WEATHER 2006
Here is an exhaustive play-by-play of the events of, leading up to, and in the aftermath of last night's tornadoes. It is divided into chapters, not that this will make it any more interesting or digestable for you readers. It begins with changing into a sweet little black dress in anticipation of social events.
The plan was for me, Michele and her roommates and Jim to go to George's for burgers yesterday around 7. We had all congregated on Michele's porch and were talking about the weather. Many complained of barometric headaches and inauspiciously wished the storm would come.
When we were all good'n'ready, we set out down Burlington. We made a stop at the L&M to use the ATM. I had money on me and I decided it was too cold inside so I waited on the sidewalk and watched a dude try to start his white car unsuccessfully for well in excess of five minutes. I was about to go over and offer to jump it, but then I remembered that 1) I had not driven there, and thus didn't have a car to jump his with, and 2) I don't know how jump-starting a car works. Oh well.
We recollected ourselves and set out for George's. We found it almost completely empty and chose a table by the window so we could watch the storm roll in, and everyone else went up to the bar to show their IDs. The woman behind the bar said that I absolutely could not be in the bar, even though we openly admitted I was underage and intended not to drink and was in plain view. We picked up to leave, couldn't agree on a backup plan for dinner, and split into two groups. Michele, Jim and I headed home-ish, and the other girls ended up going back to George's.
We stopped at the co-op to pick up dinner to take home, and once inside, it started pouring. I called Surly to ask if he could come collect us, and that he did. Michele and Jim were dropped off at her house, and Surly, Bill and I continued on some errands. Surly went to Jimmy John's to pick up his tips and ended up buying a gram off a coworker, and while we were waiting in the car we heard the first of the sirens. We continued on to L&M so Surly could buy cigarettes, and as he was getting back in the car, he smacked that same white car with his door. "Oooh, shit" he says, and we drive away. We debate driving to Oxford to look for the tornado that had been reported, but decided the car windows were too foggy and headed home.
The plan after that was to go for a walk in the downpour, since it was still very warm outside, so I put on my galoshes and stood on the stoop while the boys smoked. As we were about to set out, the rain turned to hail, and then the hail turned to golfballs and quail eggs. Standing on the stoop, one could look south and see four or five porchfuls of college kids admiring the weather in your direct line of sight. We didn't have a porch and were soaking anyway, so we decided to run out into it and collect prized specimens of unusual magnitude. Some were thoughtfully placed in the freezer by Bill. Hail collecting turned into hail juggling turned into hail fights until the streetlights began to brown out and the sirens started up once again. A particularly loud thunderclap made the sorority girls across the street scream, and all the neighbors made their way back inside.
The wind began to pick up in intensity, and the hail backed off, then started anew and just as impressively. The lights blacked out and didn't come back, so I ran inside to find my Mag-lite. I had to wait for a flash of lightning to be able to find it. When I came back out the wind nearly took my breath away, and the boys were joking about wanting to see a tornado. I examined the clouds due west of us and jokingly pointed to a dark-looking wall against skies that were otherwise well-lit by lightning; from its belly sagged one sickly grey appendage. "There's your tornado, boys," I says. Minutes later we began to notice airborne debris and that clichéd roaring "waterfall" sound, and Anne and Stuart prudently sought the basement. I tried to pull the rest of the boys along with me, but they were transfixed, so I remained too.
As soon as Anne and Stuart left, everything started crashing down around us, only somewhat-figuratively. I could feel the pressure dropping and so held the door open behind me, so that the windows in it wouldn't blow out and shower us with glass. Somewhere northwest of us a transformer exploded, sending an incredible spray of sparks and fire above the treeline. Until this point, I don't think I really had a firm grasp on just how destructive this storm was, but I suddenly was very disquieted. The boys continued to look right, watching the sparks fly, but I looked back towards the cloud formation I'd pointed out earlier just in time to see that the ominous grey dangly had turned into a perfect, archetypical funnel, and that it had progressed to immediately above the sorority house across the street. Lit from behind by lightning, I watched a chimney or vent on their rooftop collapse and roofing pulled away, upward into the spiral. I saw a chunk of shingles loosed into the sky and complete a whole circuit around the funnel before gaining enough velocity to escape orbit and disappear.
I think I was clinging to both Bill and Surly as we watched the tornado lift back up, pass directly over our house (incredibly, leaving it completely untouched), and veer somewhat to the north. I think we all sort of had an understanding that as long as we could see the funnel itself, we knew we weren't inside it and so were 'safe.' I now wonder at what point we would've decided to run inside.
The rushing sound stopped and there was nearly perfect silence, with the exception of windowpanes shattering up the block. The four of us were absolutely buzzing and ran out into the deathly still intersection of Governor and Burlington to survey the damage and breathe very, very hard. We noticed cars go down Governor and then come back up the wrong way and, surmising something was amiss, decided to take off in that direction. We were lucky to have brought flashlights.
We crested the hill at Governor and College and everywhere our flashlight beams landed there was absolute destruction: siding and shingles ripped off, branches through car windows and trees uprooted. The lightning had subsided by this time and we couldn't see what we were approaching, but the next block was far worse. We eventually came upon what was turning the motorists back - a tree, or perhaps two, had fallen clear across both lanes of Governor and taken several telephone poles with it. We cast the beams of our flashlights up and, across the street, saw the entire top floor of Alpha Chi Omega exposed wide open to the sky.
At that point, we were still the only humans on foot out on the street. We all got chills looking at that huge gutted sorority and for the first time I think it occurred to us that there might be people trapped in there. A Jeepfull of bro-heims were driving at a rather irresponsible speed towards the downed tree and powerlines in the street; we waved them down and they screeched to a halt just in time. One leaned out the window and exclaimed solemnly that the roof of the Union was ripped clear off - we were aghast until I asked if he meant the IMU or the bar, and he replied, "dude, the bar. The fucking bar."
The valley between the sorority and the Anome co-op house, which had once been full of very tall trees I suppose, was cleared so completely that I thought perhaps an entire building had been separated from its foundation and carried off. When we came back later and were able to get over to that side of the street, we could look down into the pit and see piles of timber and a valley floor as empty as if it had been cleared on purpose.
We couldn't make it any farther west down Washington and so headed back home to call our moms and get shoes for Thomas. Surly and Bill very nearly walked into downed powerlines at forehead-level until I screamed at them and Thomas collected a sliver of wood in his naked heel. When we got back home I called my mom and told her, to her relief, that the house was fine and I had taken the guinea pig with me down to the basement for the duration.
Bill expressed concern about his car and we all wanted to see the damage we'd been hearing about downtown, so we recollected ourselves and took off down Burlington. On the way there we ran into Bill's brother Ben, who said that he heard the car was fucked up - I don't know where from. Bill ran home to get his videocamera and we pressed on down Burlington. When we got to the L&M it took all of us a little while to understand that the white car, the very same white car as I had been encountering all day, the white car that had been tossed upside-down and onto a large bush, was the car belonging to the Heinens' dad. We figured out how to work the camera and took some pictures. Hordes of gawking fratboys with red plastic cups of beer gathered, some of them asking if they could pose for pictures in front of it. Made nervous by the smell of a natural gas leak, we took off soon after, parting ways with Ben.
The Burlington st. bridge was blocked due to the gas leak, so we skirted it by cutting through the rec center lot and into Chauncy Swan ramp. We followed Washington up into downtown, which had started to fill with throngs of people, many of them marvelling aloud at our good fortune of having flashlights. We walked past Surly's place of work first, seemingly the only building still lit up and with windows intact, then to the Plaza Towers. I was disappointed to see that I would still be expected at work in the morning, but soon after we were delighted by the sight of plywood (almost certainly from construction going on at the upper levels) split halfway and clinging six feet up a lamppost. The globes from every lamp in sight were missing, and there was no sign of them anywhere. They must have all been very fragmentary. True to his word, the Union bar's roof had collapsed or been pulled off leaving a hideously ragged edge, just as our friend had promised.
We headed north to St. Mary's, which we heard was now missing its spire, and found it intact. Then we followed Market to Dodge and then turned east on Jefferson, which seemed to be the northerly boundary of the severest damage. The sidewalks and street were nearly impenetrable, clogged with wind-shuffled and busted-up cars and downed trees and telephone poles. We passed many more houses missing parts of roofs (rooves?) and porches. In order to return home by way of Muscatine, we had to climb over two trees that were big enough to have smashed a car on one side of the street and a house on the other. We followed Muscatine to College and then College to Summit, and I'm fairly certain that our circuit was pretty close to the boundaries of the greatest destruction in this neighborhood. The two great houses on Summit and College appeared to have been mostly untouched, and nearly everything south of College seems to have been spared.
Back on Burlington, we passed a group of kids having a good time on their lawn with a beer bong and stopped to talk to Surly's friend Jeff on his porch. Once home, we scraped together the last of the orange votive candles from Halloween so that the boys could play candlelight Scrabble, and Surly and Bill (who found us at our house just after we got back) decided it was only appropriate now to smoke, but they couldn't find a single hitter in the house. Since the apples were in the fridge and the power was out - for who knew how long, at the time - I surrendered my sweet potato to the cause of insobriety. That clever Bill Heinen deftly crafted a pipe from it using a mechanical pencil, the lid from his beverage for the bowl, and several safety pins to secure it to the potato. What a kid, I tell ya. I called the landlord to let him know our house escaped without a scratch, then I took Stuart with me back out into the night, since he hadn't seen much beyond our block.
I took Stuart down Washington, and this time, confident that none of the downed powerlines were live, we crossed the median and were able to survey the awesome destruction of the sorority and the neighboring valley. We were unable to make it as far as the Yellow Ghetto previously, so I was greatly relieved to find it still in fine fettle, almost completely untouched. It looks like some windows were busted out on the backside of the Emilys' apartment. Across Lucas from the Yellow Ghetto, a window had blown out and big beige computer monitor was hanging out the hole, suspended by its power cord.
Our next stop was the Iowa House in the IMU, where Stuart would've been working that night if he hadn't asked for the night off. We found that the streets of downtown were being evacuated and closed off by the police and sheriff's deputies, and the flag at the Old Capitol was flying at half-mast. Stuart elected to help out his swamped coworker with extra hotel tasks. The IMU had been declared a Red Cross site, and a hundred cots were to be laid out in the ballroom for refugees. While Stuart manned the desk, I set out to investigate claims that the Main Library had taken a serious blow; after walking around all four sides, I found it in perfect shape - no missing windows, power evident on all floors - and its lawns were crawling with poor soaked bunnies.
When Stuart and I left the hotel around midnight, we set out in search of St. Patrick's, which was the church that was actually destroyed, not St. Mary's. It took me quite a while to remember that St. Patrick's was where my grandpa Mink's funeral was held, and just then we got a call from Thomas who intended to meet us there. It took some doing to get around the perimeter of downtown, which was very much blocked off by grumpy police and national guard. We ended up coming out of the alley at Happy Joe's, which was very impressively destroyed - the front face of the apartments above it simply detached itself and fell straight down onto Happy Joe's fleet of trucks, completely blocking the entire storefront.
We finally made it around the intersection of Burlington and Gilbert, where work had begun to saw down a crumpled stoplight and traffic was backed up quite a ways. Approaching Court st., we happened upon Erik Skaden, who was headed to our house and joined us. Court street didn't seem so bad until you reached the crest of the hill, whereupon a terrifying cutaway view of the internal structure of St. Patrick's was exposed. On the facing wall of the neighboring apartment building, pieces of timber far bigger than me were driven firmly into the cement, where they stuck out at jaunty angles.
We made our way to Burlington where we heard that the 200-block apartments, where the kid fell off the balcony and was killed this summer, were also kind of destroyed. We found ourselves among a herd of people that was dispersing, and in a maze of police tape we tried to pick the route out that seemed safest. We were caught in a bright spotlight and an irate officer yelled at us, wanting to know what we were doing, and we tried to explain that we were trying to get back on the right side of the tape. He asked, but didn't care to hear our answer, didn't we have to step over tape to get to where we were? In actuality, the police tape snaked around the block and enclosed a building, but if we had continued walking the way we were going we wouldn't've had to cross it again to get back out. That was the scariest part of my evening, I think.
We headed for home and on the Burlington st. bridge I spotted Surly and Bill, who didn't see me gallumphing towards them until I was right under their faces. They were a little drunk and startled. They said that they heard Gabe's was open, and that was where they were headed. We all came along except Thomas, who went home. We crossed under College and through Chauncy Swan again, and heard threatening voices coming from somewhere in the pitch black. The voices then declared "naw, they okay" and some low laughter echoed, and soon enough we emerged safe on the other side.
We didn't spend much time at Gabe's, as it was loud and packed like never before, but it was a good feeling to have participated in that Iowa City solidarity and camaraderie. We found Ben Heinen there, drunk on pity drinks (when they hear you're broke and your car is upside-down and a popular city landmark, just about anyone's response is to offer to buy you a drink), and he and his brother planned to sleep on our couches that night since they do so often anyway. When we left, Surly and Bill went straight home and Stuart, Erik, Jonny and I took Iowa avenue so we could see if it was as destroyed as everyone said (it was not) and to show Erik the terrible mess that was made of Washington and College.
And finally we were home once more, and found Thomas nearly asleep on the stoop. Inside I discovered my extra seedlings that I had potted in little peat pots tipped over, potting soil scattered all across the floor of the baking/sewing office/studio/conservatory, but the ones planted in terracotta pots had stood firm. Hooray for you guys. I set my phone alarm to wake me up and eventually fell asleep hours later, having really strange dreams that are just now coming back to me in slippery little snippets. And that is the story of that, all y'all. I'm sorry that was so many words.
Edited midnight Friday to include links to relevant photographs (mainly from the Press-Citizen, UIowa, Ilse's and Webshot galleries) and to fix some confused cardinal directions. I have such bad spatial reasoning skills.
The plan was for me, Michele and her roommates and Jim to go to George's for burgers yesterday around 7. We had all congregated on Michele's porch and were talking about the weather. Many complained of barometric headaches and inauspiciously wished the storm would come.
When we were all good'n'ready, we set out down Burlington. We made a stop at the L&M to use the ATM. I had money on me and I decided it was too cold inside so I waited on the sidewalk and watched a dude try to start his white car unsuccessfully for well in excess of five minutes. I was about to go over and offer to jump it, but then I remembered that 1) I had not driven there, and thus didn't have a car to jump his with, and 2) I don't know how jump-starting a car works. Oh well.
We recollected ourselves and set out for George's. We found it almost completely empty and chose a table by the window so we could watch the storm roll in, and everyone else went up to the bar to show their IDs. The woman behind the bar said that I absolutely could not be in the bar, even though we openly admitted I was underage and intended not to drink and was in plain view. We picked up to leave, couldn't agree on a backup plan for dinner, and split into two groups. Michele, Jim and I headed home-ish, and the other girls ended up going back to George's.
We stopped at the co-op to pick up dinner to take home, and once inside, it started pouring. I called Surly to ask if he could come collect us, and that he did. Michele and Jim were dropped off at her house, and Surly, Bill and I continued on some errands. Surly went to Jimmy John's to pick up his tips and ended up buying a gram off a coworker, and while we were waiting in the car we heard the first of the sirens. We continued on to L&M so Surly could buy cigarettes, and as he was getting back in the car, he smacked that same white car with his door. "Oooh, shit" he says, and we drive away. We debate driving to Oxford to look for the tornado that had been reported, but decided the car windows were too foggy and headed home.
The plan after that was to go for a walk in the downpour, since it was still very warm outside, so I put on my galoshes and stood on the stoop while the boys smoked. As we were about to set out, the rain turned to hail, and then the hail turned to golfballs and quail eggs. Standing on the stoop, one could look south and see four or five porchfuls of college kids admiring the weather in your direct line of sight. We didn't have a porch and were soaking anyway, so we decided to run out into it and collect prized specimens of unusual magnitude. Some were thoughtfully placed in the freezer by Bill. Hail collecting turned into hail juggling turned into hail fights until the streetlights began to brown out and the sirens started up once again. A particularly loud thunderclap made the sorority girls across the street scream, and all the neighbors made their way back inside.
The wind began to pick up in intensity, and the hail backed off, then started anew and just as impressively. The lights blacked out and didn't come back, so I ran inside to find my Mag-lite. I had to wait for a flash of lightning to be able to find it. When I came back out the wind nearly took my breath away, and the boys were joking about wanting to see a tornado. I examined the clouds due west of us and jokingly pointed to a dark-looking wall against skies that were otherwise well-lit by lightning; from its belly sagged one sickly grey appendage. "There's your tornado, boys," I says. Minutes later we began to notice airborne debris and that clichéd roaring "waterfall" sound, and Anne and Stuart prudently sought the basement. I tried to pull the rest of the boys along with me, but they were transfixed, so I remained too.
As soon as Anne and Stuart left, everything started crashing down around us, only somewhat-figuratively. I could feel the pressure dropping and so held the door open behind me, so that the windows in it wouldn't blow out and shower us with glass. Somewhere northwest of us a transformer exploded, sending an incredible spray of sparks and fire above the treeline. Until this point, I don't think I really had a firm grasp on just how destructive this storm was, but I suddenly was very disquieted. The boys continued to look right, watching the sparks fly, but I looked back towards the cloud formation I'd pointed out earlier just in time to see that the ominous grey dangly had turned into a perfect, archetypical funnel, and that it had progressed to immediately above the sorority house across the street. Lit from behind by lightning, I watched a chimney or vent on their rooftop collapse and roofing pulled away, upward into the spiral. I saw a chunk of shingles loosed into the sky and complete a whole circuit around the funnel before gaining enough velocity to escape orbit and disappear.
I think I was clinging to both Bill and Surly as we watched the tornado lift back up, pass directly over our house (incredibly, leaving it completely untouched), and veer somewhat to the north. I think we all sort of had an understanding that as long as we could see the funnel itself, we knew we weren't inside it and so were 'safe.' I now wonder at what point we would've decided to run inside.
The rushing sound stopped and there was nearly perfect silence, with the exception of windowpanes shattering up the block. The four of us were absolutely buzzing and ran out into the deathly still intersection of Governor and Burlington to survey the damage and breathe very, very hard. We noticed cars go down Governor and then come back up the wrong way and, surmising something was amiss, decided to take off in that direction. We were lucky to have brought flashlights.
We crested the hill at Governor and College and everywhere our flashlight beams landed there was absolute destruction: siding and shingles ripped off, branches through car windows and trees uprooted. The lightning had subsided by this time and we couldn't see what we were approaching, but the next block was far worse. We eventually came upon what was turning the motorists back - a tree, or perhaps two, had fallen clear across both lanes of Governor and taken several telephone poles with it. We cast the beams of our flashlights up and, across the street, saw the entire top floor of Alpha Chi Omega exposed wide open to the sky.
At that point, we were still the only humans on foot out on the street. We all got chills looking at that huge gutted sorority and for the first time I think it occurred to us that there might be people trapped in there. A Jeepfull of bro-heims were driving at a rather irresponsible speed towards the downed tree and powerlines in the street; we waved them down and they screeched to a halt just in time. One leaned out the window and exclaimed solemnly that the roof of the Union was ripped clear off - we were aghast until I asked if he meant the IMU or the bar, and he replied, "dude, the bar. The fucking bar."
The valley between the sorority and the Anome co-op house, which had once been full of very tall trees I suppose, was cleared so completely that I thought perhaps an entire building had been separated from its foundation and carried off. When we came back later and were able to get over to that side of the street, we could look down into the pit and see piles of timber and a valley floor as empty as if it had been cleared on purpose.
We couldn't make it any farther west down Washington and so headed back home to call our moms and get shoes for Thomas. Surly and Bill very nearly walked into downed powerlines at forehead-level until I screamed at them and Thomas collected a sliver of wood in his naked heel. When we got back home I called my mom and told her, to her relief, that the house was fine and I had taken the guinea pig with me down to the basement for the duration.
Bill expressed concern about his car and we all wanted to see the damage we'd been hearing about downtown, so we recollected ourselves and took off down Burlington. On the way there we ran into Bill's brother Ben, who said that he heard the car was fucked up - I don't know where from. Bill ran home to get his videocamera and we pressed on down Burlington. When we got to the L&M it took all of us a little while to understand that the white car, the very same white car as I had been encountering all day, the white car that had been tossed upside-down and onto a large bush, was the car belonging to the Heinens' dad. We figured out how to work the camera and took some pictures. Hordes of gawking fratboys with red plastic cups of beer gathered, some of them asking if they could pose for pictures in front of it. Made nervous by the smell of a natural gas leak, we took off soon after, parting ways with Ben.
The Burlington st. bridge was blocked due to the gas leak, so we skirted it by cutting through the rec center lot and into Chauncy Swan ramp. We followed Washington up into downtown, which had started to fill with throngs of people, many of them marvelling aloud at our good fortune of having flashlights. We walked past Surly's place of work first, seemingly the only building still lit up and with windows intact, then to the Plaza Towers. I was disappointed to see that I would still be expected at work in the morning, but soon after we were delighted by the sight of plywood (almost certainly from construction going on at the upper levels) split halfway and clinging six feet up a lamppost. The globes from every lamp in sight were missing, and there was no sign of them anywhere. They must have all been very fragmentary. True to his word, the Union bar's roof had collapsed or been pulled off leaving a hideously ragged edge, just as our friend had promised.
We headed north to St. Mary's, which we heard was now missing its spire, and found it intact. Then we followed Market to Dodge and then turned east on Jefferson, which seemed to be the northerly boundary of the severest damage. The sidewalks and street were nearly impenetrable, clogged with wind-shuffled and busted-up cars and downed trees and telephone poles. We passed many more houses missing parts of roofs (rooves?) and porches. In order to return home by way of Muscatine, we had to climb over two trees that were big enough to have smashed a car on one side of the street and a house on the other. We followed Muscatine to College and then College to Summit, and I'm fairly certain that our circuit was pretty close to the boundaries of the greatest destruction in this neighborhood. The two great houses on Summit and College appeared to have been mostly untouched, and nearly everything south of College seems to have been spared.
Back on Burlington, we passed a group of kids having a good time on their lawn with a beer bong and stopped to talk to Surly's friend Jeff on his porch. Once home, we scraped together the last of the orange votive candles from Halloween so that the boys could play candlelight Scrabble, and Surly and Bill (who found us at our house just after we got back) decided it was only appropriate now to smoke, but they couldn't find a single hitter in the house. Since the apples were in the fridge and the power was out - for who knew how long, at the time - I surrendered my sweet potato to the cause of insobriety. That clever Bill Heinen deftly crafted a pipe from it using a mechanical pencil, the lid from his beverage for the bowl, and several safety pins to secure it to the potato. What a kid, I tell ya. I called the landlord to let him know our house escaped without a scratch, then I took Stuart with me back out into the night, since he hadn't seen much beyond our block.
I took Stuart down Washington, and this time, confident that none of the downed powerlines were live, we crossed the median and were able to survey the awesome destruction of the sorority and the neighboring valley. We were unable to make it as far as the Yellow Ghetto previously, so I was greatly relieved to find it still in fine fettle, almost completely untouched. It looks like some windows were busted out on the backside of the Emilys' apartment. Across Lucas from the Yellow Ghetto, a window had blown out and big beige computer monitor was hanging out the hole, suspended by its power cord.
Our next stop was the Iowa House in the IMU, where Stuart would've been working that night if he hadn't asked for the night off. We found that the streets of downtown were being evacuated and closed off by the police and sheriff's deputies, and the flag at the Old Capitol was flying at half-mast. Stuart elected to help out his swamped coworker with extra hotel tasks. The IMU had been declared a Red Cross site, and a hundred cots were to be laid out in the ballroom for refugees. While Stuart manned the desk, I set out to investigate claims that the Main Library had taken a serious blow; after walking around all four sides, I found it in perfect shape - no missing windows, power evident on all floors - and its lawns were crawling with poor soaked bunnies.
When Stuart and I left the hotel around midnight, we set out in search of St. Patrick's, which was the church that was actually destroyed, not St. Mary's. It took me quite a while to remember that St. Patrick's was where my grandpa Mink's funeral was held, and just then we got a call from Thomas who intended to meet us there. It took some doing to get around the perimeter of downtown, which was very much blocked off by grumpy police and national guard. We ended up coming out of the alley at Happy Joe's, which was very impressively destroyed - the front face of the apartments above it simply detached itself and fell straight down onto Happy Joe's fleet of trucks, completely blocking the entire storefront.
We finally made it around the intersection of Burlington and Gilbert, where work had begun to saw down a crumpled stoplight and traffic was backed up quite a ways. Approaching Court st., we happened upon Erik Skaden, who was headed to our house and joined us. Court street didn't seem so bad until you reached the crest of the hill, whereupon a terrifying cutaway view of the internal structure of St. Patrick's was exposed. On the facing wall of the neighboring apartment building, pieces of timber far bigger than me were driven firmly into the cement, where they stuck out at jaunty angles.
We made our way to Burlington where we heard that the 200-block apartments, where the kid fell off the balcony and was killed this summer, were also kind of destroyed. We found ourselves among a herd of people that was dispersing, and in a maze of police tape we tried to pick the route out that seemed safest. We were caught in a bright spotlight and an irate officer yelled at us, wanting to know what we were doing, and we tried to explain that we were trying to get back on the right side of the tape. He asked, but didn't care to hear our answer, didn't we have to step over tape to get to where we were? In actuality, the police tape snaked around the block and enclosed a building, but if we had continued walking the way we were going we wouldn't've had to cross it again to get back out. That was the scariest part of my evening, I think.
We headed for home and on the Burlington st. bridge I spotted Surly and Bill, who didn't see me gallumphing towards them until I was right under their faces. They were a little drunk and startled. They said that they heard Gabe's was open, and that was where they were headed. We all came along except Thomas, who went home. We crossed under College and through Chauncy Swan again, and heard threatening voices coming from somewhere in the pitch black. The voices then declared "naw, they okay" and some low laughter echoed, and soon enough we emerged safe on the other side.
We didn't spend much time at Gabe's, as it was loud and packed like never before, but it was a good feeling to have participated in that Iowa City solidarity and camaraderie. We found Ben Heinen there, drunk on pity drinks (when they hear you're broke and your car is upside-down and a popular city landmark, just about anyone's response is to offer to buy you a drink), and he and his brother planned to sleep on our couches that night since they do so often anyway. When we left, Surly and Bill went straight home and Stuart, Erik, Jonny and I took Iowa avenue so we could see if it was as destroyed as everyone said (it was not) and to show Erik the terrible mess that was made of Washington and College.
And finally we were home once more, and found Thomas nearly asleep on the stoop. Inside I discovered my extra seedlings that I had potted in little peat pots tipped over, potting soil scattered all across the floor of the baking/sewing office/studio/conservatory, but the ones planted in terracotta pots had stood firm. Hooray for you guys. I set my phone alarm to wake me up and eventually fell asleep hours later, having really strange dreams that are just now coming back to me in slippery little snippets. And that is the story of that, all y'all. I'm sorry that was so many words.
Edited midnight Friday to include links to relevant photographs (mainly from the Press-Citizen, UIowa, Ilse's and Webshot galleries) and to fix some confused cardinal directions. I have such bad spatial reasoning skills.