The wise man built his house on the rock: Back to square one in our Unalakleet build.

“I want to go with Dad,” Ellen declared as I got out of the car.

            She reached for my hand and we walked the rocky (literally and figuratively) road to its end just before our lot.  That is where it met a snow filled gully at a willow line.  Someone had cut a trail through the willows a year or so before.  I crouched down and felt her arms reach up around my neck before I stood back up with my little burden, trudging through the snow breaking trail for her Mom and Dave.

            We were there figuring out where to dig our test holes to determine location of our house, garage, and drain field.  It was an extraneous act.  The lot directly south held a ton of gravel, the one just down the hill to the west of us looked like a gravel parking lot, and the other developed property just to the north-west had beautiful rock for building.

            “Yeah, I am pretty confident,” Dave said as we walked up the hill, “but one thing I have learned is that I don’t always know.”

            At $100 a piece, the holes would be cheap insurance, but once they were dug, we were planning on immediately pulling the trigger on ordering supplies to get a garage up as a base to build our house out of.

            “I can get the excavator up here this week,” Dave stated, “We’ll come up with a time, and you can come out and see the holes being dug.  I like the owner to be there.”

            As we walked back toward the car, Ellen was visibly confused and frustrated.

            “Where are we going?” she asked.  “Aren’t you going to build my house?”

            “Well, Bub,” her mom explained, “we need to get materials shipped in, a foundation put down…”

            “There’s wood right there,” Ellen gestured to the pallets we had brought up the hill to build garden beds out of.

            “We’re going to need a little bit more than that, Bub,” I tried to clarify, “but today was a step closer.”

            “Well, don’t forget that I want a telescope in my room,” and she turned and reached up to me to be carried back to the car.

            Dave’s son Reuben, Bub (of course) and I went up to the lot a couple of days later once they had the excavator in place.  Bub had seen equipment being worked on television, but it was something that had her in awe as the heavy tracked vehicle crawled its way through the snow we had just struggled through and then worked its way up the hill.  She would stand as close as I would let her and then retreat when I would yell for her to move back as the machine continued its approach.

Bub's first real-life experience with an excavator was awe inspiring... but even this impressive machine struggled with the concrete hard permafrost found just below the topsoil.

            The bucket punched through the top layer and began struggling with what it found underneath.  I smiled as I saw large chunks dropping out of the bucket.

            “Wow, he hit rock fast,” I said to Ellen who was wrapped around my left leg watching with mouth open.

            The going was slow and it got to the point that Reuben was only able to remove about a five-gallon scoop at a time and the front of the tracks were being lifted up off the ground with each effort.  I began realizing that it wasn’t rock.  He was only four feet into the ground when Dave walked up behind me.

            “Wow,” Dave commented, “didn’t expect to find that.”

            Permafrost.  The rock that Reuben had been extracting was actually large chunks of frozen clay.

            It was pretty much the same thing we had built our Galena house on, but it was kind of a game changer in Unalakleet.  For one, we were planning on harvesting rock from our lot to finish building the road to our property as well as building the driveway to the garage.

            There was no rock.  Seven feet down, and it was still frozen clay.

            “Let’s try over by those willows,” Dave pointed toward the south boundary line.  “Maybe we can find something there for your drain field.

            The ground was not frozen there and the bucket penetrated easily: a better sign.  It was still mostly clay, but the bucket started turning up signs of gravel… and then signs of water.

            “Well, it looks like we could get deep enough to do a septic before hitting the water,” Dave said.  “So, that is a better.  Can’t build on it, but this would work for your drain field.  Let’s look further up the hill to see if we can find a good building site with better soils.”

            The third hole started out okay.  Reuben punched through the thin layer of top soil and began pulling up full buckets of material, which quickly turned into partial buckets filled with more frozen clay.

            “Huh,” I gave my very educated opinion.

            “Yeah,” Dave agreed, “not what I figured we’d find.”

            “That pretty much determines that we shouldn’t build here,” I yelled to Dave over the roar of the excavator.

            “Well, I wasn’t going to make that decision for you, but that is what I was thinking.  No need throwing good money after bad,” Dave agreed.

            Reuben shut off the machine and we began walking down the hill.

            “Hey,” Ellen yelled confused again, “I thought we were going to build my rainbow house.”

            Evidently after meeting no resistance to her telescope proposal she figured she’d go for broke.

            “Well, Bub, not quite yet,” I said a little disheartened.  “Looks like I won’t be getting my shop just yet though either… but,” I continued, “I’m working on it.”

            Myra was waiting expectantly at home when Ellen and I walked through the door.

            “Celebration?” She asked.

            “Not exactly,” I answered, “permafrost.”

            “Wow, really?”

            “Back to square one,” I said trying to sound okay with it, and honestly the more we talked about it, the more we were.

            This was not the first building project that we ran into hurdles on or heard the answer of “not yet” on.  The first house we built had multiple not yets that all turned into God taking care of us (don’t know how else to explain it) better than we could have taken care of ourselves.

            We said grace just in time to beat Bub’s first shovel full of noodles into her mouth.

            “We didn’t build my rainbow house yet,” she said not looking up from the noodles she was urgently working on.

            “Not yet,” Mom replied, “but we’re working on it.”

The Flood

“Dad?” Romay anxiously asked as we both stood looking at a stick that was much wetter than it had been about twenty minutes ago.

            “Yeah,” I responded, “the water has gone up,” and before she could ask, I continued, “we’re going to be okay.”

            She had just gotten back from helping a friend move empty fuel barrels and a snow machine to higher ground.  Only days before, the entire community of Galena had been cruising around in our cars, windows down, enjoying the early spring heat, and keeping a light-hearted eye on the Yukon as the ice began to rot.

            While Romay and I had been working outside helping our neighbors, Myra had stayed behind to get a few things in order in our home.  We weren’t worried.  When we had built, we knew that ground level on our property was above the hundred-year flood line.  But as we watched the pond across the road grow, Myra took some time to get things ready just in case.

            The winter of 2012-13 had been one in which multiple puzzle pieces had fallen exactly in place.  The fall got cold quickly, dipping down into negative numbers shortly after the end of moose season, and though we got a little snow early, we never really got dumped on like usual.

            Snow is kind of a counter-intuitive thing.  When touched, its cold.  Of course- it is frozen water.  However, snow holds air and acts like nature’s fiber glass.  A good foot of snow on river ice keeps the ice from thickening as quickly because even though the mercury could drop to negative twenty, the insulation keeps the ice just below freezing.  Fall and winter cold in interior Alaska without insulative snow meant thick ice… feet and feet of ice.

            Later in the winter, the mountains in Canada where the Yukon River is born got dumped on.  A record amount of snow fell and accumulated waiting for spring thaw to push it into the Yukon.  It was like a healthy savings account of water for the river.

            Then, the spring had stayed cold.  The ice really never got the slow rot that we had experienced in earlier years.  It was solid, thick, and hard.  Then it got warm… hot: short sleeves and shorts weather.  The stock pile of snow in Canada cashed out all at once and began pushing down the river.

            When the river broke, we gathered in ice watching parties awed by the school bus size pieces of ice tumbling in the current of the river.  We stood near the break wall at the end of the runway and felt the power of the river shake the ground beneath us.

            Water began pouring into Alexander Lake, a good thing for a float plane lake that had not been recharged in quite some time.

            “Is that a crack forming near the culvert?” I asked Myra as we were out for a walk and crossing the “new road” bridge.  The bridge had been built by mounding earth over a steel culvert large enough to drive a snow machine through while standing up.

            “Yeah, sure looks like it.  Maybe we should let someone know about it,” she had commented.

            A day later a surge of water pushed through the lake and snagged the culvert lip, lifting it and tearing it through the ground like it was made of paper.  Again, a group of us stood by watching and nervously laughing.

            “Man, that is going to take some work to fix,” a local heavy equipment operator shrugged as we stood talking.

            Honestly though, none of us was worried.  It was the first time in recent history that our most respected elder had not said, “Prepare for a flood this year.”  Sidney had said it just about every other year that we had ever come close.

Though the water was high, the ice was pushing on down river with no signs of slowing.  And, almost without warning, it just stopped.  Dead.  No movement.  A couple of bends down from Galena, Bishop Rock towers above the river.  A solid, enormous, building-sized boulder shaped the river rather than allowing the river to shape it causing a ninety-degree bend and water depths of sixty to eighty feet.  Large chunks of ice had got caught in the corner, piling onto each other until an ice dam spread the width of the river and pressed to the bottom holding a two-mile-long sheet of ice behind it.  Water and Ice continued downstream with nowhere to go other than up and over the swollen banks filling in dry lakes and sloughs that had not seen water in decades.

            And the water kept coming.  It didn’t care that the normal overflow holding ponds were full.  It hadn’t read about 100-year flood levels, and there is a reason that water is described as running, not walking.  So, Romay and I had stuck a stick in the mud a couple inches up the hill above the lake across the road.  We figured if our yard was going to get wet, that was where the water would come from.

            After seeing the stick wet, we walked back across the road and gave Myra the update. 

            “Well, the lake is definitely higher, but it does not look like it will really make it over the road,” I encouraged.

            I followed Myra’s eyes as she looked down and watched a small stream of water run past our feet coming from behind the house.  We had not even considered the lake behind the house filling up and that the flood would come from there.

            “I’ll get our emergency stuff together,” Myra said as she turned and headed back to the house with Romay.  “You should probably load the tools into the truck.”

                        We grabbed Myra’s little chainsaw and threw it in the boat along with the bug out bag she had put together: food, change of clothes, first aid kit, fresh water, jet boil, fire starter, axe shotgun, rifle, and shells for both.  We finished putting the tools in the back of the truck to drive them and it to higher ground.  If the flooding got out of control, we were going to need those tools to put our house back together.  Myra and I drove the truck and Romay followed on the four-wheeler.

            Higher ground was the parking lot next to the school shop.  A number of other cars were parked there already.  Without thinking about it, someone parked their vehicle in the gate blocking the way for many of us to park our cars up and out of the water.  They had locked the doors, taken the keys, and left town.  We parked our truck and four-wheeler just down the hill on the highest spot we could find.  We hoped it would be enough and walked back to the house.

            “Wow,” Romay said in disbelief as she looked where the truck had been parked in our driveway.  The river had made its way into our front yard and washed out half of the drive.  Had we waited any longer, the truck would have been stranded.

            Water kept pouring in, the town’s emergency siren sounded like an air raid warning and then everything went eerily silent.  The city had shut off the diesel generators whose humming was just interwoven so strongly into the background fabric of noise that we no longer noticed it until it wasn’t there.

            I began grabbing lose propane bottles around the yard and strapping them to trees to keep them from floating away if the water should get that high.  I shut the house’s propane off as well as the stove oil.

            “I think we should go check in at the emergency shelter,” Myra said, and we walked back to the school.

            “We have flights coming to pick up people who would like to evacuate now,” the mayor announced to a group of us standing in the parking lot.  “If you want to go, come and put your name on the list.  Just people, no pets.”

            “You and Romay are going,” I insisted.

            “What are you going to do?” she asked.

            “Kemper and I will stay here and keep an eye on the house,” Galena was and is a great community, but there are always a couple in every community that make the rest of us keep an eye on our stuff.

            Concern was evident on her face.

            “We’re going to be okay,” I forced a smile.  “Things are going to work out.”

            The road had a foot of ice-cold water running with a slow current when we walked back to the house to get bags for the girls.  My feet went almost immediately numb in my running shoes.

            Sometime during the day, Myra had the forethought to cook a meal, “There is a plate of brats on the kitchen table.  It should be enough for you and Kemper for quite some time,” she said.

            The girls hugged the dog and we trudged back to the school while he waited back at the house for me.

            At the boat that would take them and a half-dozen others out to a waiting bus at the dike, we said our quick good-byes.

            Myra ended hers with, “You two boys be careful.”

            It was an order.  And then, they got in the boat and were gone.  I walked back to the house.

            “Well buddy,” I said to the dog, “it’s just you and me now.”

            He looked up at me with his big brown knowing eyes that didn’t require words to express what he was thinking, “We’re going to be okay.” 

            Kemper and I sat on the porch in the warm sun watching the water go up. 

            “Well Kemper, it gets past the fifth step on the porch, and we head for the boat,” I explained the plan as he looked me straight in the eyes, “after that the water is over my chest waders.”

            Then I began addressing the only one who could do anything about the situation, “God,” I said aloud, “we need a little miracle here.  Please, please bring this flood down.”

            Almost immediately I watched the water recede an entire step on the front porch.  It dropped almost faster than it had been going up and I began to dance with the dog on the porch.

            “Thank you, Father, thank you, God!” I yelled looking up to the sky.

            I looked back down to the water and saw the recession stop and the water begin creeping back up the stairs.  It had gone down one, but in half the time it had taken to do that, it came back up two stairs.

            “Hey, that’s the wrong way, God,” I pointed out.  “It’s supposed to be going down.”

            I ran inside and threw on waders and shoved a brat in my mouth and gave one to the dog.

            “Here we go, buddy,” I encouraged stepping down the porch and into water that was now only an inch below the tops of my waders. 

            Kemper followed and immediately began swimming behind me toward where the boat was parked and floating above the trailer (we had given it some slack and tied it off to a tree earlier).  I climbed in over the transom, put a hand behind the retriever’s head so that he could leverage himself aboard.  Kemper, true to form, stood next to me as he shook off the ice-cold water from his short polar bear plunge.

            We tried to get comfortable as we watched the water submerge the snow machine that I thought I had parked high and dry.  And then the water went up and over the motor of the go cart that I had just changed the piston and cylinder in the day before, and it continued to go up the steps, stopping one before the very top.

            Unbeknownst to either Kemper or me at that time, Myra and Romay had shot through a road that was actively overflowing with a steady current full of pick-up sized icebergs cruising through the current.  The standard teen, Romay caught the action on the camera of her device.

            They had safely made it to the bus, rode to the airport, and were awaiting the flight.

            “The state has called off the flights,” the RAVN representative announced

            “What?” Myra asked in disbelief.

            A number of ladies started crying.  It truly had been a classic evacuation of women and children first.  The men of the town had sent their wives and kids out with the understanding that a flight was on its way.  Some state representative had decided that it was not enough of an emergency to send a plane.

            Word was relayed back to the mayor who responded, “Send the plane, we’ll figure out how to pay for it.”

            When the water had surged up the steps of our porch, it had also surged up the sides of the dike.  A handful of local heavy equipment operators were waging their own counter assault on the advancing river which was licking at the top of the dike and threatening to spill over, breaching, and flooding onto the runway completely eliminating that means of escape and leaving the women and children with no high ground to run to.

            RAVN sent the flight, and our girls (Kemper laid claim to them as well) flew safely to Anchorage.  The national guard followed suit and between that evening and early the next day, all the women and children were moved to safety.

            Though spongey on top, the dike miraculously held.

            Back at the boat, I was fighting a dog who was simply listening to his hunting instinct.  Every rodent for the surrounding five miles must have been taking refuge in our yard as he and I watched lemmings and voles and mice swim by looking for their own piece of high ground.  Kemper whined as I struggled with his collar keeping him out of the frigid water.

            “Stay in the boat,” I yelled each time a water-logged rodent swam within tempting distance of the dog.

            I shared a sandwich from the emergency supplies with the dog to keep both our minds off of things.  I found his food and put it in a bowl in the bottom of the boat.  He and I floated for six hours.

            “Kemper,” I said, “This is dumb.  We’re sitting twenty feet from a perfectly dry and comfortable house.  Let’s go back inside.”

            I turned the key on a boat that had not been fired up yet that year and listened to the old four-stroke Honda jump to life.  I think the both of us smiled as we motored out the driveway and then turned into the break in the trees to motor back up the yard and to the front porch.  We tied off and went inside where we shared another brat from the kitchen table and moved to the living room where we could keep track of the river’s progress based off of how much of the pig house roof was showing (thankfully that year’s pigs had not arrived yet).

            I opened a book and began to read.  I could only handle so much watching the river level go up and down and pleading with God.

            “Woof!” Kemper yelled at me.

            “What the heck?” I yelled back, “I’m the only one here, you don’t have to yell.”

            “Woof!” just as insistent.

            Kemper never really had to bark at me for me to know what he wanted.  He just looked at me and told me with his eyes.  Evidently his bladder and bowels had reached the point where just looking at me was not enough.

            “You’re just going to have to go in here, man,” I said, “there is nowhere else.  It’ll be okay.  I’ll clean it up.”

            He ran to the door to make his point.

            I followed him and made what I thought was a stronger one: I opened the front door and gestured to the yard.  “Do you see anywhere to go poop right now?”

            Kemper jumped into the boat and barked again.  Off toward Alexander lake I watched a sixty-foot spruce snap off as a bus-sized chunk of ice went shooting up the lake.

            “You’re kidding?” I asked refusing to move from the deck.

            “Woof!”

            “I’m not taking you to dry ground just to poop.  You can go on the porch.  I’ll just kick it off into the water for you.”

            “Woof!”

            “For crying out loud,” I griped climbing over the bow after untying.  “This is dumb.”

            But we were doing it.  I was on the search for dry ground so that my dog who refused to go in the house had someplace to poop.

            We motored across the road and into the once small lake and pointed toward the school that I hoped was still dry.  I approached a fellow teacher’s house and took extra care when I got to where I figured his truck was parked.  I didn’t want to hit my prop on the cab of his truck.  I looked into the water and saw it about a foot down as we passed.

            A block from the school, and the water quickly got shallow.  I tied off to a fire hydrant and coaxed Kemper into the water behind me.  With the way the current was, and me being unsure what I might hit, walking seemed to be a safer way to go the last block.  We needed a fully operable boat.  I watched Kemper tense up as he jumped into water that was up to his belly.  I kept him upstream from me so that he would not be swept off of his feet and away from me.  It was this experience that caused him to walk wide from water for a full year.  He was a born swimmer and avid duck hunter, but fast-moving liquid ice was not his idea of a good time.

            Kemper happily stepped out on the first dry ground he found, lifted a leg, and grinned as he urinated for a solid two minutes.

            We walked into the school yard and were greeted by Mrs. Smith who must have been one of the only women left in town.  She was tending to a pack of dogs who were all calmly lying next to bowls of fresh water.

            “Can he stay with you for a couple minutes?” I gestured to Kemper.

            “Sure, happy to see you guys,” She replied.

            “Stay here, buddy, I’ll be right back,” and I walked into the school.

            The library had been set up with a table containing water, and some easily grabbable foods.  I snagged a pilot bread and some water for the dog and I. 

            “Jason?” a familiar voice said from behind, “is that you?”

            I turned around.

            “Man, we are so glad to see you alive. You were one of the last people we had to account for.”

            “We’ve been doing fine.  Kemper and I have plenty to drink, good food in the house.  We had to come find dry ground so that he could pee.”

            One more pilot bread with peanut butter for myself and then I prepared one for my friend.

            “Here you go buddy,” I said tossing him the pilot bread.  Kemper had been patiently waiting next to a fresh bowl of clean water and snagged the cracker out of the air as it came to him.

            “Thank you,” I called over my shoulder as Kemper and I headed back to the boat and home.

            Kemper and I made the same trip twice a day for the next couple of days just so that he could go to the bathroom.  We would check in, I borrowed a satellite phone and called Myra and Romay to let them know that we were doing okay, and then we would head back home.

            On one of the days, I got curious how a friend was doing down-stream on Alexander lake.

            “We should go check on Kenton,” I said to an agreeable Kemper as we hopped into the boat. 

            We drove the boat up to the intersection that led to where the bridge had washed out.  20 yards away, the water was till ripping through, trees that were over 20 inches in diameter were swaying in the current just hoping a chunk of ice would not come too close.  I slowed the boat to a crawl just as the prop struck the road.

            “Be careful,” I heard Myra’s voice say in the back of my head, and then it fast-forwarded to a scene at a church with Myra explaining to the mourners gathered that she had told me to take care of myself after she left.

            “This is dumb,” I said to Kemper and he looked at me in agreement as we turned the boat around and headed back to the relative safety of the house.

            Time passed.  John Riddle II paddled by in a canoe and we had a brief conversation.  A man in a boat piled with what he explained as all he had left motored by the house.  Later I watched a boat going the other direction fully on step.  I yelled after it as the wake struck the house.  The water had stopped going up a 2x4 width from coming into our house.  The river did not require the help of some random boat to lift it up and over the remaining dry one and a half inches.  I needed no wake signs.  We visited the school off and on.

            “Bruce, what happened to your hand?” I asked a fellow flood defiant (victim sounds too passive).

            “I shot a muskrat that had climbed up on my porch,” he started.  “I was going to eat him.  When I went to pick him up, he latched on to my hand.”

            “You should get that looked at,” I grimaced.

            “It’ll be fine,” he answered while putting peanut butter on a pilot bread.

            When Kemper and I got back to the house, a Black Hawk helicopter circled us.  I waved, but didn’t want to look too happy to see him because I didn’t want to see a man connected to a cord coming down to pick me and the dog up.  We’d made it this far, we’d see it through to the end.

            Finally, during one of our visits to the school so Kemper could pee, we were given the news.  The ice dam at Bishop rock was beginning to break apart and we would be begin to see the water go down over the next twenty-four hours.  Kemper and I headed for home and docked the boat at the front porch.

            “Okay, we need to stay awake and aware,” I gave Kemper the plan.  “We need to get the boat back on the trailer before the water goes too far down.”

            Kemper yawned in agreement.

            “You’re not helping,” I chided.  “We’ll just go lay down for a couple of hours.”

            Kemper and I pretty much had not slept for two days.  I read, he took cat naps, no offense to dogs out there, but we never truly rested.

            He crawled up into the bed next to me and we closed our eyes.  I woke up to the sound of running water.  It was dusk when we had gone to bed, but now it was full on bright morning and my muddled mind was struggling to place where I had heard that sound before.

            “Crap, Kemper, get out of bed,” I shot up and headed for the stairs, “we gotta move the boat.”

            The dog came crashing off the bed after me and we dashed down the steps.  The boat was propped at a 30-degree angle with its rear sitting in the water and the bow jammed into the front porch.  As much as I pushed and Kemper encouraged, the boat just wouldn’t budge.  I slammed my booted foot against the bow and it finally broke free, knocking a wedge out of the porch that would act as a daily reminder the of the flood rest of the years we lived in that house.

            The dog and I jumped into the boat, started the motor and drove back out of the front yard, into the ditch, onto the driveway and as close to the trailer as I could get.  The water was rushing out of the yard at this point like someone had pulled the plug on the washtub.  As I pulled up to the trailer, the water level dropped to below that of the trailer bumpers.

            “Close enough,” I decreed as I shut of the engine.

            Compared to Noah’s 30 days and 30 nights, our three had been nothing, but Kemper and I had some idea of how he must have felt when he stepped onto dry… soggy land again.  Kemper walked over to a tree in the yard and triumphantly lifted his leg.

            Firewood was scattered over the entire yard, empty fuel drums were floating in the pond behind the house, the boat was sitting off the trailer, our freshly planted garden was completely gone.  Kemper and I smiled at each other.

            “Well buddy, we made it.  We’re okay.”

            And he agreed.

Isaiah 43:2 (NIV)

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you.  When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.

Bishop Rock from above.  This is the 90 degree angle in the river that is notorious for causing Galena's flooding.

A day before the flood, we were putting in brand new garden beds for that year's planting.

At this point, we thought we had dodged a bullet.  Ice was bank to bank, water was high, but everything was moving.  Eight hours later, everything changed.