The Volunteers
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Robert Frost
My granddaughter, who is a BYU student, has been staying with us off and on since the Utah Governor ordered a “Stay Home, Stay Safe” proclamation in the face of the COVID 19 pandemic, and all the colleges in the state went online overnight. For a while she lived in her empty apartment after her roommates headed home because she had a good job–which disappeared within a week or two because of quarantine restrictions on restaurants. So lately, she has taken over an empty bedroom downstairs with her computer and her books. A couple of weeks ago, she sat next to Daughter #1 on my bed and pinned ties onto the masks we were making as part of the LDS Relief Society ProjectProtect’s call for 5,000,000 first responder masks in five weeks.
“Kind of like turning downtown Salt Lake City streets into rivers to save the city from flooding overnight.” I said over the noise of the sewing machine.
“What?” she said.
Oh yeah. Now that I’m older, I’m getting an inkling of what if means to “see the end from the beginning”. Not that I am acquiring any God-like powers. It’s just that my brain is starting to squish all my memories together, so they seem to lay on top of each other instead of in a nice orderly timeline separated by months and years. I had forgotten that her father was still in middle school back then.
Our family was in church on the Memorial Day weekend of 1983. Son #6 wasn’t even born yet. Sons #s 1, 2, and 3 were no doubt sitting reverently on the bench next to me because they and their dad routinely went to sleep during the speaker section of the meeting. Daughter #1 and I wrestled with the rest. But everybody’s heads popped up when the Bishop interrupted the speaker to make an announcement. Downtown Salt Lake City was about to engulfed by floodwaters from the 700 inches of snow-melt in the Wasatch Mountains (more than double an average year’s accumulation) which was triggered by two or three days of unusually warm weather. The water was roaring its way down the canyons, damaging everything in its path—threatening businesses, LDS church archives, homes, and public buildings.
The Bishop of our ward said the Prophet was asking every able-bodied male, aged 12 and older to shuck off their Sunday best, grab work clothes, gloves, shovels, and head downtown where huge mounds of sand were already being dumped to fill what eventually would amount to more than 300,000 sand bags. Rumors flew that that it was going to be a miracle such as this valley hadn’t seen since the seagulls devoured the crickets more than 100 years ago.
And in fact, it was. That Sunday afternoon ten thousand men (and women) converged along State Street and 1300 South to 600 West (among others) to build rivers with sandbag shores which guided the flood waters into the Jordan River and out of the city. Volunteers filled bags, stacked them, and then built temporary walking and automobile bridges across flooded streets. Many worked all night, into the next day–then came back again after only a few hours of rest.
My husband and Son #1 (the only one of my sons old enough to answer the call) pulled into our driveway more than 12 hours later. They were almost unrecognizable, covered in layers of sand and mud. All up and down my street, I could see lights burning till well into the wee hours as my exhausted neighbors and their sons washed off the grime and fell into bed.
Men who taught school and worked in hospitals, men who drove bulldozers and backhoes, men who farmed or raised cattle, men who ran grocery stores, men who sang in choirs, men who spent their days in front of computers, and men who never in their lives had spent so many hours with a shovel–all of them worked shoulder to shoulder to save a city. And they did.
The next week my husband and I took our children downtown to see the rivers in the streets. The little ones squealed with glee when they saw someone kayaking and later a couple paddling a canoe. We watched while a fisherman pulled a trout out of the river that had once been 13th South. As we walked along the banks of the sandbag rivers, I remember being overwhelmed with what good people can accomplish when they work together.
Just three weeks later, the rivers were gone, the sandbags emptied, and the streets were once again filled with cars. My granddaughter listened to Daughter #1 and I tell the story–then we looked up photos of the flood on Google. Quiet for a few moments, my granddaughter continued placing one pin after another to hold the ties which when finished became the growing stack of masks sitting next to her on the bed in my room. “It’s happening again, isn’t it?” She said. Another miracle.