told me: ‘See you around,’ ” she said. “They knew that we had lost our house.”

Her response was completely rational. “I did a little tear-shedding,” she said. “OK, a lot of tear-shedding.”

Counselors report a rash of water nightmares. Insomnia also afflicts many flood victims, especially those who were ordered to evacuate in the middle of the night. One man said he would drift off to sleep, but every time he did, he’d soon wake up covered with sweat.

The sight of a ruined house evokes the strongest emotions and the strangest behavior, it seems.

An elderly South Dakota couple, one of many who have refused to leave the drenched wreckage that once was home, was coaxed out by Phillippi, the psychologist from Madison, S.D., after 2 1/2 hours of talk. They would go, they finally agreed, but only to spend their nights elsewhere. They insisted on coming back each morning to spend the day amid the mildew and the damp.

In Niota, by contrast, Mary Anne Reed has built a ritual out of keeping her distance from the red frame house where she and her husband raised a family.

Early every morning, she wakes in exile at her sister-in-law’s house way out in the country. By 6:30 a.m., her car is parked on a dirt and gravel road overlooking a lake that was not there a month ago. She ignores the water and focuses on the place she lived in until three weeks ago.

This is the closest she’s allowed herself to come. Her voice shakes when she talks about it, so she doesn’t, much.

Plenty of others from town have made the trip in boats, taking photos like Sharon Granneman’s, or bringing out clothing and supplies.

Reed also had her chance. She guided a Red Cross crew on a tour of inundated Niota. When the workers motored toward her end of her street, she told them to stop at one of the willows and let her off. She’d climb into the branches, she said, and they could retrieve her on the way back out.

She tried to sound lighthearted. They turned the boat around right then and there.

During most of the daylight hours, she can be found at the Appanoose Faith Presbyterian Church, a sturdy clapboard structure with stained glass. Its most important feature these days is its location on high ground.

In the basement meeting room, Reed immerses herself in work, trying to forget the red frame house. She tells a teen-ager where to get tetanus shots. She listens to the GTE man explaining why the church phone number will have to change again. She explains the day’s menu to the women from the dry, bluff-top churches who have come to make meals for the levee workers. There are more cooks than sandbaggers these days.

Later, she sits with her husband and two old friends, Lynn Farr and Lester Eaves, at a folding table. Each of the three men sports a billed cap and deep circles under their eyes. They share an empty paper cup, against which they regularly tap their cigarettes. It is rapidly filling with a pyramid of butts and ash.

They speak of earlier floods, the ones in which Niota, not the river, was the victor. “I fought it in ‘65, in ‘73, in ‘85, in ‘89,” Lester Eaves said. “I sold my house in town 20 years ago.”

Farr barks harshly, in imitation of a chuckle. “He seen it coming.”

This is an especially painful subject. During an April flood scare, someone from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers warned the citizens of Niota that the river would run high in July. The near-unanimous reaction at the time, recalled the district fire chief, was: “Oh, ha ha.” There’s no flooding in the summer, they all knew.

At the other end of the table, Jenni Boddeker tries to prod her young son into consuming something more nutritious than the cinnamon bun he’s chewing. She stops repeatedly as the tears well up. She will not let them overflow.

The Boddekers lost a second-generation family boat business here. One of the churchwomen offers a meal; Jenni Boddeker turns it down.

“If I bring you something, you’ll eat it, right?” the woman says. Boddeker shakes her head. The woman loads a tray and sets it down. “C’mon, Jenni, we worked together a long time,” she says.

“Thanks, Barb,” Boddeker answers, very close to crying now. She lifts a fork. She puts it down again.

“How long have we lived in our house?” Reed asks her husband.

Says Farr: “Oh, you mean the one on the lake? The one in the lake.”

No one talks for a moment. “At least,” Eaves says quietly, “we can still laugh.”