(Attributed to David, after escaping the anger of King Saul, who sought his life)
He sent from on high, He took me;
He drew me out of many waters.
He delivered me from my strong enemy,
And from those who hated me, for they were too mighty for me.
They confronted me in the day of my calamity,
But the Lord was my stay.
He brought me forth also into a broad place;
He rescued me, because He delighted in me.
As a child, I remember reading Madeleine L'Engle's sci-fi novel, Many Waters, and facing the impending flood in a desert-scape with Noah and his family as a great adventure. Shortly after the birth of our second daughter, I ventured out for an afternoon with a friend to see Darren Aronofsky's epic Noah in the theater, and the pathos was overwhelming. Of course I wept. What had changed? Marriage and motherhood change everything. While I have always fallen in love with the settings and characters of a great story - the myth of the Great Flood is no exception - I am far more susceptible to heartbreak over lost beauty and innocence now that I am jointly responsible for two small lives. All great myths require us to ask, "Is any of this is true?" and then, "In what sense is it true?" Of course, C.S. Lewis reminds us that we must pay close attention "when myth becomes fact", because something supernatural and deeply real is occurring. When flood waters came near us last spring, Truth was inescapable: I owe more thanks for life on a daily basis than I am accustomed to giving.
First, there is something to be said for living in an ark. It reminds that we all are vulnerable sojourners on earth, when we fancy ourselves self-made masters of our own households. Ha, the wind and the rain remind us, and we can only reply hey, ho as the Bard intended, for the rain, it raineth every day, without a nod toward our plans. We considered moving into a houseboat once, but not for long, since we dreaded the idea of scraping the hull in wetsuits. After years of scheming, we settled for a tiny house on wheels. That is a story for another post, but suffice it to say that some of our mantras came from a semi-humorous "conviction" that we should plan for the zombie apocalypse, nourished by musical, waking dreams:
Our love will sail / in this ark / the world could end outside our window / we'll find forever / and write our name in fire on each other's hearts
(Janelle Monae, "Say You'll Go")
I wanna wake up with the rain / falling on a tin roof / while I'm safe there in your arms / so all I ask is for you / to come away with me...
(Nora Jones, "Come Away With Me")
What did we want to leave behind? Suburbia: a place that had been good to us, but that suddenly felt cold and constraining. The romance of the open road, the hope of more time in the great outdoors, made possible by less time cleaning and maintaining square footage, keeping a yard, and amassing stuff. We traded traditional homeowner concerns for new ones, and a rising river was among them. We live in a community that stays informed, where neighbors look out for one another, and emergency evacuations are rehearsed and enacted with good result. When the river crosses the 100-year flood plain twice in a decade, we don't leave these things to chance. Our veterans predicted that we'd have six hours' warning to leave our site for higher ground. The warning came as we left Good Friday services downtown at 7:30pm, and the river crossed our road, cutting off access to our site at 2:30am the next morning. We were safely out of the area, staying the night in a church parking lot until adventuresome, hospitable, church friends could lead us to their acreage in the morning. From the time we arrived at our home to evacuate until it was hitched up and road-ready, 55 minutes were filled with packing, disconnecting, and "battening down the hatches," as my submariner father would say. Years in the Army also had taught our family how to be mobile and even expeditionary, for which we are grateful.
We had seen articles of tiny houses evading hurricanes, and as we watched the water snake its way into site-built homes and churches overnight, we were beginning to understand both the risks and the rewards of waterfront locations, as well as houses built to move. Nevermind that some may regard us as vagrants, even reckless parents placing our children at the mercy of the elements. Percieved trauma becomes traumatic, somehow. If I felt guilt that we were sleeping in a parking lot, potentially inconveniencing our friends like a couple of college kids bounding into town to "crash for a few weeks," I also felt eddies of exhilaration and deep, swift gratitude coursing through me. We closed the curtains, taking turns to keep watch that the bridge would remain passable through the night. We were home, and though they had fussed as if we'd squeezed in a grocery store trip an hour before bedtime, our children now slept serenely.
In the morning, our cheery hosts guided us to a neighboring plot of land lent by a brother-in-arms and his family. We stayed until the water receded permanently, and the swollen waterways heaved out their flotsam. This had to be retrieved, extracted, and sometimes disposed of, as communities restored their patchwork lives. In a the purple glow of symphonic evenings cued by fireflies, we enjoyed proximity to friends, sharing meals, laundry cycles, and jokes about hauling blackwater to the sceptic port. We made ourselves less burdensome in small ways, gave tiny house tours, and tried to be charming. If nothing else, we banished boredom and solitude just long enough for our retired friends to miss these luxuries. After two weeks (our 40 days and 40 nights) we rejoined our usual neighbors, many of whom had enjoyed two weeks of collaborative feasting and fellowship. They ribbed us for being absent, for not being eyewitnesses to their feats of solidarity: they had pooled the available power, water, and daily donations from surrounding farmers on higher ground, giving new meaning to the Psalmist's "you prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies."
A word about those enemies: in a tiny house, these are most certainly complacency and fear, which work in tandem to make the whole endeavor seem a joke with no punch line. I cannot count the times folk have beheld us and betrayed on their faces that they think they are seeing a modern version of Dorothea Lange's migrant workers in living color. I also live in certainty that they will be right about us - that it will be a tragedy - if we neglect that tire pressure, those bearings, those axles, that coat of weatherproof oil the siding has wanted all year and the heat tape to winterize the plumbing. They will be right about us, and we adults will be the villains, playing "kids" with our irresponsible wanderlust.
I am learning to hold these suspicions with an open hand, because they belie a truth that we all prefer to ignore: tragedy strikes where it will. If the villain is the enemy of merriment (taking himself too seriously at the cost of life, love, and beauty) then we are all the villain when we pursue security at the cost of community, justice, and that seventh-day rest that is always engulfed by more work. If the tragic hero is blinded by hubris, then our proper sense of pride has overflowed the bounds of a proper ambition, until it becomes our ill-fated quest for an inflated American Dream, and our fatal flaw "the love of money." Living through the housing crisis and Great Recession, we sort through the mixed bag of suburbia, and our illusions are exposed. We are not alone; more people can benefit from the dose of gratitude gained by subverting suburbian norms, even in subtle ways. When neighbors share tools instead of owning one of everything, tend community gardens, and mentor young ones outside their insular families, they humanize these risks and rewards. They remember what we'd all like to forget. No one has truly earned all of the advantages or disadvantages she experiences. No way of life is immune to what insurance companies call "acts of God." Everyone is accountable for how we weigh the risks and rewards of being alive and in relationship, investing our time, our treasure and our energies. This is reassuring when we question ourselves about living in a tiny house "down by the river." We cultivate our sense of humor about our situation, because it keeps us human, and helps us avoid taking ourselves more seriously than we ought.
What the waters left behind in our neighborhood was telling. The nearby fields lost their fresh fertilizer, setting farmers back weeks and months. How food grows is a mystery worth giving thanks for. Tree trunks, picnic tables, and propane tanks bobbed in the wake of the flood until they (mostly) came to rest where people read their labels and tried to return, repurpose or discard them. Nothing is truly wasted - not even the deep sense of loss and regret in passing a soggy mattress piled into a dumpster. FEMA came to condemn and pronounce fit for living the left trailers of those who opted to stay in the flood zone. Some lost their weekend retreat, but neighbors and landlords made sure that no one was left homeless.
Home is both strange and familiar. It defies the words we use to wall it in, escaping out into the woods and curling up under a tree or stretching out on a grassy knoll. It beckons us like the gathered-round firelight, the worn rug where we cast off shoes and cares, and the old armchair that needed to be reupholstered a decade ago. When home is on wheels, its worth is measured not in mortgage payments or resale value, but in the cherubic, sleeping faces of its smallest inhabitants. When the river steals out of bed to lap hungrily at shorelines, we keep watch, warmed by the sleepers' calm in the storm. And, we remember that there will be a luminous bow of color at the end of many waters.
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