The Cloying Silence of Powerlessness

The news helicopter hung overhead, staring – suspended; paralyzed in mid-air as though hypnotized by the inundation. The major thoroughfare below, threatened and narrowed for days, was finally overtaken. The river had steadily risen and swelled over the past week, creeping inexorably up to and then over its banks, spilling first over the walking path before climbing, Sunday evening, up the rise and over the street. The barricades were assembled, detours directed, and police officers positioned. The water level at the reservoir north of town continues to rise. The rivers into town continue to bloat. The currents, gathering momentum like an urban mob, rage and rip and smother and uproot. Bridges downtown have been closed, and a kind of frenetic stillness settles upon the city, as though we are holding our breath. And overhead, the helicopter – mirroring the rest of us – simply hangs there; staring; filming perhaps, for there is little else to do.

There is a sense of powerlessness that meets the rising river levels. Sure, there are sandbags to fill and lug and stack in prayerfully strategic locations; there are jugs of water to stockpile and pantry staples to gather…just in case. There are basement boxes to elevate and alternate routes to anticipate. But while they are important precautions, they are finally impotent gestures designed to cope. They will not, we know, influence the outcome. The water rises, just as the wind blows, as it wills.

Though we have endured flooding before, we will never get used to its humbling force. Perhaps we are genetically incapable of psychologically accommodating impotence. We are wired to imagine and invent and engineer our way into control, and then lull ourselves into believing we have accomplished it.

Perhaps that is why we now find ourselves simply hovering overhead – staring; mutely and tragically awed by the raging and irrefutable demonstration of the fact that we haven’t. I suspect we will never make peace with our own vulnerability, or our inability to finally and successfully engineer our way out of it.

Mortality, all the sandbags in the world notwithstanding, can be the pits.

The water levels are still rising, it’s raining again, and who knows when the roads may reopen – or what, when they do, what we will drive along them to find.