Except for one woman.

She wasn’t patiently waiting at all.

She pushed up to the counter and loudly expressed her displeasure for having to wait for her oatmeal and tea. She griped and made a general ass of herself while the rest of us waited quietly. There were several baristas working, and they were busting their butts. No one else was complaining. There wasn’t confusion behind the counter, but just the typical time it takes as drinks are lined up on the counter in the order they are placed. With this many people, you will have to wait. Only someone who overrates her importance in this world and has never been a barista or worked in the food service industry would behave as this woman did.

“So are you going to get me my oatmeal? I’ve been waiting forever.”

The young girl behind the counter got the woman her oatmeal, even though her order wasn’t the next one up.

“My tea. I had a tea.”

The barista tried to explain that the cups were lined up in an order.

At this point, my drink came up (her’s probably would have if she wouldn’t have messed up the order and confused the baristas) so I went outside and sat at a table and waited for my friend, who arrived shortly after me. The woman came out with her oatmeal, and loudly expressed her displeasure at experiencing a wait to a man sitting at another table by himself.

“I’ve been waiting probably 25 minutes! Only in North Dakota,” she said. “I asked if I could have a cup of water and just brewed my own tea, but they said they can’t do it. Unbelievable.”

A man sitting at the next table chimed in with agreement, and a lame quasi-flirting thing began.

“I’m from Minneapolis,” the woman stated. “I work with a consulting company that provides startup capital for new business. I’m on vacation, and only driving through North Dakota, thank God.”

“I’m from Calgary,” the man said. “I work with an oil company, and yeah, I know what you mean.”

They both proceeded to agree on negative things about the state of North Dakota and make me wish that they would both go back to where they came from.

It wasn’t long before her tea came up but because she was outside and so taken with flirting with this man and bonding over the fact that they were metropolitan people as opposed to the inept yokels in North Dakota, she wasn’t aware of it. She was made aware of it, though, when one of the other customers — a complete stranger to her — went outside and politely told her that her tea was ready.

A short time later, after the loser oil guy left with what seemed to have been his real girlfriend, she went inside with all her big purses and expensive electronics, but as she approached the door to get in, realized she had no free hands. Another patron inside — a complete stranger to her — rushed to get the door for her.

“Here you go,” the patron said, holding open the door.

When it was time to go, the woman faced the unpleasant challenge of getting her expensive SUV out of an extremely tight parking lot. As she was backing up, another car pulled into the drive-through lane behind her. Instead of honking the horn at her as she backed in his direction, he began waving and directing her as she backed out of the parking space so that she would safely achieve her goal.

It’s amazing, really.

Some ignorant woman from a large city decided to view her slower service as being caused by the fact that she was in North Dakota instead of the obvious problem that it was extremely busy. She then decided to bad mouth the state as she was surrounded by people from North Dakota who, later, helped her three times. Apparently this made her feel superior and allowed her to bond with a likely two-timing douchebag oil guy.

Why would the fact that it happened in North Dakota have anything to do with it? As I’ve stated before on this blog, the slowest service I’ve ever gotten at a Starbucks has consistently been at the Chicago O’Hare airport (Gate b17, to be specific). I don’t assume that the state of Illinois has a malfunctioning time-space continuum problem. I can discern if it is a “too busy” issue or “the staff is inept” issue, but I certainly don’t hold an entire geographic region responsible if my Starbucks drink doesn’t materialize within three minutes of ordering. Only an ignoramus would make such a broad and poorly educated assumption.

Calgary, home of an aging Olympic complex and, apparently, not enough oil work to keep the douchebags there. Minneapolis, center of a state that couldn’t afford to staff and stock its state parks and roadside shitters and is about one insult away from North Dakota flipping the switch and turning its power off. Let’s see how long it would take for her to get her tea, then.

Yeah, I got her license plate. 007EPX 

The reader need merely select any story from the current crop of flood-related articles on the local newspaper’s website, and go to the comments accompanying it. You have your random religious nutter sprinkled in and about the commentary, and the rare level-headed writer who is endeavoring to provide factual information or encouragement.

But mainly?

Class envy.

Short floods rush in and provide for chaotic heroism. The devastation comes quickly, catching everyone off guard and not giving anyone a chance to think of reasons to not help or hate. People pitch in, become generous, and are able to maintain it for a short duration. Everyone gives everything, for it is a bit easier: it will only be for a short while. The water drops, and the next element of crisis, the cleanup, begins. The same thing happens. There is less time for grumbling. There is less time to over-think helping. There is no time to make it normal; it remains devastating.

The flood in Bismarck/Mandan has been going on since May. Read that again: SINCE MAY. It is now mid-July and it will not be abating any time soon, if you consider that the water is still very high and that the flood cleanup is still a long way off. I know that Minot has the national attention, but the flood here is a different animal entirely, one that slipped in just slowly enough to provide some triage preparation, but has still devastated large swaths of property and people. It changed the face of two seasons, and the geography, for the region. Can you imagine living temporarily out of your home for this many months, some without homes to return to possibly just before a North Dakota winter sets in?

Sadly, the mighty Missouri has been overflowing her banks long enough for it to become a kind of “normal” and allow people time to  start formalizing already-held grudges in terms of how they are to be interpreted through the lens of this flood. I sit and read the comments section of the paper, and listen to people talking (myself included), and realize that a long flood is a much different animal than a short flood. The immediate needs of humanity are lost to time and desensitization, the human face of personal tragedy is another dramatic above-the-fold photograph to be thrown out tomorrow, and the meat of it simply becomes a matter of who is going to pay and by god, I’m not going to see my taxes raised to help those people in those big fancy houses who were dumb enough to live by a river.

(Nearly all cities are built on rivers. Not all people affected had big fancy houses.)

How strange that a necessary component of human survival — a kind of absorption of the awful so that it became livable and normal — also hinders it. Callouses protect, because they keep us from feeling.

I can only imagine the conversation on Noah’s ark, a flood which was, oddly, shorter than the one still going on here and with far fewer angry animals.

Envy is ruinous.

Grandpa had raised Herefords, but but got rid of them when I was five years old. I have only vague memories of them, though dad is pretty sure he’s glad they got rid of them. According to dad, they got sick, got out, got loose, or got into trouble at precisely the moment when you were least conveniently able to deal with it.

While watching Food, Inc. several months ago, I remember turning to my friend and telling him that not only did we know where our beef came from when we were growing up, but that we often knew the name.

“There was this steer we called Bubblebutt,” I said, knowing that any conversation started with such a great lead was only destined for eye rolling.

Growing up, my sister and I were over in my grandpa’s pasture quite a bit, since he kept the horses out with the cattle. If we wanted to ride horse, we had to go out there to get them. Sometimes we’d lure the cattle up to the gate by feeding them tall grass. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have grass to eat in the pasture, but cows always seem to go to the farthest edge of their pen, stick their neck out, and get that “better” grass on the other side. We’d easily have a mob of cattle up at the red metal gate, hungrily pulling the grass from our hands as fast as we could pick it, doing all the weird things they do with their tongues and noses.

Bubblebutt was the easiest to pick out of the herd, for obvious reasons. He had a lump on his posterior. He was always front and center when we fed them grass, and so we fondly talked to Bubblebutt as he munched away on the grass. And then one day, he was gone. He did not come up to the gate with the rest. It was just a few days before our freezer was filled with white-wrapped packages of meat from the butcher in Munich.

“Where did Bubblebutt go?” I asked my sister in a panic, realizing that summer barbecue season wasn’t going to be as festive as it had in the past.

Bubblebutt was much smaller, crammed into that freezer, than I remembered him.

Perhaps my nephews are more aware of things than I was at their age. I named my 4-H sheep project “Friendly” and they named their beef projects things like “Sir Loin” and “Jerky” and “Roast” and “Supper.”

I think somewhere there is a line between knowing the source of your food, and being able to talk about your memories of it back before it was food. That is, the hamburger is less enjoyable if, between bites, you can reminisce about all the fun times you had with it when it mooed.

After blizzard Hannah; Highway 5 in Langdon.

In 1997, the Red River of the North flooded the Eastern part of the state, topping off Blizzard Hannah from just a few weeks earlier. Hannah snapped tens of thousands of power poles and buried entire houses, and then, when she melted away, decided to let the state sink beneath the water.

Spring flooding had already started before Hannah hit. After the blizzard, the water seemed to appear from nowhere everywhere.

It was than that I realized that when people snidely comment during a flood (in which the homes of the wealthy and not-so-wealthy are destroyed) that people shouldn’t be building on a flood plain, as if anyone deserves the pain and stress because they’re “rich”, they ought to remember that much of the entire state of North Dakota IS a flood plain. It seemed as if, in April of 1997, Lake Agassiz was trying for a comeback.

The weeks prior to Grand Forks going under had been filled with the three colleges in Fargo taking turns calling off classes so we students could help out. I was living in a basement apartment in Moorhead, my landlady already having capped off all sewer drains and leaving me to use the showers and restrooms in the art department. It was difficult to concentrate on things like art history or calculus when you knew there was a looming, murky catastrophe imminent. For several days, I headed over to the Fargo Civic Center to be bused to where they needed help with sandbags. It was the day that the dike broke near the Oak Grove school that stuck out in my  mind. The dike was so far above my head, and the huge amount of water terrified me. We had formed a sandbag line and things were moving so quickly. Water was bubbling up from the saturated ground and the people living in the houses were somewhere between numbly and methodically moving out the important things or panicking over those of us who stepped in flower beds. Suddenly, a rush of law enforcement and firetrucks came by, and I noticed water swirling around my tennis shoes. The dike was giving way, and we were told to get out. The next days were filled with traffic pouring out of Grand Forks to the west, since bridges east were under water. The local news crew got very little sleep, becoming an almost 24-hour station in which they provided emergency updates mixed in with the called-in information of people across the state who were willing to open up their homes to those quickly losing theirs in Grand Forks.

I went home that weekend, my goal being to get through I-29 before it was closed, as it was it quickly succumbing to the deluge. I found myself driving on a road I couldn’t see, gripping the steering wheel tightly as I followed the wake of the truck in front of me through water filled with ice chunks that floated up and banged against the door of my low convertible. I wondered if I should have attempted the drive; everyone else was in a truck. As I was driving north through Grand Forks, the radio station came alive with urgent warnings that the dikes were giving way and people needed to get out.

Dad managed to get a few flights up over Grand Forks before the airspace was restricted, which led to him getting an interview on a radio station regarding the attempts by the town of Drayton to build their dikes higher with wooden panels since the oncoming water was going to exceed the earthen berms and was going to exceed it quickly. He was asked what he thought, since he’d seen the amount of water headed north.

Growing up, we were in a drought; it was always dusty and my sister and I played softball in a dry slough bed. Then, in 1993, things turned into a wet cycle and Devils Lake started devouring farm land and people’s dreams and the Red River became a beast once a year, and it’s been nothing but water in this state ever since.

Every year, I dread spring. I hate the stress people have to go through because of the simple fact that the largest cities tend to be built on rivers, and the cities, of course, are where you find the people. I hate the feeling of being in an area affected by a flood, and the strange stress it puts on everyone, even those (like me, right now) who are in no danger of suffering property damage. The stress to help, the stress of knowing friends are stressed, and the knowledge that people right now are having water drip and leak and pour into their homes, taking away safety and instilling a loss of control and panic. The strange anger of going to help sandbag at the local zoo, for example, and seeing a huge gathering of people at a picnic shelter right next to it not lifting a finger. It’s completely displaced, but comes from a sense that when an oncoming and likely ongoing event is about to devastate and affect a large number of people, life shouldn’t go on as usual if there are ways to help.

Life should go on, but it shouldn’t.

As I drove out to Southport yesterday, to help a friend’s family sandbag, I was almost overcome by tears. The houses there are nicer than anything I’ll likely ever see in my entire life, but I don’t want people to lose their homes. I don’t want to lose my home, and I don’t wish it on anyone else. I saw people hurriedly throwing things into UHaul trucks, and the general chaos that comes from a mix of law enforcement, National Guard, construction equipment, and frantic sandbagging. I sat in a 3+ mile-long traffic jam on Burleigh Avenue since all roads had been blocked, leaving only one entrance for all traffic into the entire southeast part of the city. I saw the frustration on the faces of the people inching along with loads of sandbags that were needed hours ago. I saw, from the air today, how much water is coming our way from Montana and wondering how in the world this is going to go and what Bismarck will look like when it’s all said and done. This isn’t going to be some three-week spring flood, but a sustained flood of high and rushing water for an entire summer. It’s going to change and affect the entire community in some way.

I frequent the local web sites that contain updated flood information and maps, checking to see where my friend’s house is and really angry that I am to be in Portland next week when I would much rather be helping him sandbag his house.

I sit in my dry apartment knowing that I won’t really be affected all that much.

I hate floods. Water flows from high to low when it wants to, and despite what the ACoE says, or whoever is currently being blamed, we really never control it.

———————-

Links:

• Bismarck Tribune flood page
• ND DES flood page
• Flood 2011 Facebook Page
• #bisflood Twitter updates
• City of Bismarck web site
• Flood prep (sandbagging, drains) videos
• Flood 2011 photos (Bismarck Tribune)