Biking Against the Apocalypse

Sorry for the lack of updates; it is not because I have been on vacation. Though it appears that I have an unexpected vacation of sorts next week (perhaps I'll have time to get around to that Dirty Kanza report). As you all probably know by now, the rivers in Iowa are unified and rising up against, well, against everything. On Friday we all heard that the University of Iowa would be closing early and that we were not to report back to work until June 23rd. Crazy.

Although that Friday was a gorgeous day, the Iowa River was still rising quickly. So I changed into my grubby clothes and went down near the library to set up some sandbag walls. After three hours, my arms were done, so I came home and had beer.

The next morning was equally beautiful and the river had risen almost two feet in the night. So I went back down to the University to help out. It was hectic. A score of us were right on the water rapidly building a wall to prevent the Facilities Building from getting soaked. And we got it up. Hooray for us. After nearly four hours of solid work, though, my body was very tired.

I figured I had earned an easy bike ride, so I called Steve, who had also spent the last two days volunteering to save some much loved local businesses, and we decided to ride some gravel roads. Just before we left a large consolidated storm was developing north of Iowa City. No biggie, it looked like it would stay north (and the weather people said it would, too) so we went south towards the sunshine.

The storm slowly followed us, though. We would occasionally feel sprinkles, and then ride out of them. But we never really reached that elusive sunshine that was oh so close. And after 35 minutes or so of riding south we turned west and saw that the clouds were actually closer than we thought and looked downright tornado-ish.

Our thoughts were confirmed when Robin and Cody called almost simultaneously to inform us that big hail was falling from the sky and the tornado sirens were blasting. Robin urged us to go inside, and while I agreed that it was a good idea, we were kind of on the wrong side of the river to get to any sort of shelter. But since we were on bikes we decided to check out the closed bridge into the town of Hills anyways. As we rolled towards it the fields on either side of the road started to turn to water. They became veritable lakes, and we were only on a tiny stretch of pavement. It was at this time that I saw a series of puffy clouds coming down from the dark blue sky towards the ground. I asked Steve if that is how tornadoes form. He said maybe and brought up that moment in the blockbuster hit Twister when they were driving on a road similar to ours and saw some things in the air that should have been on the ground.


Lucky for us, there was no flying debris. And double lucky for us, we were able to cross the bridge into Hills. Once there we re-assessed the situation and decided to go into Iguana's for Negra Modellos and chips and salsa. It was a nice break, and the beer certainly calmed my nerves.

As the TV weather stations showed the storm moving east-southeast, we decided to ride west a bit before turning north and riding back into Iowa City. For the most part, the storm did not look quite as ominous as it had earlier. But that didn't last long. The wind seemed to be shifting, the temperature was dropping, and we were getting farther and farther away from the friendly blue skies and fluffy white clouds off in the distance. When we turned north we resigned ourselves to the fact that we would get very wet. Not a big deal, but when large bolt of lightening came down a short ways in front of us, we turned back around to re-think our plan.

None of our new plans were very good, though. And we had no idea if any of the bridges we normally ride over would even be open. Thankfully in the few minutes while we stopped to rest and discuss, the storm moved quite a ways to the east. So back north we went. As we crested a hill we saw not only a dry bridge, but also the universal sign that everything would be OK.

From this point on the roads were wet but we could see our shadows. This made us happy and we rolled into town as fast as our tired and somewhat out-of-shape legs would carry us. To aid in our momentum we rolled through a few stop signs and crossed Highway 6 before the light turned. Our luck, or good deeds, or karmah, or whatever, had run out, cuz the cops caught is on that one. Or was it? Steve took care of the smooth talking while I tried to sit and look pretty. And though the cop knew running lights was bad, she didn't really seem to understand bike laws. We decided not to push it. I got home still a little jittery from the whole event and decided another beer was in order.

I snagged these photos from the Press-Citizen and Des Moines Register websites, both of which have been doing a wonderful job of covering the flood. None of the pictures were taken near where Steve and I were, and none of them look quite as bad as the skies above us did, but they give you an idea.