Just before I boarded my flight back home from another
successful climb up Kilimanjaro, I got a texted photo from my wife Merry Beth of our
son Jace stomping around in what looked like a few inches of standing water in
our driveway.
“Been raining for 3 days now. Our grass is loving it and so
is Jace. Safe travels honey.” Merry Beth had no idea the impact this deluge of
water from the sky would have on our home and our state of Colorado. No one
did.
My 14th Kilimanjaro expedition was just a
pleasure as I guided up a wonderful group of women, most of which were from New
Jersey. They all performed well and in
spite of my mild reservations on spending 2 weeks with a group of “Yankee
gals”, they blew me away with their kindness, humor and fortitude. I was
honored to stand on top of Africa with all 12 of them after a long hard summit
night. I would return home with a smile on my face and sense of satisfaction
assisting these good people in achieving a life long goal.
Then the real climb began….
I awoke Thursday morning in Miami where I was scheduled to
deliver a keynote speech to a group of financial advisors the next day. My
first night in a comfy bed in 2 weeks provided me the kind of early morning
where I continuously kept rolling over and finding deep sleep…over and over
again. Until my phone rang and I saw that my wife was calling. Wait, it’s 6am
there…an unusually early hour for my morning allergic wife.
“Honey, we’ve got 2 feet of water in our downstairs and it’s
rising fast.”
“Not sure I heard you right…. Did you say 2ft of standing
water inside our house?”
“Yes. And it’s raining hard. And I’m scared.”
Helplessness. That was my initial emotion. Then fear and
concern. Then… it was time to problem solve and assure MB that we would figure
this out.
Before I could even send out the help signal flare, my phone
began blowing up with texts and calls from my friends that were headed over to
help MB with the house. Friends who knew
I was thousands of miles away and unable to take care of my family. The cavalry
was on its way.
I heard multiple times from dozens of people…
“We’ve got this.”
“What can I do to help?”
“Tell me what you need.”
“I’m on the way over to your house.”
As the morning unfolded I began receiving photos of a dozen
of our friends hauling furniture to higher ground, crawling around in the muck to
access soggy boxes filled with random keepsakes and artifacts as well as making
calls to our extended network to get the mitigation of water underway quickly.
Throughout the day I continued to hear stories of neighbors
installing sump pumps in my house to relieve the volume of water even though
their own homes were still filling. Tales of friends taking 90 minutes to drive
across town to our house in the middle of the night to deliver pumps and hoses…
trying to find roads that weren’t washed away.
I received photo after photo of random shit from my hippy days being
saved by the salvage team. I found it so poetically beautiful that many of my
old “hippy friends” were finding my old hippy flotsam and jetsam saturated in
the crawl space. They put their energy and love into ensuring that hundreds of
old Grateful Dead ticket stubs and photos from days gone past were given a
chance to dry out and perhaps be saved. The true find of the day was perhaps
the most beautifully absurd… my friend Avery comes upon a ziplock bag
containing a 2 ft ponytail that, perhaps in an effort to never let go of the
long haired hippy that I was in my 20s, I still kept in a box, deep in the
crawl space. And now…I get to keep it for another 20 years, thanks to Avery.
I returned home the next night to a house in shambles and a
wife that had been strong until she saw me and finally let out all of the
tension… sobbing on my shoulder. She had
been so strong the past 48 hours…not sleeping, vigilantly monitoring the house
and showing our 8-year-old son how to be strong in the face of adversity. I held her as the tension and stress of 2
days poured onto my neck from her eyes.
The smell of mold and mildew hit me first. Worse than any
locker room you’ve ever stepped foot in.
My furniture and belongings piled all over the garage…pools
of water surrounding stacks of soggy boxes. My Dad’s antique dresser dripping
water from its drawers. All the furniture stacked high with the wood wilting
with water. My son’s childrens books, lying soaked on the cement with all the
pages stuck together. All of my medical school textbooks soaked from cover to
cover.
Then it was time to step inside…
The living room was filled with mattresses, tables, photos,
clothes, guitars and gear. Not any available floor space left. The downstairs
was a maze of fans, hoses, dehumidifiers, extension cords and soggy carpet. The
water heater was ruined as well as the washer/dryer and HVAC unit. The toilet
was off its flange in an attempt to allow the water to flow down the sewage
hole. The tub was filled with a layer of brown muck.
Ugly.
As most of the country knows now, Boulder County was crushed
with biblical rain last week…. “The 500 Year Flood” hit us. Over 200 folks are
still missing. Countless homes were lost. Thousands of basements were flooded
and property damaged. Colorado got beat up…bad. Clearly it will take years to
rebuild our roads and the communities and lives they lead up to.
But I have seen something beautiful through the clouds. Something
stronger than the power of a swollen river or a flooded home.
I have seen love and compassion. I have seen consideration
and kindness. Well beyond my house and its efforts, the stories of heroism
abound throughout the Front Range. Daring helicopter rescues and life
threatening rescue missions. Tales of taking folks in who have lost it all.
In the end we will replace the dry wall, carpet, appliances,
furniture and gear. These are just “things” that have only material value. We
are viewing all of the lost items as a mandated “Spring cleaning” from the
universe. Time to get rid of all the shit you don’t need. A solid exercise for
us all.
What I can never replace is the community that I witnessed
rally in an effort to help out a friend. I am grateful and proud of our local
folks. They are rock-star-heroes and I will seek out opportunities to repay the
favor every chance I get.
Now we dry out and move on.
