Un-Sandbagging

John and I spent most of Saturday in Moorhead, MN area helping remove thousands of the sandbags in place to control flooding at the beginning of the month. We'd watched the media coverage of the flooding when volunteers put an estimated 3.5 million 40 lb sandbags in place to save homes and businesses from ruin when the Red River crested in early April. It worked out to about 40 miles of sandbags, quite a lot of them in rings around private houses to keep them from flooding. We'd missed the call to help then, so we weren't about to miss out this time. We got up at 3:00 a.m. to meet at the Church at 4:00 and carpool to be in place for work by 8:00 a.m.

A Lutheran volunteer association ran the clean-up effort last weekend. More than 300 Mormons came from all around Minnesota to help hundreds of other people start to dismantle the sandbag walls. I was one of very few woman on-site. But, always having been able to hold my own in most grunt labor, I had no qualms about signing on this time. I'd forgotten I'm no longer 20-something nor physically fit.

Our task was to deconstruct those sodden sandbag walls (like in the picture -which is not us, I'm afraid) from around the houses lining the river and shift the bags to the street (like the picture below) for heavy machine removal. It was the equivalent of lifting my son Ian, over and over, hour upon hour, without the benefit of bracing the weight on my hip (as one does with a child). I managed to keep a decent pace all morning, but by lunchtime my biceps and glute' muscles burned. One charming Mrs. Homeowner cooked us a fabulous hot lunch and I ate it standing for fear that if I sat down I'd not get back up again. Thank goodness we didn't have to eat those MREs. Bleh.

After four hours, we cleared two houses of about 5,000 sandbags and enjoyed each other's company very much. After Mrs. Homeowner's marvelous lunch, we moved on to another house that had 12,000 sandbags around it. It sat at a lower level than the others, and the sandbags hadn't been able to prevent flooding. In fact, it seemed that the makeshift wall had even kept the water from receeding as quickly as it could have and the damage to the house was heartbreaking.

That batch of sandbags was soaking wet and therefore felt twice as heavy and twice as muddy as the bunch we'd done that morning. About 30 of us stood nearly sholder to sholder to hand them down a human line to the street, so I didn't even have to do the lifting I'd done all morning (loading bags into carts). Even so, after about an hour, I couldn't keep up with the men any more. It was all upper body bicep work and I just couldn't keep the pace or the weight. Feeling disgruntled and foolish, I betook my soggy muddy self out of the way to join another woman on the tailgate of the supervisor's truck and drowned my sorrows with bottled water. John kept up the pace for an hour longer and then stopped when he felt his back start to twinge. Half an hour after that, about 100 reinforcements arrived, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Our driver was also worn out by then and we left about 2:30 p.m. to head for home. When we left, the reinforcements had nearly cleared that house, all within an hour of getting there.

The last time I was that wet was the summer I detassled corn as a young teenager, but I've NEVER been that filthy. It would quite easily qualify as an episode of Dirty Jobs. Completely covered in mud. Both of us. Through four layers of clothing. And, our faces were sunburnt. They still smart a little today.

We could hardly move yesterday, but the experience was well worth it.

In other news... As I went to wash the work clothes yesterday evening, the washer broke. *sigh* Evidently (from the research I did this morning), one only gets about 5 years out of a Kenmore HE3 front load washer before they die. Thats an absurdly short amount of time for such an expensive washer. I LOVED that machine. The repairman comes tomorrow, if he shows me an estimate of anything greater that a couple hundred, I can't vouch for the sanity of my reply.