Iowa City…
It feels wrong to hear about all of this second hand. It feels wrong, not being there…
Our friends and family are safe, but still… I wish we could help. We’ll be there in two weeks but I wish we could go now.
Listening to the reports, and talking to friends who are spending their days out sandbagging, I’m reminded what an astoundingly tight community it is. What a special place.
Ach!
June 17th, 2008 at 8:54 am
I was wondering about your clan, your old home. How’s Gerry?
June 21st, 2008 at 7:55 pm
It’s cool. Damage isn’t bad in IC, considering. The muck is no good, but we have about 252 doctors per capita, so we’ll have the disease thing under control, I imagine. No one seems to have much sympathy for those who rebuilt, or built, in the ’93 floodplain; the rest will have some assistance but probably not enough to make them cavalier about more floods. Word is the new city manager is handling things well. Coralville will have problems for a while, though.
Mostly it’s expensive. Expensive here, which is no good because there’s so little industry beyond the university complex, but also no good because it’s a big knee to the state economy’s nuts. Which is no good when you have 20,000 undergrads with poorish parents trying to put themselves through college, especially while loans are hard to come by. Also no good when a small, but perceptible, chunk of the university’s non-tuition funding comes from state taxes.
It’s decidedly heartwarming, though, to see how everyone behaved throughout this thing. People really gave and thought nothing of it; worst I saw was irritability about traffic.