Peter Rambo (author photo); Kelly Sikkema
On Aug. 21, 2018, torrential rain swamped the Madison area, causing widespread flooding, washing away our cars and leaving us stranded at home to watch the water sweep away almost everything we owned.
Imagine, pre-pandemic, three years ago. It’s your third day in Madison; you’re half-naked and fast asleep when you’re awakened by your elderly mother-in-law yelling, “Your car is floating down the street!” On a rainy night in Madison, two days after you moved into a rental house that you can’t afford — in a lovely community they call the village of Shorewood Hills. Within minutes you notice a grown man running down your flooded street holding his infant daughter over chest-high rushing water, screaming his head off: “Get out of the house before the water takes it!”
You quickly look downstairs to find water pouring in through your windows. You try to save what you can. But you are not fast enough to save much. You freeze, startled by your cell phone beeping out of control, because your spouse is live-tweeting everything that is happening! Beep! What do you do when your car is floating down the street? Beep! What do you do if there is water coming in through your front door?
You take your Bible floating past your face as a bad omen.
Immediately, you begin to think, How the hell are you going to save your mother-in-law, Miss Carolina, a top-heavy woman with child-size feet? Her baby feet are so tiny they would never be able to kick her to safety. You phone Malcolm, your wisest friend, who you affectionately call Grandpa, and who always knows what to do. Hastily Grandpa asks, “Did you cut the power off?”
“Yes, the power is off.”
“Gas?”
“We don’t have a gas stove.”
“Do you have a concrete foundation?”
“Yes.”
“Good, then your foundation should hold. Can you get to the roof if the water gets any higher?”
“No! We don’t have a ladder that can get us high enough.” “Is there something you can put your mother-in-law on if you have to remove her from the house?”
“Yes! I think.”
You grab the antique dining room table from your living room and start to make a raft. Miss Carolina screams at you. “Boy, that ain’t gonna float. It’s too heavy.” Your family stops everything they are doing just to laugh at you hysterically because you learn in that moment not all wood can float.
So. You give up on that idea, and you eye Miss Carolina’s favorite piece of furniture — an ugly fake wood entertainment center from IKEA — and prepare it for battle. Miss Carolina looks at you like she will kill you if you take the only piece of furniture that she has left from the move. She loves that entertainment center more than she loves you. But you don’t care. You don’t have a choice. You need to save this woman like Leo saved Kate in Titanic because you know in your marriage:
Your mother-in-law comes first…
then it’s your wife…
and then it’s you.
You are going to be divorced if you cannot save this woman. So, you conserve your energy and wait out the storm.
Luckily, our foundation did not break like those on some other houses on our block. We were safe, but our spirits were broken.
We lost both cars, our home was no longer inhabitable and our marriage was left soiled and moldy like our personal items. This included our Sleep Number bed that we’d had for only two days and still hadn’t made a payment on. We were displaced and homeless until something magical happened.
A stranger who’d followed my partner’s live tweets started a GoFundMe page for us and people began to donate so we could afford to move. The Madison Story Slam, which I had been to only twice, donated to our GoFundMe despite having a GoFundMe for themselves. Costco refunded us for the items we lost in the storm. Stranger upon stranger volunteered to help us and spent hours throwing away everything ruined by the floodwater. One person paid for us to stay in a hotel for several days.
There were no rental cars in all of Dane County, thanks to a privately held healthcare software company’s annual conference. But we found a U-Haul truck and were able to drive that around to find a smaller but more expensive apartment with a 15-month lease that we couldn’t afford.
And, I was able to get back to work. A group of students from my spouse’s academic department helped pack us up and move into our new apartment. Somehow this community saved us from drowning.
Three years later, I am broke and divorced. I still lie in bed at night, afraid the rain will take something else away. Yet, I’m forever grateful to the strangers of this beautiful city, who later became my friends. They are a constant reminder of everything that I have made it through.
Charles Payne is a Madison transplant, certified teacher, and self-taught social artist from Michigan. He has a master’s degree in education.
If you are interested in writing a personal essay for Isthmus, please query lindaf@isthmus.com.
