Tonight I went out with Alex, three men, and two other teenage boys. We headed over to The Greens, which is a really nice golf-course community in the southwest part of town. I’d been in the neighborhood just to the south on Monday, and clearly these were some of the worst-hit homes in the flood. As we drove down the streets tonight, we saw piles of trashed furniture, carpet, drywall, and of course mud in every driveway and spilling out into the street. There were front-end loaders digging through the piles and dropping them into huge roll-off dumpsters. What a mess.
We hopped out of the van and started asking people if they needed help. To our dismay, we talked to three different groups who were cleaning out their garage or hosing down the driveway or whatever, and all of them said they didn’t need any help this evening. They’d been working on cleanup since early in the morning, and frankly they were just done (it was approaching 7pm). We were sort of bummed, because here we were, ready and willing to help, and it seemed like no one needed us!
Then we came across a couple of women cleaning out their garage. They said they were pretty much wrapping up for the night, but one of them yelled to her husband, who was just hauling a wheelbarrow full of mud from the basement. He dumped the mud in the street, looked at us, and said he appreciated the offer, but he was burned out. He yelled down into the basement to his buddy, who yelled back to say, “Seven guys? Are you kidding me? Let’s get back to work!”
So we did. We spent a couple of hours shoveling mud in the basement into five-gallon buckets, hauling the buckets up through the window well, and then dumping them in the street. After we’d cleared out a lot of the mud on the floor, we attacked the drywall. The water had reached within a few inches of the basement ceiling, so all of the walls were completely ruined. The sheet rock crumbled a bit, so we basically tore the walls down in pieces and then shoveled the pieces into buckets and out into the street.
At one point I was shoveling mud in a dark room (there wasn’t power in that part of the basement) and couldn’t even tell what was in it. There were toys and electronics and books and who-knows-what. I saw a few old LP’s, but they were coated in slimy dark goop and I couldn’t even tell what they were. The guy who owned the house was a bit of a film aficionado and had some old 8mm reels as well as a reel-to-reel projector that must have been fifty years old. It was, of course, ruined. He was sad about it because it had belonged to his father. But he put on a brave face and said that maybe he could clean it up eventually and get it working again. If not, he said, he’d put it on a shelf as a decoration.
The boys were real troopers, hauling all of that mud, and when we finished the family was laughing and shaking our hands and basically in complete disbelief that we’d just been walking around the neighborhood offering to help complete strangers. They took our picture and told us over and over how grateful they were and how awesome we were. It was really cool.
Back home, I asked Laralee to take our picture. It’s hard to tell, but that mud on my jeans and Alex’s shorts is probably a quarter-inch thick. I think our clothes weighed ten pounds more than usual. And I don’t even want to talk about my boots.
