The Flood
/What if we’re scared at the wrong moments?
Flooding in University City, Missouri in 2022 | PHoto courtesy Mary Ann Gaston
“Before my eyes, across two different states, what was ‘safe’ and ‘not safe’ became hard to distinguish.”
This is a story about fear.
It makes sense to be scared when we’re facing danger. But what happens when disasters occur in unexpected places?
In this episode, Marina Henke takes us from a desert in Utah to a suburb in Missouri and explores how a flood changed her attitude toward risk in the backcountry.
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Welcome to Out There Podcast. Our stories are written for the ear, so for those able, we recommend listening while reading along. Transcripts may contain minor errors; please check the audio before quoting.
VOICEOVER: Hub and Spoke audio collective.
WILLOW BELDEN: Hi, I’m Willow Belden, and you’re listening to Out There, the podcast that explores big questions through intimate stories outdoors.
Our next season is set to launch in the spring. But in the meantime, we’re going to be releasing several bonus episodes this fall and winter. This is the first of the bonus episodes. It’s a story about fear, and why we experience fear where we do.
It goes without saying that the outdoors can be dangerous. There are wildfires. Floods. Injuries. But what happens when disaster occurs in an unexpected place? What does that do to our fear? And how does it shape our ability to find joy?
Marina Henke has the story.
MARINA HENKE: There's about to be a flood.
I think about floods a lot. For a while, I was terrified of them. I imagined what they would look like, where they might be, what it would smell like. How there's nothing and then something, all at once.
As a teenager, I spent most summers in the Southwest. That's where I learned about flash floods. This was red rock country, with slot canyons and narrow crevices. Even just 30 minutes of rain can turn a dry riverbed into just a really deathly current. Out West every year people die from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You learned to read the skies. To not camp in certain areas. To always be wondering when and where water could fall.
And then the summer would end. I'd come back home to the Midwest with its green trees and lazy creeks, parks with half a hill of trees that we'd call forests. In Missouri it actually rained all the time. Huge torrential downpours with thunder that would rattle our old kitchen windows. But you know when something’s so regular, you stop paying attention to it? In my mind, flash floods just didn’t happen in Missouri. I had no reason to be scared of them. That fear, it was tucked away until I went back to the desert. A place where things are dry until they are not.
The desert was a place I fell in love with, also all at once. I was a kid, going to camp, seeing prairie dogs for the first time. Learning that ponderosa pines, they smelled sweet, like vanilla. I’d fall asleep to lightning storms and watch the sunrise every morning from a sleeping bag. And it’s not that I was never scared. Especially when it came to floods, we learned how dangerous they could be. But I think as a teenager, that risk was kind of thrilling. I kept coming back.
Slowly, though, during that time, that fear of flash floods — really of risk in the backcountry — it grew.
On this night, several years ago, I’m in Utah, the southeastern corner of it. The sun's just starting to set. The clouds are thick and full of moisture. It’s me and a group of girls. We’re on a backpacking trip. I’m just old enough to finally be in charge, even though man do I still feel young.
And I am terrified it's going to flood. I came to the Southwest that summer armed with my usual hesitations. This wasn’t the land of Midwestern gentle downpours. But as we inched our way deeper into red rock country, that fear, its volume just turned way up.
We finish setting up camp. It's on this shallow incline of a mile-wide canyon we're hiking along. And it's just about to rain. Technically, I know we're safe. I’d learned by now, how to pick a good spot. There's not any huge downpours in the forecast. But I can't eat all evening. I can barely put up with our campfire songs. We go to bed. And sure enough it starts to rain.
MARY ANN GASTON: I'm Mary Ann Gaston. I'm 76 years old.
MARINA: Mary Ann lives in Missouri. She speaks softly, but she's not shy. She was a nurse manager for years. She's exactly who I’d want on the other end of a phone call at the doctor’s. And in July of 2022, her house was about to flood.
MARY ANN: I knew that they were saying we were going to have heavy rains and, you know, to expect flash flooding. And I thought, well, you know, I knew I'd had maybe four inches in the basement once before. And I thought, ‘I can do that.’
MARINA: Mary Ann lives at the end of a curving street that's at the bottom of a hill. There's a stream that runs behind her row of ranch houses. You can't see it from her house at all.
MARY ANN: I mean, I've known that it was there. When we have heavy rain, I can hear it. When we don't have heavy rain, I can smell it.
MARINA: On this quiet street in Missouri, it started to rain.
MARY ANN: So a little bit before 4 a.m. that Tuesday, July the 26th, I got a phone call from my neighbor who's next door. My son was here, and he has — he had — a Honda Ridgeline truck. And she said, “The water is getting up really high under Chad's truck. I can try and move it if you want me to.”
And I said, “Well, he's home.” So I woke him up, and he went out the door, and, you know, there was no way to get down the steps. There's a little stone wall that is in the front of my house. And the water was high on the sidewalk, and he came back in, and he said, “I can't get to it.” And he went around to the basement door, and then he said, “Oh, mom, you won't believe the basement.”
MARINA: Can I just say this is what terrifies me about floods. It's that refrain I heard again and again in the Southwest: There is nothing and then suddenly there is something. And that something is water. It’s so much of it. Enough to kill you. I know this is entirely not logical, but I always think that with fires, you can just put them out. They can disappear.
Back in Utah I'm in my tent. It's hot. I'm trying to sleep. I can't. Because I am so convinced it is going to flood. Water is dripping onto our tent. I think maybe if I see it, I'll feel better. So I get up, and I open my rain fly, and I stand outside. I try to think of it like those soft rains I love in Missouri. But it doesn't work. I'm alone in the night under just a little moonlight. And all I can imagine is this basin we're in filling up with water like a big bathtub. I think of us sloshing around. Our tents floating to the top, our sleeping bags and pads a big sopping mess.
MARY ANN: So I went down and I just got halfway down the stairs and I could see about a four and a half foot geyser shooting straight up out of the sewer drain. Just looked like Old Faithful, it was just like... And you could hear this rush. And I have this video of the water just bubbling up. So much water. I actually called 911 because I thought we were going to float away. And the lady said, “You know, we're trying to get people out of cars and people out of homes. Do you have a higher level?” And I said yes. And she said, “Go to your higher level.”
MARINA: In Utah, there’s just a bit of moonlight peeking out from the clouds. It's damp, and it should be beautiful. I go back to bed. It keeps just raining so gently. But my heart is racing. I can't take a deep breath. I'm lying there thinking about all the water that's trickling down into the canyon that we're in.
MARY ANN: We could see it now starting to seep under the front door and starting to seep under the sun porch door. And that's when we went upstairs. We retreated to bedrooms. And I had on the TV because I wanted to see what the weather was doing. And after about 10 minutes, of course, the router was under, underwater. So that all went out. And so I said to him, I said, “We need to pack because we're not going to be able to stay here.”
MARINA: It gets light in Utah. I wake up, and everything's somehow fine. The kids break down camp. I keep looking up at the sky.
MARY ANN: As it began to get light, it was just amazing. I mean, the house was totally surrounded by water. I looked out. We were, there's a dormer at the top of the stairs, and we were, had the window up and we were looking out. And I kept seeing something in the water, and it was moving. And I finally decided it was a person. He was swimming and he had a backpack he was pushing.
So I called to him, and I said, “Do you need help?” And I said, “Are you okay?” And I said, “You can come in to my first floor.” But I said, “There's water and there's electrical, you know, things are plugged in and I don't want you to get shocked.”
MARINA: We start to hike back to our cars. There’s just a light drizzle at this point. We cross a stream where the water looks like chocolate milk. It's up to our knees. In my head, I have a countdown. Three hours until we're safe. Two hours until we're safe. Please don’t flood. Please don’t flood.
MARY ANN: I have photos around 6:30 where the water is receding in the first floor, and then by 11 o’clock we were outside. But at some point I measured the waterline on the garage, and it was four and a half feet. I mean, all of the contents in the house, in the living room, the couch, the chair, the bookcase where I had my grandson's toys and puzzles and books and craft items, and it had dumped over. And all of that was, you know, on the ground now, wet. If it had a motor or it wasn't wood, I lost it.
MARINA: In Utah, we get to our vans. It didn't flood. We're loading up our gear, the kids are piling into the back seats. But I still hear myself snapping at everyone to go faster, to stop with the games. I'm still thinking: let's go, let's go, let's go.
MARY ANN: So the whole neighborhood was, you know, people were just out like almost like a zombie apocalypse. It was a disaster zone, and you could barely thread through the street because of the dumpsters and the tow trucks. And then, then the belongings all started, you know, coming out. So, you know, the front yard was piled with everything that, you know, you, you had.
MARINA: A flood did not happen that day in Utah. We'd come to a hillside on a canyon that had clumps of sagebrush and prickly pear cacti.
MARY ANN: There was a fireplace screen in front of the fireplace. There was a nice tan-ish gold chair and a half over there in the corner, there was a little trunk.
MARINA: And we'd left a hillside on a canyon that was unchanged. It had clumps of sagebrush and prickly pear cacti.
MARY ANN: And as you can see, we're sitting here with an antique desk, there's a coffee table over there somewhere. And some lamps, but that's it. You know.
MARINA: Sometimes I think we're scared in the wrong moments. I came back home to Missouri. There's no more red rock, just leafy green trees and heavy Midwestern rain I know to expect. This was years before Mary Ann’s house flooded. And, that summer in Utah had done something. I stopped camping after that. I’d dream about flash floods, worry endlessly about taking kids out into the desert. Missouri was safe, the desert was not. All those things I’d loved about the Southwest — they didn’t stack up to the way my mind, it would just scramble everytime I imagined another season out there.
MARY ANN: Every time we've had rain since I'm over here, the morning after. And the first thing I do is, you know, I'm down to the basement to see, to see what happens.
MARINA: Several years passed from that backpacking trip in Utah. I thought about floods less, but only because it had been so long since I’d spent time in the landscapes where I learned about them. Life was good, but sort of flat. I’d dream of red rock, sometimes obsessively look at photos on my phone from those years.
And then, Mary Ann’s house flooded three blocks from my childhood home. I didn’t know it had happened, didn’t even know to be scared.
In the days after, I drove around her block, looking at the piles of stuff, looking at the trails of mud. This wasn't red rocks or buttes or mesas, but this? This is what I'd always imagined. People walking around with glazed looks on their face. In shock.
Some neighbors packed up their belongings. The flood had destroyed their home beyond repair, or maybe they just couldn’t imagine living on this street anymore.
MARY ANN: It's really eerie to be here in the house now, because there's no one around, you know. It's eerily quiet. And I said to my son last week, “It just kind of feels like a ghost town.”
MARINA: Insurance agents arrived, flood maps were redrawn.
It wasn’t all at once, but I could feel something in me begin to crumble. What if bad things happen in beautiful places AND bad things happen on paved streets with ranch houses in the suburbs? It hadn’t flooded in Utah — hadn’t even come close. Before my eyes, across two different states, what was “safe” and “not safe” became really hard to distinguish.
And somehow, it brought a relief that I did not expect. Mary Ann had woken up and her house had filled with water. It could happen here, it could happen there. I began to feel restless, like I’d been living in this flatter world for no good reason.
Not long after Mary Ann’s flood, I returned to the desert. I’d forgotten the dryness of the air — the way that the dust can feel soft on your skin. I felt like I was a kid again, like I was falling in love with the desert all over again. But it was a more mature love. I was tentative, I looked at the skies, I felt a fear of what I knew could be true.
One afternoon white clouds began to stack on top of each other. I knew the desert — knew that they would darken until they turned black, until it rained. It poured for an hour, left huge puddles on the dirt roads.
That night, I stayed awake in my tent for a long time. I stepped outside, under the moonlight. I thought of floods, and risk, and fast moving water. All those things still existed in the desert I was in. But they existed in Missouri too, with its gentle hills and green trees. There was beauty here and -— yes, there was still fear. But for the first time in a long time, I could hold them both at once.
WILLOW: That was Marina Henke. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she works as a podcast producer. You can find her on Instagram @marinaclairehenke or at her website, marinachenke.com.
As for Mary Ann, she’s back in her house again. It took nearly six months to finish all the repairs.
If you enjoyed this episode, please share the link with a friend. We’re always eager for new listeners, and your recommendation is our best form of advertising.
Coming up next time on Out There…
JENN HESS: I was the only girl at this race. It was outside of Minneapolis, Minnesota in like 91, 92. And I was the only girl, and I was very shy at the time. And boys made fun of me ‘cause I had a pink bike. I was the only girl. And I got so like frightened that I just went home. I didn’t even ride, didn’t do the race, didn’t do anything. And from then on, I walked away from bikes.
WILLOW: Tune in on November 30 for a story about the gender gap in mountain biking. We’ll explore why certain sports are still SO male dominated, and we’ll visit a mountain bike clinic in Wyoming that’s trying to change the status quo.
MOUNTAIN BIKER: Oh my gosh, OK.
OTHER MOUNTAIN BIKERS AND COACHES: You got it! You got it, you got it. Yeah Christie! Nice! [laughter]
WILLOW: Out There is a proud member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of idea-driven independent podcasts. One of the other shows in the collective that I think you’ll enjoy is called Mementos. It’s about the objects we keep, and the stories behind those objects.
I was actually just listening to one of their episodes last night. It’s from a couple of years ago, and it is just delightful. It’s about this guy from Wisconsin, who ends up taking in a little parrot named Cricket. And it’s just a wonderful story. It’s the kind of episode that just has you smiling to yourself the whole time you’re listening.
You can find Mementos wherever you get your podcasts, or at mementospodcast.com.
Today’s story was written, produced and sound designed by Marina Henke. Story editing by me, Willow Belden.
Out There’s advertising manager is Jessica Heeg. Our audience growth director is Sheeba Joseph. Our interns are Katie Reuther and Maria Ordovas-Montanes. Our ambassadors are Tiffany Duong, Ashley White, and Stacia Bennet. And our theme music was written by Jared Arnold.
Special thanks to everyone who is supporting Out There with financial contributions, including Mary Seim, Eric Biederman, Phil Timm, Doug Frick, Tara Joslin, and Deb and Vince Garcia. If you’d like to make a financial contribution of your own, just go to patreon.com/outtherepodcast or click the link in the episode description.
That’s it for this episode. Have a beautiful day, be bold, go outside, and find your dreams.
Credits
Story and sound design by Marina Henke
Story editing by Willow Belden
Music includes works from Blue Dot Sessions
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