The Ark

The rental car has that faux-new car smell and for a moment Ellen’s mind wanders as she thinks about how much she wished she had a new car. When was the last time she had had a new car? Had she ever? James is outside pumping gas. They are at the last gas station north of the Iowa border in Owatonna, Minnesota heading south.

“Do you want something?” James calls as he heads to buy a snack.

“A Coke and some Twizzlers,” she says. He nods and leaves the pump filling up.

The last time Ellen was in Owatonna, Minnesota was also the first time. She was a freshman in college and taking the Greyhound from Northfield to Waterloo, Iowa to spend Thanksgiving with her grandmother, Mimi. There was a bus transfer in Owatonna and Ellen read the bus schedule wrong. The next bus was at 6 PM, not 6 AM, so she spent twelve hours killing time at the Happy Chef, with less than $2.00 to her name.

She is happy to keep this visit brief.

Ellen scans the radio for something she thinks they would both like. She settles on old school rock and roll and leans back, soaks in some Stevie Nicks and takes a deep breath of the cool air-conditioned air. It’s hot and bright outside, like only southern Minnesota can be.

James is back and hands her a Coke. He cracks his open and takes a deep sip. Ellen scans the horizon. Her brow furrows.

“James,” Ellen pop out her door, half in, half out. James is looking at the pump. “The sky looks weird.” James doesn’t turn around. “James, James, honey, did you hear me?”

He nods with his back to her and pays for the gas. He repeats obediently, “the sky looks weird, I heard you.”

“It’s not right.”

He shrugs, hangs up the pump, shuts the gas cap cover, and climbs back in the car.

James turns on the car and the continue south on I-35.

“The sky is pea green,” Ellen insisted.

James says nothing but reached over to change the radio, he scans and skips until he lands on a football game.

“We’re almost there,” James says.

“You are listening to Iowa Cyclone Network!” the announcer says brightly.

They are just a few hours from Woodward, Iowa, and the family farm. It is true, they are practically there.

Ellen is taking James to meet her father for the first time. James is English, as in from England, and probably wouldn’t have come to Iowa for any other reason, but they have been dating three years now and are moving in together. Ellen decided it was time. Her mother died a year to the day from the day she met James and Ellen hadn’t been back to the farm since.

Lydia’s death was not pretty. She was only 59 and according to her oncologist she had cancer everywhere.

“If you were to take your mother,” he said, “and chop her up into little itty bits, and biopsied each of those itty, bitty bits, you would find cancer cells in every single one of them. I can’t explain why she is still living.” Zero points for bedside manner, dude.

She was dying for ten years, a fact her ex-husband reminded her of often as if to suggest she was somehow going to come out of this alive. Eventually, after an excruciating last month, she died. Ellen and her brother sat vigil, taking turns keeping her as comfortable as they could but by the end it became too much. Eventually, the hospice nurse suggested morphine patches to control the pain.

“If you do this, she probably won’t wake up,” the nurse cautioned. Ellen’s brother looked to her to make the call. Their other brother wasn’t there yet – work responsibilities kept him in Kansas City. There was no more waiting. She was in too much pain.

“Put on the patches,” she said. Walking out of the bedroom she broke down.

“What’s wrong?” her father asked.

“I just killed my mother.”

Ellen hadn’t been back since the day after her mother’s funeral. She wasn’t ready to face the sorting, and remembering that visit required, but now she had no choice. There was business to do – introducing her fiancé to her father, and meeting his fiancée, Corrine. The real reason for the trip was Corrine had decided they were moving to Tampa in a month, and she was already jettisoning their mother’s things. She reassured Ellen she would never get rid of anything of value, but Ellen was not so sure.

“They are not even married yet,” Ellen complained to James.

“Don’t you think you’re being a bit hard on her?” he asked.

“Dad was telling me how impressed she was that she got thirty dollars for a red Fiestaware sugar bowl I gave my mother.”

“And?”

“That sugar bowl is worth $450!”

Corrine was the divorced next-door neighbor, twenty years younger than her father, and conveniently at the ready with casseroles, potato salad, bagel bites, cinnamon rolls, and anything else a grieving seventy-year-old widow would need even before her mother had died. She wasted no time ingratiating herself with Dick, Ellen’s easy-going, hardworking father. To be fair, she was not alone. There were other widows lined up as Lydia lay dying, “Just coming to check on Dick,” or “Just wanted to drop this off for Dick, “Poor Dick.” Not even one of them asked about Lydia.

Lydia had not an easy woman in good health and she was not well liked in their small town. She chafed at being a farmer’s wife, hailing from the big city of Waterloo, the college educated daughter of professional musician, granddaughter of a Greek and Latin professor. She met Dick the year after she finished her master’s degree. Her friends were all married off and Lydia, now 24, was hearing whispers of her being an old maid.

Ever the romantic, Ellen asked Lydia, what drew her to Dick.

“He was the only good-looking single man in town.”

Lydia was a first-year schoolteacher working in Toledo, Iowa, a small central Iowa town of less than 2500 people, and Dick worked three jobs after finishing his stint in the Army Air Corps wrapping up the tail end of World War II. In addition to working his father’s farm, Dick shoveled grain at the local granary and pumped gas at the only gas station. “Little Dickie” was pumping her gas one day and fell hard. For their first date he asked her to a local Lion’s Club dinner by leaving a note on gas station stationary under the windshield wipers of her car at the local elementary school where she worked. How could she refuse? Forty-five years later, she was never satisfied and frequently advised Ellen to “do better.”

“Your father,” she said, carefully enunciating the words, “is brown plaid. Brown plaid is boring and boring lasts a long, long time.” Ellen looked horrified. Lydia continued, “Don’t get me wrong, brown plaid is good, brown plaid men don’t cheat, they don’t leave, they don’t gamble, they are always there, but do better for yourself than a brown plaid man,” she advised.

Chief among Lydia’s complaints was the fact that Dick was a dreamer, but he never did anything about it. Despite being a farmer, like his father, grandfather, and great grandfather before him, Dick always talked about sailing the world.

“How are you going to sail the world when you haven’t ever learned to sail?” The biggest body of water near their farm was Lake Okoboji and they never had enough money to visit there, but that did not stop Dick. Dick was a well-regarded wood worker, so he had a plan. In an act completely counter to his nature, ordered (without even telling Lydia) subscriptions to Sail, Wooden Boat, Practical Boat Owner, and Cruising World. In the months that followed he spent hours pouring over them and making plans. Out in the barn, a classic one-hundred-year-old barn of weathered gray wood, Dick collected the materials for his first major act of defiance. He was building a boat. He dubbed it the Ark, because even he knew it would never see an ocean.

The plan was to build a 36’ sail-boat with room to live aboard – two sleeping berths, a galley kitchen, a toilet/shower room and a six-foot cockpit. He was a man possessed and worked long into the evening building the frame that he would lay the fiberglass on top of. Ellen was far away in Seattle raising her sons while this was going on, but even though he was over the moon, he was very discreet. During her weekly calls home Ellen would try to pry information out of him.

“Does Mom know about the Ark?”

“Nope,” he said.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

“Great,” he said. No details.

Each week the same questions and each week the same answers. Lydia was oblivious.

Lydia never went to the barn, but as she lay dying she whispered to Ellen,

“When I am gone, take your father sailing on his boat.”

“The sky looks really weird, Ellen insists, “seriously, It’s not right.”

James turns up the radio to better hear the game.

“Shhh,” he says, suddenly invested in the Iowa State football game.

“Tom” the announcer cuts in, “They’re saying that there is a tornado warning in northern Hamilton County.”

Ellen and James pass a sign saying “You are entering Hamilton County.”

“Oh shit.”

“They are saying all non-essential personnel need to evacuate. Are we non-essential personnel?” the announcer laughs nervously. Now it is raining and windy and the sky is no longer blue.

An emergency broadcast alert interrupts to telling everyone in the following counties to seek shelter and they begin a long list of counties, including Hamilton.

James pulls over at the first rest stop, Love’s Travel Stop, and they head inside for coffee and pie. The restaurant is mostly empty, and they watch the wind and rain waiting for their coffee. Instead, the waitress comes back empty-handed.

“We need you to come with us.”

She leads James and Ellen to a trucker’s shower, a space less than 10x10. They stand in the shower, the only place to sit is the toilet which has no lid and look nervously at the others – a family with a high school son, the waitress, two cooks, the manager, and two retired brothers traveling the US visiting small cafes along the way. You learn a lot about people when you are stuck in a trucker’s shower waiting for an F3 tornado to pass.

Thirty minutes later they get word the tornado has passed. It touched down in a small town six miles southwest. Everyone starts to leave the trucker’s shower, but the manager stops them. Unfortunately, there is another tornado headed in their directions and they need to stay put.

“That’s Woodward,” Ellen says, frantically trying to get a cell phone signal.

“There’s no coverage in here,” says one of the cooks as he taps the walls. “Too thick…that’s why we’re in here,”

Ellen tries texting, ‘message failed to send,’ ‘message failed to send.’

Forty-five minutes later Ellen and James are back on the road with nothing but blue sky around them.

“We need to get to Dad’s.”

Woodward is wasteland. Everywhere there is devastation. A semi-pick-up lays on its side with sticks and ephemeris piled up like the landfill. Houses imploded like a bomb went off. The roof of a gas station is twisted and hangs half precariously. Ellen bites her nails, blinking back tears. She dials her father’s number, over and over, but the phone just rings and rings. No one answers.

Heading south on out of town when the road veers left Ellen scans the fields for sight of her father’s farm, or the barn. Nothing is there, nothing. All gone, except a tall white sailboat hull cresting the horizon like the ocean her father would never sail.