My Family and the Flood

My wife had been pushing me to try for kids for, well, a couple of years, and I was finally getting there. I always knew I wanted kids, or figured I did, but then reality comes: can we afford it, shouldn't we enjoy what we have a little bit longer, are we sure we want to do this, etc.

Then, my friend messaged me one night and asked me to join him at the children's hospital to take a few photos as they were saying "goodbye." His 18 month old had been fighting cancer, and it was 1 in the morning and my melatonin-addled brain thought "oh, they must be taking him home."

It wasn't until I walked into the room with my DSLR that I realized what he meant. In fairness, he had prefaced the request with, "do you mind if I ruin your night?"

I am not even close to a professional photographer. But I tried to take as many pictures as respectfully as I could of the literal hardest moment any parents could ever hope not to have to go through. At a certain moment, it became time, and I found myself... stuck, in a sense. I was the only other one in the room aside from the parents, but I didn't feel like I could abandon them, and so I sat there as they disconnected the machines keeping their son alive. It was the most awful two minutes as the attending sat there with a stethoscope against this tiny chest.

I waited until an opportune moment, and then hugged them, quietly took my leave, went home, edited the photos as quickly as possible, uploaded and sent them, and then bawled for an hour or so.

Needless to say, this set back our efforts at even _trying_ for kids by about 2-3 years. Because I just was stuck by this all-encompassing thought: you can't lose what you don't have. You simply aren't open to that sort of vulnerability if you don't have children. It doesn't exist, until you form it into being. And that thought haunted me. Just like it haunts, well, every parent on some level.

And to clarify: this didn't even _happen to me_. It happened to _them_, and their son. But it was a defining moment for me that made it really tough to overcome.

Eventually, we did have two kids (after a miscarriage, of course, because isn't that how it goes), and they're sitting behind me watching a movie as I type this. But these sort of thoughts are always there in the background. And yeah, reading a story like this one about the flood just spears you in the soul.

The story was powerfully honest, but I think it also concludes that love is as powerful as death. Death will come for all of us, and instead of trying to fight against it, it might make sense to try and understand what it is, and what it also brings. If we fear death so much, it is often because that fear has stopped us from truly living while we are still alive.

A wonderful novella in this context. Hard science fiction in one respect, with correct physics, but also literature in my opinion: https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/Reading/Ch...

It's also harder to protect them as well as yourself, adding to that sense of vulnerability.

This was possibly the saddest piece I’ve ever read based on how it was written

Like the little boy with his skin melted off walking down the road crying for his mother… horrendous stuff.

At a (central Texas) city council hearing today on granting someone a variance to build tennis courts on a meadow next to a creek, a longtime resident said, “I think I’ve lived through five 500-year floods here.”

There are over 2000 watersheds in the US. It would be unusual if we didn’t see around 20 100-year floods every year.

I'm living next to a river and it's been fine for decades - largely because this area is full of rivers so any flooding is just spread thin. I feel this is mostly a drainage problem of areas where all water is channeled into a narrow area by the surrounding geography? "Narrow" being a relative term here of course, considering geological scale.

I live in an old watermill. We’ve had a “run for your life” flood. Fortunately, I was well aware of the risks when we moved here, and always keep an eye on the weather in winter.

We had about 10cm of rain fall on already saturated soils upstream of us, and as darkness fell that evening I could see the river rise… and rise… and rise - and in the nick of time came to the realisation that we had to evacuate, NOW. Our car had already washed away, so we ended up bushwhacking a few km out in the driving rain, two very pissed off cats stuffed into our go-bags. Turns out the car being gone was no great impediment as the road was gone, too, utterly washed out.

Came back to an almighty mess - flood was a 10,000 year one, the house was buried in gigantic flotsam, entire trees that had been uprooted, and tumbled down the river in an enormous jam, inches of mud coating every surface. The chimney had washed away.

The mill itself was fine. Three meter thick stone walls, for a reason, it turns out.

We still live here. The year after the flood we had a small earthquake, enough to send boulders crashing down into the valley - and the year after that a wildfire, which reduced much of the valley to a moonscape. That time, we fled with a toddler in tow, as well as the cats.

Perhaps one day this place will be the end of us - but the 99.9% of the time it isn’t trying to kill us, it couldn’t be better.

We now at least have huge water tanks and a deluge system for the fire risk, and a cabin 30 meters above the river for us to decamp to in the winter when the flood risk grows - and a new roof with a steel substructure to catch any errant bits of mountain that decide to visit.

Directly from their website: https://www.fema.gov/flood-insurance. This encourages everyone to build in places that shouldn't be built in the first place.

"Floods can happen anywhere — just one inch of floodwater can cause up to thousands of dollars' worth of damage. Most homeowners insurance does not cover flood damage. Flood insurance is a separate policy that can cover buildings, the contents in a building, or both, so it is important to protect your most important assets — your home, your business, your possessions.

The NFIP provides flood insurance to property owners, renters and businesses, and having this coverage helps them recover faster when floodwaters recede. The NFIP works with communities required to adopt and enforce floodplain management regulations that help mitigate flooding effects.

Flood insurance is available to anyone living in one of the 22,600 participating NFIP communities. Homes and businesses in high-risk flood areas with mortgages from government-backed lenders are required to have flood insurance."

Resilience and foolishness are very close together. I can't imagine living in a place where you have to rebuild every X years when you can just move somewhere else. The people are just used to it.

This will get worse and at some point you have to ask if the areas are actually habitable or if it's just a colossal waste of resources to live there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Flood_Insurance_Progr...

As of August 2017, the program insured about 5 million homes (down from about 5.5 million homes in April 2010), the majority of which are in Texas and Florida.[4][5] The cost of the insurance program was fully covered by its premiums until the end of 2004, but it has had to steadily borrow funds since, primarily due to Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Sandy, accumulating $25 billion of debt by August 2017.[4][6] In October 2017, Congress cancelled $16 billion of NFIP debt, making it possible for the program to pay claims. The NFIP owes $20.525 billion to the U.S. as of December 2020.

Japan is similar in terms of moving on from environmental catastrophes. Due to it's geographic location, the number and severity of earthquakes and tsunamis not to mention the regular stuff like wildfires, flooding etc. there's just a lot of devastation and loss. Japan does memorialize the larger events of course and there's public memorials at annual schedules, etc.

I'm not sure that a country being "resilient" in that manner is a good thing. It's callous towards the individuals involved, who may not be as quick to move on, emotionally or otherwise. And moving on quickly doesn't exactly encourage learning from tragedy, which really is its only upside.