"Reed, Robert - OurPrayers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

Only they aren't Indians, I learn. Someone bends close and says, "They're from
Bangladesh." Then he repeats himself, for emphasis. "Bangladesh. You know? Where
it floods like this every year?"

In accented English, I hear the word, "Tragedy."

The small dark men seem to understand better than the rest, although it doesn't
stop them from doing their jobs. Their cameras beam home images of destruction
and despair, as if to prove to their pitiful homeland that even rich Americans
can experience Nature's horrible extremes.

March was wet, but April made March seem dry. In memory.

Then came May, which was easily worse. I remember a puffy-faced weatherman
reporting afterward that we had three arguably blue-sky days in all of May. We'd
already exceeded our average annual totals in precipitation. But June stayed
just as cheerless, just as strange, the jet stream deciding to come over our
heads, steady as a highway, delivering Pacific moisture to a band of six
midwestern states, every night beginning and ending with barrages of heavy rain
and hail and wind and more wind.

My sister's house was lost in June, little warning given. Her family escaped
with the proverbial clothes on their backs, and when I last talked to her, she
was trying to live with her in-laws in Greendale. Seven people in a trailer, a
marriage straining like...well, like every levee image you can devise...and all
she said was, "If only the rain would stop. That's all I want. Why is that too
much to want?"

At some point -- I don't know exactly when -- I began to watch every weather
forecast with an obsessiveness and a growing frustration. Waking in the middle
of the night, I'd flip on my bedroom television and turn to the Weather Channel,
waiting for that glimpse of the radar with its map and neat colors and the
time-lapse sense of motion. Great glowering red storms would form, then march
along until mid-morning. Then the summer sun would lift the humidity, new clouds
forming, the sticky remnants of last night's storms seeding fresh ones, the
pattern scarcely changing from night to night.

Our city's levee was the best, we heard. Tall and thick, and tough. And our city
administrators treated doubters with scorn, as if doubt itself could undermine
all the good Federal dollars that went into the long embankment.

By July, the pattern was clear. The worst of the rains fell on a narrow band
just upstream from us. Our climate made tropical people wilt. The upstream towns
had drowned, and the giant reservoir downstream from us was filled to
overflowing. Then it did overflow, the Army Corps of Engineers having no choice
but to release the excess water, letting it slide over the top in order to save
their fragile earthen dam.

By then the world was watching us. The Midwest in general, but us specifically.
Our dramas were featured on every news program, in practically every nation.