The Flood of 1997

The Flood of 1997

(A 13-year old boy’s perspective)

The spring of 1997 was a terrible one. I remember it started out with my mom, dad, and I coming back from a basketball tournament in Devils Lake and on our way home we happened to run into a heard of Holstein cows. That’s right, a heard. The cows were all very dark and it was one of those nights where there was absolutely no moon, one of the darkest nights that I remember. We went into a dip in the road and when we came out on the other side all we saw was the reflection of the eyes of a million hamburgers. Somehow my dad managed to miss most of the heard but we did clip two or three of the cows with one of them flipping around the side of the car and crapping on the window on my side of the car. All I could think of was that if that window had busted in the ordeal this trip could have been a whole lot shittier…

So that was the beginning of the Spring of ’97 for me, almost got crapped on by a heard of cows and totaled out our car, things weren’t looking so great.

Besides this there was a growing fear that all of Minnesota and North Dakota was going to flood, in Minnesota we’re survivors but we were obviously worried about everything we would lose in North Dakota…this was before the oil was really discovered otherwise it might have been more of a national concern.

The day after my near poop experience there was a pretty terrible ice storm that knocked out most of the power in our area and kept it down for several days, which made the flood fighting all that much more difficult. Once the power was back and we were able to get back to junior high…and life for most other people, they really kicked up the efforts by giving us the option to go down and put together sand bags for building dikes in Grand Forks and the surrounding area. Now I’m really into volunteer work now, but at the time I’ll admit that the only thing that I was thinking was that it meant getting out of school. I live at one of the highest points of Red Lake Falls, I’m not really worried about the river getting to me, I’m more worried that I may fall into the river!

So you know just how smart I was signing up to do a bunch of manual labor rather than practicing my keyboarding skills in school…thankfully I’ve gotten smarter over the years, it did only take me about ten years to finish my bachelor’s degree…

After a few weeks of loading up these sand bags and sending them to the needed areas we all got pretty good at it but unfortunately we started hearing phrases like “100 Year Flood,” which of course being as smart as I was, I started constructing an Arc and gathered pairs of animals. But even at 13 years old we began to realize just how devastating this flood could become. Grand Forks was in serious trouble and despite all of the help it was getting from the area, the thought was that it just wasn’t going to be enough.

My sister was attending UND at that time but classes had been put on hold so that the students could help sand bag to help save their city and very possibly their University. As it became more and more evident that the effort simply wasn’t going to be enough, the residents of Grand Forks were evacuated. They were told to leave their possessions behind and just get out of the city. My sister, much like myself, was a bit of a procrastinator at the time and probably took off much later than she should have. On her journey from Grand Forks to Red Lake Falls she was detoured several times because of flooded roads and eventually took her car through about four feet of water to get home. Now mind you, she is probably the smartest of this Brumwell clan…

By the time she arrived home I had gone to sleep, I was tired from all of the keyboarding practice I had resumed after they found out my notes to go sandbagging had been forged…but I awoke the next morning to one of the greatest sights a 13-year-old boy may ever experience, a living room filled with beautiful co-eds!

As our place was the closest place for Steph and her friends to escape to they decided that they would all come here until they were able to get back to their families once the water subsided. I truly thought I had died and gone to heaven…just a few short weeks prior to this a cow had almost crapped on my head, now all of a sudden I felt like Hugh Hefner! I took immediate action, waking up Ryan and heading straight to the kitchen. I had met all of these girls before but I hadn’t had the opportunity to truly impress them, so by the time they woke up Ryan and I had prepared their breakfast and were dawning our Sunday best…but alas, I was 13 and wouldn’t have known what to do with any of them if given the opportunity, not like today’s generation.

Oh, I almost forgot about the flood! Downtown Grand Forks was all but destroyed, after the dikes broke and all of downtown was flooded, the buildings downtown somehow started on fire as well. The local paper had pictures of houses and decks floating down the river almost daily. Whole sections of the city were completely wiped out and many, many people lost their homes and really, their identity.

But from the ashes of devastation an almost new city was reborn. The old downtown has mostly been rebuilt, and in many ways is much nicer now than it had once been. Larger dikes and flood walls were constructed to help protect the city and where once stood an older neighborhood there is now a beautiful city park that helps house many travelers that come to Grand Forks for the shopping and many other area attractions.

It has now been 15 years since this terrible disaster, and I was recently reminded by a posting on Facebook by one of those same lovely ladies that was once a guest in our basement. Many people remember the events differently and this account probably isn’t accurate at all, I was 13 after all, but I guess the point is that although it seemed like a real shitty situation to most, to one 13 year old boy, it resulted in one of the best weeks of his life. It goes to show you, when God (or a cow) shits on your window, sometimes he opens a door (that leads to a basement filled with beautiful co-eds)…or something like that.