Sunday at the houseboat (now a dustboat) was hugely productive; six friends helped clear the heaviest ruined stuff and we loaded up the curb. By Monday, Iowa City loaders, crunchers and dump trucks were hauling away “general debris,” one of the four types of piles we are supposed to make and by far the largest, [...]

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Two friends accompanied me back down to the house Friday and we flung open windows, took up carpet and linoleum, knocked holes in drywall, lifted and dragged and tossed and piled. The neighborhood still is a “mandatory evacuation” zone, but recovery is beginning and the few city reps and utility company employees making it down [...]

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It’s Wednesday morning, going on a week since the Iowa floods forced evacuation of our Iowa City neighborhood, and I’m about to drive an hour west to Grinnell to work on a China-related feature article for the Grinnell College alumni magazine. The assignment arrived in an e-mail offer the other day–a describe-the-universe kind of story [...]

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Our commander-in-chief stumbled over his tongue Tuesday morning in addressing our situation here:
“I’ve just assembled my — many people on my domestic policy team to discuss the current flooding in the Midwest.  Of course, our hearts and thoughts go to those who lost life.  And of course, we’re concerned about those whose — who lost [...]

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The new twist for travelers setting out from Iowa City is that, due to closings of roads, bridges and now highways from the flooding in Eastern Iowa, you cannot get to the Cedar Rapids airport  without going in a huge loop, way west to Des Moines and then north and back east. That means what [...]

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The Buddhist idea (which I’m going to grossly oversimplify) that the begging bowl will never be empty now rings quite true to me. I’ve abandoned the burdens of most worldly possessions to the advancing waters, and instead am relying on the goodness of friends. I’ve had so many offers of places to stay that, at [...]

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The floodwaters have crept up behind my house and the sandbagging crew worked three hours on that part of the line last night. Crazy. The reservoir is supposed to top the emergency spillway today (Tuesday) for the second time in 50 years, and then things will get worse. Crazier.
My younger son (turns 22 next week) [...]

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I was in China during the summer of 1993, when weeks of torrential rain caused reservoirs and rivers to overflow their banks in the U.S. Midwest. I got the news from back home in Iowa by watching Dan Rather. The very day I returned was the day the highway from the Cedar Rapids airport to [...]

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It’s 19 years since June 4th, liusi, entered the China lexicon as a tragic day in Beijing. But the date meant something to my clan long before that; June 4th, 1924, was my father Ted Polumbaum’s birthday. After a forty-year career as a photojournalist and a year and a half in the grip of a [...]

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