Everyone loves a comeback story, one of those made-for-television, inspirational tales of resurrection from the ravages of destruction. Cheering crowds, heroes thrust onto shoulders, heartfelt hugs all around.
Real-life comebacks, though, can be arduous, heartbreaking ordeals, burdened by self-doubt, impatience and the realization that whatever you’re coming back to probably will fall short of what it once was.
And so it is in the clobbered, shrunken rural speck of Oakville, now more than nine months into its own halting comeback from last June’s floods that devastated parts of Iowa, including this scrappy town. The levee protecting the town and its 439 people was no match for the rampaging Iowa River, which found its way onto the second stories of some homes and left a legacy of mold, mud and destruction in nearly all of the 180 or so homes here.
The rusty street sign on River Road, at the eastern edge of Oakville, warns outsiders that this is a “Neighborhood Watch” community, and “Our neighbors are watching.”
That is, the ones who haven’t given up and moved on.
“It’s going to be a long time, maybe two or three years, before we can breathe in and say, ‘Whew, we made it,'” said Benita Grooms, the mayor who has lived in Oakville since 1953. “And it’s going to be pretty slim pickins for a while.”
Grooms can’t say for certain how many people live in town, but she knows she’s sending water bills to 50 addresses and that 60 kids get on the school bus every morning for the trip up Highway 99 to Wapello.
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“Hopefully we’ll be a community again,” said Grooms, 77, whose words and manner provide equal measures of determination and a firm recognition of reality.
The arrival of the spring flood season last month on the Red River border separating North Dakota and Minnesota is a reminder of the often-severe obstacles that stand in the way of comebacks. Fargo and Moorhead have begun their cleanups, the second major effort since the big flood of 1997. In Cedar Rapids, where 10 square miles of the city were under water last summer and 5,400 homes and 700 businesses were damaged or destroyed, officials say it will take 10 to 15 years to recover.
Oakville is isolated, midway between Burlington and Muscatine and not on the way to anyplace. It’s a collection of 17 muddy streets and about that many blocks. The bank is still closed, and so is the only bar in town. Grooms doubts it will reopen. There is no retail in Oakville, unless you count the construction supply shop. For-sale signs dot every street.
But it’s home to people like Kirk Swanson and Rhonda MacGuire and Joe Whitaker, who — through state and federal assistance, their own work and the help of volunteers from all over the country — are taking back their property, if not their town.
Darin Swanson, who owns an excavating company in central Indiana, has made many trips to Oakville since November, staying 10 days at a time to help his uncle and his two teenage children get out of their FEMA trailer and into their newly rebuilt home on East River Road. It’s a light blue wood-frame, and it’s one of the best-looking houses in town.
Whitaker, standing in the bright yellow living room of his home that once had 6 feet of water in it, said he “would have run out of money a long time ago if it weren’t for volunteers” who came from Louisiana, Oregon, Michigan, Indiana and elsewhere.
“We have a big bus that came from Pennsylvania. This is their second time here and they plan to come back at the end of May,” Grooms said.
The people who took the mud out of Grooms’ home, a refurbished Presbyterian church built in 1897, came from Mississippi, she said. “And they had gone through Katrina. … It’s been amazing.”
All bets about the future may be off if Oakville gets flooded out again. Whitaker said he’ll take his three boys and leave if the high waters return.
Grooms said Oakville’s comeback will be smaller. She expects maybe a quarter to a third of the town’s residents are gone for good. No matter what, she and her husband, Cody, intend to stay.
“We got married in 1953 and this has been our whole married life, from the Fire Department to church to community groups” — and two terms as mayor, one marked by the hundred-year flood of 1993 (which the town barely escaped) and a later term marked by last year’s gusher.
“They’ve asked me not to run again,” Grooms said, expressing no surprise or disappointment. “They think I’m a jinx.”
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