I'm Armed With Some Half-Hearted Threats

Tuesday was one of THOSE parenting days. Actually, Monday was one as well, leaving me feeling a bit testy.

It all culminated in me telling the girls that I was this close to getting in the car and driving to Alabama.

This close!

Of course, when I say things like this, I mean it in the sitcommy way of Peg Bundy or Estelle Costanza. My eyes get big and my arms flail and my facial expression is 100% ridiculous and it's a little bit of comic relief.

"If you kids don't knock it off, Mommy's gonna take a hot air balloon to Alaska and live with the grizzlies like that Treadwell guy that gotten eaten a few years back."

(Honestly though, I'd rather not end up ground beef in the scat of an animal nicknamed Mr. Chocolate.)

"I've had enough! One more peep and I'm jetting down to Florida to find CSI Eric Delko. I don't care if his hours are unpredictable!"

(This is how he looks when he misses me. Very wistful...)

"The next person that screams will be responsible for me actually traveling to Crawford, Texas to help former President Bush clear brush."

(Because sometimes a day with The Decider seems more palatable than parenting.)

"Since no one is listening to me, I may as well just head out to the Redwood Forests. And no one will be able to drag me back..."

(...because I will be chained. "No, officer, I am not heading back to the Mid-Atlantic! I don't care if it's snack time!")

But they never get it. Just frowns and watery eyes and then suddenly I feel like an asshole. All they hear is Mommy Go Bye-Bye.

The schtick never works like it does on TV.

How About Some History?

My entire experience with the aftermath of Mother Nature's wrath is wrapped up in the minor inconveniences of lost power and downed limbs.

I have no tales to tell of being on a sailboat in the midst of a major storm, nor fleeing an F4 making mincemeat of farms and trailer, nor being tossed helplessly by the shifting of the Earth's plates, nor watching flood waters rise around me.

This is the way I prefer it, from my relative safe perch in the Mid-Atlantic, where our last major event was a hurricane that made its way up from the Carolinas not long after Hannah's birth. Those winds, approaching 60mph, were terrifying. It is beyond my comprehension to fathom anything more powerful and actually being around after its departure.

That being said, I love me a good nature disaster story. That sentence sounds awful, as if I am blind to and callously indifferent to the destruction and death wrought by sky, wind, rain and mud. Not true. I am as horrified as anyone when a giant tornado winds its way through a Kansas town, leveling humans and houses alike. I could not stop watching and reading items on the tsunami in December of 2004. That water could erase the lives and livelihoods of that many people was too much to handle. Ditto on Katrina.

Mother Nature is one tough cookie -- kind and generous and beautiful one moment, and merciless the next -- and that is compelling.

Dave and I just got back from what I like to refer to as our Death and Destruction Tour of Western PA. (Alright, we just got back more than a week ago, but medical woes and writer's block have prevented me from doing anything with this experience.)

We visited the Flight 93 Memorial, and also Fort Ligonier, which featured actual soldier's uniforms with cannon shrapnel holes.

The highlight of our trip was Fallingwater -- Frank Lloyd Wright's masterpiece of a vacation home built for Edgar Kaufmann, Sr., the Kaufmann department store magnate, back in the 30s. And I'd show you pictures, but I can't, without the express permission of the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy, so you'll just have to trust me when I say it was truly spectacular.

But while we were in the vicinity, I wanted to do some touring of Johnstown, PA.

Johnstown, if you're not familiar, is famous for pretty much one reason and one reason only.

On May 31, 1889, the town and its denizens were completely obliterated when the South Fork dam failed following a record rainfall.

Oh, Mother Nature. Seriously.

But it wasn't just Mother Nature, which makes the story of Johnstown so much more compelling. It was about man, too. And class. And negligence. And odds.

Because at the time of the flood, the dam belonged to a group of some of the country's wealthiest Americans (Andrew Carnegie and Andrew Mellon, for example).

(These guys fancied themselves some time away from the Pittsburgh riff-raff and pollution.)

The reservoir contained within the dam was originally created to provide water to the Pennsylvania canal, but when the canal system became obsolete, the water passed through several hands, before being purchased by this fabulously wealthy group of men who renamed the reservoir Lake Conemaugh, and proceeded to create what was called the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club surrounding it. This club was a means for some of Pittsburgh's wealthiest to get away from the noise and pollution of the city and get to somewhere private and peaceful. And you had to be asked to join. You couldn't just sign your own ass up.

(The actual South Fork Fishing & Hunting Club building. The inside is in shambles, but is in the midst of historic renovation. Across from the porch would have been Lake Conemaugh, but is now homes and roads.)

The dam, which contained approximately 20 million gallons of water, had been in disrepair for a long time. The members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club did some basic maintenance on the dam, but not enough to make it secure. They trimmed a good 4 feet off the top of it to make a wider base for their carriages to pass, covered the dam's spillway to keep their game fish in and neglected to replace the dam's drainage pipes, which had been pilfered and sold for scrap.

In the meantime, they had cabins built for themselves, had servants on staff, and generally had some lovely times around the lake.

Fast forward 10 years. Massive rains for days on end put Lake Conemaugh close to its breaking point. A heavy, ominous, saturating rain that already had water practically flowing through the streets of Johnstown, which was about 14 miles below the strained dam.

On the day the dam gave way, a man named Elias Unger led a group of men to try to hold the dam, patching with futility until finally, it let go. The story goes that Elias, knowing the number of people that lived in the path of this monstrous wall of water, went back to his house and collapsed. The dam itself gave way at about 3:10pm.

(Elias Unger's house. The water would have filled the valley below.)

It took the water almost an hour to reach Johnstown, and in the meantime, destroyed the towns of Mineral Point and Woodvale.

I read David Halberstam's book about the Johnstown Flood a few years ago, and I'll leave it to him to actually describe the scene:

The height of the wall was at least 35 feet at the center, though eyewitness descriptions suggest that the mass was perhaps ten feet higher than off to the sides where the water was spreading out as the valley expanded to a width of nearly half a mile. It was also noted by dozens of people that the wave appeared to be preceded by a wind which blew down small buildings and set trees to slapping about in the split seconds before the water actually struck them...Because of the speed it had been building as it plunged through Woodvale, the water struck Johsntown harder than anything it had encountered in its fourteen-mile course from the dam...The drowning and devastation of the city took just 10 minutes.

So the wave decimates the town, stripping trees, building, barbed wire from factories, industrial parts from the Iron Works, houses, people, animals...all get swept up in this massive surge of water. At the edge of town is a huge stone bridge, and all the debris gets jammed there. The bridge, for whatever reason, actually holds.

At the Flood Museum, they had this map with a timeline and a miniature flood trail stuck within a plexiglass box, with plaques on the outside describing the scene. I don't know why I took a picture of some of the scene descriptions, because really, what is the point, but here is one worth posting, because when you think of the horror of that day, and thinking that good God in Heaven how could it possibly get worse? It does.

Yes, presuming you are still reading this lengthy post, this is correct. Here is Halberstam again:

Now boxcars, factory roofs, trees, telegraph poles, hideous masses of barbed wire, hundreds of houses, many squashed beyond recognition, others still astonishingly intact, dead horses and cows, and hundreds of human beings, dead and alive, were driven against the bridge until a small mountain had formed, higher than the bridge itself and nearly watertight...

And then, for whatever reason, all of that jammed debris caught fire.

Jesus.

In the end, more than 2,000 people were killed that day. Many survivors ended up blaming the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club for not doing more to ensure the dam's safety. Some tried, unsuccessfully, to bring suit against the club. Editorials of the day skewered the clubs members as out of touch elitists and some actually depicted the members as guilty of murder, and indeed, after the flood, most of the members went quietly away as if guilty. A few were involved in the massive relief efforts, but most were not.

(What is left of the dam. It's hard to get a good idea of the scope of water that would have been contained within this, due to the angle.)

Clara Barton and a few other workers from the Red Cross arrived days after the flood and stayed until sometime in October, providing much needed leadership and disaster relief. Go Clara!

I just find the entire story so interesting, as it's a good primer on both negligence and the relentless nature of water. What was once a wealthy man's retreat became hell on earth for those in the path of Lake Conemaugh, released.

(Halberstam's book is fantastic, as it actually contains eyewitness accounts. Kathleen Cambor wrote a work of fiction about Johnstown and the flood that included some of the South Fork Fishing & Hunting Club members, and it was fascinating as well.)

Two-by-Four

(Dear Cate, don't read this, thank you)

After Lillian's 8lb., 5oz. body was pulled from a 5-inch incision in my abdomen, the doctor examining me in recovery decided that she didn't like the amount of blood coming from my nether regions.

In fact, she stood between my leaden legs, and said, and I quote, "What is that?", with this crazy, scrunched up eyebrow look suggesting a head-scratching mystery.

I was feeling like a person who had just been operated on (i.e. like a pile of shit set aflame), otherwise I might have been able to come up with any number of comments in response.

"I'm sorry, doc. Have you ever tried to wax around a beach ball?"

"Didn't you learn about vaginas in med school?"

"I call it my pink taco!"

"Careful, it's got teeth!"

The she pulled something from it and immediately decided that I was a suspicious person and required a bit of torture to get me to divulge whatever prized information I had stewing about in my brain. Faster than I could say What the Fuck, I had several pairs of hands treating my belly as if it were some freshly risen dough in need of a serious beatdown.

And if I'd had any secrets, I would have lasted just about as long as Mancow did being waterboarded.



It wasn't a life and death situation. There was no talk of a trip back to the OR. I just had some excess bleeding and it needed to be stopped.

And they did it by treating my abdomen like a Tae-Bo accessory.

Whatever pain medication that allowed them to successfully separate my flesh and extract my child had most definitely worn off, and it felt just like you'd imagine aggressive palpitations on a just operated upon body to feel like (shit, set aflame, again).

It was the most ghastly pain I'd ever experienced. I would take a full 27 hours of my firstborn's labor before I'd go through that single minute again.

After I had time to fully process the medical staff's smackdown -- with a delightfully cherubic baby sucking away happily at my soon-to-be-ravaged nipple -- I was rather irritated with David for what I perceived as not coming to my aid.

I had indignantly decided that he should have reacted to my loud cries of pain by, at the very least, asking "What the fuck are you doing to my wife, motherfuckers?"

When I actually brought this up, like (no kidding) two and a half years later, he defensively explained that it was all he could to stay conscious. Too much thought and he would have hit the floor.

I should have realized this ahead of time, knowing full well about his difficulty merely having a vial of blood taken, but goodness that pain wiped clean any amount of sympathy I had for squeamishness. I was just so traumatized by the horrific sensation of multiple women punching my just-pieced-pack-together stomach. (Am I successfully imparting how painful this was?)

During childbirth class, Dave almost passed out several times. The most dramatic was when my midwife brought out what can only be described as a relief map of the dilating cervix. I remember him turning to me and kind of squishing up his face, as if willing the vision of gaping cervices from his head, in an attempt to stay upright and conscious. God, I love him.

And it was pretty impossible to look at, even for me. I can watch a surgery on TV with no problem, but the representation of how my lady bits are supposed to look in order for a baby to emerge was just grotesque. 10 looked impossible. (Mine stopped at a ladylike 4, simply refusing to go no further.)

Also a problem was the discussion of vaginal tearing, and really, who can fault him for that. I just kind of la-la-laed through that part, trying to conduct a magical thinking experiment in which my vagina escaped unscathed from the peril of an emerging baby head. La la la la I can't hear you. My vagina is totally gonna be fine, la la la.

Sometimes I have trouble believing that all this happened to me. That I survived these two gigantic events and walked away with two gorgeous babies. But contrary to popular mother-speak, I never forgot the pain. I don't think I ever could. If one was given an ice cream cone after being smacked in the gourd with a two-by-four, one might be excited to have the cone by probably won't forget that their head hurt. Ya know? I know, this example doesn't exactly fit here, so sue me.

(I have no idea why I'm thinking about this, but I am. Now the kids are back from Home Depot with their father, who apparently also stopped at the beer store. So the weekend begins. Happy 4th everyone!)