{"id":2110,"date":"2020-06-12T06:00:04","date_gmt":"2020-06-12T13:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=2110"},"modified":"2020-06-12T08:32:19","modified_gmt":"2020-06-12T15:32:19","slug":"tales-from-the-non-tour-credible-threat-trail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2020\/06\/12\/tales-from-the-non-tour-credible-threat-trail\/","title":{"rendered":"Tales from the Non-Tour Credible Threat Trail"},"content":{"rendered":"

First off, thanks to all of the fans who broke out of quarantine long enough to buy books, Credible Threat made it to # 40 on the USA list. We may have missed the NYTimes<\/em> list, but so what? Win some\/lose some. So thank you one and all.<\/p>\n

\"\"I\u2019ve been home again all this week, responding to emails, trying to get the next book to come to order, and mostly just waiting out lockdown. As of tomorrow, I will finally have my first mani-pedi since February. Hooray for Big Apple Red, and I\u2019m so glad Andy\u2019s Nails in Bellevue is finally open again!<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve also been corresponding with my family email group and, as it happens this week has brought to light a happy\/sad anniversary of some forty-eight years standing.<\/p>\n

When our folks pulled up stakes and moved us lock, stock, and barrel from South Dakota to Arizona, we didn\u2019t really look back. We returned there for visits, of course\u2014summer vacations, funerals, and weddings. Most of the rest of the relatives stayed put in northeastern South Dakota\u2014around Summit, Marvin, and Watertown, while some migrated to Rapid City in the western part of the state while others went so far out of bounds as to move all the way to \u2026 well \u2026 Minnesota. Two of my mother\u2019s sisters, my aunts Alice and Helen (aka Toots) and their families settled in Rapid where Alice opened a pancake house on the banks of Rapid Creek, the Little Red Hen, and Toots and her husband, Clarence owned the Lake Park Motel nearby.<\/p>\n

In June of 1972, my mother and younger sister, Janie, traveled to South Dakota to Milbank for my cousin\u2019s wedding which was scheduled for June 10. I was working a twelve-month contract on the reservation in 1972, so my going wasn\u2019t an option, but my mother and my younger sister, Janie went. So did Alice and Toots, my aunties from Rapid City\u2014Alice as a guest and Toots as the officially appointed wedding singer.<\/p>\n

The weather in northeastern South Dakota was fine. The weather in the western part, and most especially in the Black Hills, was not. There it had been raining for days. A new storm hit the area on Friday afternoon, and over the course of several hours it dumped fifteen inches of rain over the watershed that drained into Rapid Creek. Flash flood warnings were issued, but I don\u2019t think anyone had the slightest notion of how bad it would be. Early in the evening and with Toots out of town, Clarence and their eleven-year-old son, Steve, drove by the motel to check things out. With everything seemingly fine, they drove back home and went to bed.<\/p>\n

Shortly thereafter, all hell broke loose when the Canyon Dam upstream collapsed under the fifteen-inch onslaught that fell between 5 PM and 9. A huge wall of water came crashing down Rapid Creek. Clarence woke up, looked out the bedroom window, and saw houses with lights in them seemingly floating by. It took him a moment to realize that if they still had electricity, their house was the one that was floating. He got Steve up and dressed. Pithing minutes they were treading water in the kitchen. They tried climbing onto the floating fridge, but that was too precarious. At some point, Steve\u2019s right arm and head were trapped between the fridge and wall. Clarence managed to use a two-by-four to pry him loose. A few moments later, something hit Clarence and temporarily knocked the breath out of him. His sudden silence terrified Steve, but he came around and, in the dark, they were able to locate each other in the dark by waving their arms. Eventually they were able to find the door to the attic and climb up into that. They were dry up there but still not safe. Afraid they might be trapped inside and crushed if the house slammed into a bridge, they fought their way through the roof and climbed out. At some point the house caught in some tree branches long enough for someone to hear Clarence\u2019s whistle and come rescue them. Only later did Clarence discover that their house had never been properly bolted to the foundation.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Alice\u2019s son Stan, his wife, and their newborn who lived in a neighboring trailer park were also in mortal danger. They somehow escaped their floating trailer and clambered up onto the roof. They made their way to safety by jumping from roof to roof. Other people who remained trapped in their floating trailers ended up being crushed to death by waves of debris piling up against bridges.<\/p>\n

By five o\u2019clock the next morning, the water draining from Canyon Lake had passed through, and Rapid Creek was back inside its banks. The Little Red Hen was gone. The Lake Park Motel was gone, taking with it Toots\u2019s and Clarence\u2019s plans for early retirement, but thankfully no one in our family had perished.<\/p>\n

Naturally there was no phone service. More than three hundred miles away, Alice and Toots heard about what was going on, but as Mary and Kevin\u2019s wedding day dawned, they had no way of knowing whether or not their loved ones had survived. Together they made the decision not to tell Mary about the situation until after the wedding although I believe my sister, Jane, who had stayed over with Mary the night before actually spilled the beans. Toots is remembered to have said, \u201cSince I can\u2019t do anything about it, I could just as well sing.\u201d And she did.<\/p>\n

According to the National Geographic, the Black Hills Flood of 1972 in which 238 people died counts as the worst flooding disaster in the US in the last hundred years. The flood happened on June 9. The wedding happened on June 10. On Wednesday of this week, Mary and Kevin celebrated their 48th wedding anniversary, a happy and sad one both.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the thing. I believe my Aunt Toots was right. When things are tough and you really can\u2019t do anything about them, you could just as well sing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First off, thanks to all of the fans who broke out of quarantine long enough to buy books, Credible Threat made it to # 40 on the USA list. We may have missed the NYTimes list, but so what? Win some\/lose some. So thank you one and all. I\u2019ve been home again all this week, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33,5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2110","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-family","category-writing"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-y2","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2110"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2114,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2110\/revisions\/2114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}