The deluge and after
This spring, I was new to the Midwest—and the cataclysm of a biblical flood was not on my agenda.
Natural disasters, like people, are decidedly particular. A person’s distress tolerance will frequently reveal their regional origins. As someone who’s spent most of his life in California and Colorado, I am prone to downplaying concern to people who are less familiar with earthquakes, fires, and mudslides. However, as a recent transplant to a Minnesota river valley, I am a foreigner when it comes to the power of floodwaters. My anxiety went off the charts when the historic Rapidan Dam threatened imminent, critical failure a week into my pastoral call with a new church.
Flooding is common in Minnesota’s river valleys, typically resulting from snowmelt compounding through the various tributaries to the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers. But last winter was a “lost winter” for Minnesota: the effects of climate change left the state bereft of snowbanks and ice-covered lakes. The lost winter itself was the culmination of several years of sustained drought, so locals feared yet another dry spring would follow.
Instead the Great Plains region experienced its heaviest rainfall since 1908. It was not snowmelt but saturated water tables that filled our news broadcasts and social media feeds with images of flooded towns and fields throughout the Dakotas, Iowa, and Minnesota. Mankato, the town I now call home, had 14.7 inches of rain in the month of June, more than triple the average. Calling it a rainy month would be a lesson in understatement.
