Monday, May 15

Around 1000 people out of the fewer than 10,000 who live in Newmarket had been evacuated from their homes. Schools were closed. As the morning wore on it became obvious that most of the roads out of Newmarket were flooded, that sinkholes were appearing in them, and that bridges were in danger of being washed away. The main road through town — immediately behind my office — was now a lake, with only the roofs of parked cars in the deeper spots showing above the caramel-colored water.

So no one could go anywhere, and the streets started to fill with people. In newspapers and on TV you see the iconic images of floods — cars awash, rowboats going down the street — but what they never show you are the crowds of people having a great time. A flood is an awesome event. It’s one of those rare occasions when the power of nature to disrupt our lives is indisputable. It’s different from a snowstorm where everyone in an area is affected by pretty much the same amount — your house may be under water and two doors down your neighbor is high, dry, and watching your ordeal on the Weather Channel./ It was the Newmarket Mardi Gras, and everyone — including those of us who had been flooded out of our homes — was as happy as if free beer was being handed out on every streetcorner.

Newmarket Main Street is close to the river, but the problem wasn’t that the river had risen (although it had). A previously channeled underground stream that flowed in a pipe under a parking lot, continued beneath Route 108 and under a collection of houses, to reappear in a gully running into the Piscassic River down by the town parking lot, had swollen to the point where it could no longer be contained. The stream — now a torrent — burst out from beneath a wall close to the Newmarket Video Stop, ripped through a parking lot, formed a lake in a dip on Route 108 (Exeter Road), and then flowed diagonally through the houses to enter the main river more or less where it used to. On the way there, it hit a house full on, with dramatic consequences.

First the front garden vanished. The lilac bushes that had been there simply disappeared, swept downstream. The torrent hollowed out where the front garden and the side and back yards had been, creating a gully around the house. The water poured over the edge of the road into this gully like a waterfall. The waterfall undermined the asphalt, causing the road to start collapsing. Eventually the house’s foundations were completely exposed, and I began to wonder if the foundations themselves were going to be undermined? Was the house already leaning to one side? With only gushing water and no flat land around it it was hard to say. On the way to this unmissable Mardi Gras event was a captivating side-show: two cars caught up in the torrent, one turned on its side and the other almost completely submerged and with its trunk torn open by the force of the water.

Meanwhile, over at the Newmarket dam, another house most certainly was in danger of having its foundations undermined, and the Fire Service, and later the National Guard, was there in force, placing sandbag after sandbag in what became a mighty wall to protect the building. I thought of the thin line of sandbags I’d laid outside the sliding glass doors of my basement and wondered if they’d stopped any water at all coming into the house? Maybe the water hadn’t risen that high?

The Newmarket dam itself was spectacular. Even on a quiet day I wouldn’t kayak right to the edge, but I’ve been close. On this rainy Monday the water was poweful enough to rip apart a bridge downstream and sweep it several miles away, where substantial parts of it — those parts that weren’t littering the riverbank — were to wash up a day or two later in someone’s front yard.

Everyone — and it did seem as if everyone who lived in Newmarket was hanging out — was enlivened by the procedings. No one seemed at all down about what may be happening to their houses, and everyone was concerned about everyone else. At this point we hadn’t been home and had no idea whether our house was flooded or not. At that time it seemed like a 50/50 chance that we might have gotten lucky. But there was no way to know until the water went down.

Next… Rescuing Yoda

So, our dossier went off to the Chinese government in May (about the same time as the flood). From that point on there was little to do but wait for a child to be assigned to us — an event that’s known as “the referral.” Many families find this the hardest time in the adoption process: there’s little to do, the timescales are uncertain, and everything is out of your control. Early last year the average time between submission of the dossier and the referral was six months. By the time we started our application, back in October, the referral time had crept up to ten months.

June brought bad news. The referral times had crept up to a full year, and showed no signs of doing anything else but continue to increase. This was both disheartening and disturbing, because it meant that rather than Shrijnana being able to take the last couple of months off school as maternity leave and having the whole summer to bond with our daughter, we’d be traveling to China at the end of the school summer break or even at the start of the fall semester. That’s very bad timing. It would be very hard for Shrijnana to take two months off work at the start of a term.

We decided to investigate other adoption possibilities, and realized very soon that Ethiopia was a promising choice. The referal times are much shorter, the needs of orphans there are, if anything, more pressing than in China, and it’s a less expensive option than many of the other countries from which children are often adopted by Americans.

I was surprised to find that I was grieving for the Chinese daughter that I would no longer be adopting. I’d pictured her a thousand times in my mind’s eye, and had a sense of having a relationship with her. Of course the child we would have been adopting hasn’t even been born yet, but on an emotional level that doesn’t matter. Those feelings of grief are passing, although I experienced renewed pangs when I bumped into Rose, a seven year-old Chinese girl that friends of our adopted, at the post office.

We no longer know what sex our child will be. I find myself curious and excited about the possibility of having a son, and how different that would be from having a daughter. I can imagine it being a lot of fun.

I’m excited about going to Ethiopia. Perhaps as a result of reading Alexander McCall Smith’s gentle and loving No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books, which are set in Botswana (the other end of the continent, of course) I have very warm feelings about Africa. A good friend of mine lived in Ethiopia for several years as well, and was there during the coup that deposed the Emperor, Haile Selassie. It’s another small connection. But mostly I think it’s that I’ve like everyone I’ve ever met who’s from Africa. The African high school students I’ve taught study skills and personal development skills on UNH’s Upward Bound summer camp have been friendly, intelligent, and endowed with the work-ethic of the recent immigrant. These are all qualities that I find very attractive. I’m not meaning to stereotype, simply to say that my experiences have been very positive. I’m looking forward to our trip to Ethiopia (which may include a visit to Kenya).

And yet we have issues to work through. The way that our child will be perceived as an African-American will be very different from how a Chinese-American child would be seen. And the local community of adopted Ethiopian children is much small than the adopted Chinese-American community. These are things we have to reflect on. How will we deal with casual, or not so casual, racism affecting our child? Still, I’m fundamentally an optimistic person and I’m sure we’ll learn to handle whatever comes our way. The main thing is that we’ll be experiencing the joy of witnessing a child’s growth and development.

Hmm. No posts since May? What’s that about? I’m glad you asked.

Sunday, May 14

It was a wet day in southern New Hampshire: a wet day that followed many other wet days. It had rained hard for a week, and that day we had, by some estimates, close to a foot of rain, with solid rain forecast for the rest of the week. The Piscassic River just behind my house (which we purchased in January of this year) rose ominously, reaching the top of its banks and continuing to inch almost perceptibly towards the building. In the late morning I watched it approach a stand of trees, make tentative contact with the near edge of the first trunk, then creep, tree by tree, towards the back deck of the house. After periodic observations I concluded that the water was moving at the rate of about one horizontal foot (24 cm) every hour. I paced out the distance from the water’s edge and conclude that if the rain kept up the water would reach the house the next morning.

A neighbor came out to join me and asked if I’d heard the warning about the possible imminent colapse of the Nottingham dam, some miles upstream. Apparently the fire service had been round that morning, but had neglected to leave notes for residents who weren’t at home. I envisaged the effects of a dam collapsing upstream: a wall of water — god only knows how many feet high and moving at what rate — sweeping downriver, deluging every house in its path. Since our house — like all the houses close by — has a walk-in basement facing the river we were particularly at risk.

I alerted my wife to the danger and we headed to the local fire station to pick up some sandbags. We’d no idea what we were doing, or whether it would help, but we manhandled sodden and unbelievably heavy sacks of sand around the back of the house and made a clumsy wall along the twelve feet of sliding glass doors. I couldn’t imagine how it hold back so much as a drop of water. I just hoped that the doors themselves would keep the river out, although if the dam did break I could imagine a wall of water simply smashing the glass in.

So, displaying a degree of insouciance that some might find borders on the insane, off I went to Boston — in the pouring rain — to see the Icelandic band, Sigur Ros, play in (would you believe) an outdoor concert. Well, it wasn’t quite outdoors; there was a canvas roof, which served mostly to amplify the constant drum of water and drown out the band. I got home about midnight and went to see what the river was up to. By this time it was perhaps eight feet from the deck of the house, and perhaps six inches below the sill of the doors. My neighbor — the one who had warned me about the dam — came out and told me that the Nottingham dam had been shored up and was considered to be no longer a danger. At this point I was, I told him, more worried about the rate the river was rising. He didn’t think it was going to be a problem. Such innocence!

I got to bed about 1:00am, only to be rudely awoken by the Fire Service at 5:20, ordering an immediate evacuation. Fortunately we had an evacuation plan in effect, and threw a large box of food, blankets, flashlights, and other emergency supplies — along with some hastily-packed clothes — into the back of my wife’s car. After some debate we decided we’d head to the Red Cross shelter in town, with the option of sleeping in my office, which is in the center of town and on high ground. We’d be close to home and in a better position to go back and rescue our pets — an iguana and a tortoise. Downstairs, the water was covering the wood of the deck and was just below the door sills.

The reason we were being evacuated was that the roads in and out of our condo complex were already flooded to axle-depth; another few inches of water and the roads would be impassable. The septic system for our houses was also flooded, and since the electricity cables are underground there was the possibility of electrocution as well!

On the way down to the Red Cross shelter we saw, to our astonishment, that a river had burst out from under a wall behind a parking lot in town, and that a torrent of water was sweeping across the lot, hitting the edge of the building (where my accountant’s office is), continuing downhill, where it was turning Route 108 — Newmarket Main Street — into a lake.

And in fact the first person we met at the shelter was Nancy, my accountant. She’d faced a double-whammy, having been evacuated from her house and having headed to her office to sleep, only to find a wall of water between her and her office door. Make that a triple-whammy; at the shelter she’d been able to get virtually no sleep because of the coming and going.

So we headed off to my office, which was above water, and which has a bathroom, a microwave, and the internet: the bare essentials of life.

Next… The Newmarket Mardi Gras.