The Spillway

There is a spillway that contains the water between the Coralville Reservoir and the Iowa River below the dam just outside of Iowa City, Iowa.  The Corp of Engineers sits in their tower above the thundering water, maneuvering the levers to change the flow of the water to the farms and towns south. I still go to the Corp of Engineers' website and monitor the water level occasionally.  I compare this year's water level with the record highs and lows.  I check the level against the floods of 1993, when every river flooded and the engineer's released all the water they could, but the water built until it washed over the top of the dam, Iowa City flooded, and my sister's house was swept away.

I can measure the distances of my life by the spillway.  My dad used to take us there when I was little.  We'd stand at the railings, staring down at the water that crashed through the ridiculously small spillway, spraying anyone who stood too close.  He'd tell me about the power of the water-- that anyone who dared to jump in would be swept under and down stream-- dead before they ever came up. He'd tell me lies-- about school buses that went in, whole cars full of people.  I know now-- should have known then-- that a school bus would have to be going pretty far out of its way-- intentionally out of its way-- to get anywhere near the spillway.  And the channel was so narrow that the bus might have a chance of hopping the spillway if they got up enough speed.  I don't think anyone ever died there.  If they did, I never heard about it.

One of the first things I did when I got my driver's license and a car was to load it up and drive out to the cliffs on the res that was cornered and allowed to escape so thinly through the spillway.  We had to park on the side of the road and trek through the woods, dragging blankets, beer, and small grills along.  We'd come out of the woods on a rocky cliff overlooking a turn on the river where it was dammed up into the reservoir.  In low water, the cliff was thirty feet above the water, the shore below gray and sharp.  A jumper had to get a running start to clear those shores below.  I never jumped off the cliffs-- not until the year of the floods, when the water was so high it wasn't a jump so much as a step.  I swim like a fish, and I'd jump off anything into clear water.  But I had a fear of water I couldn't see through.  I'd heard of too many kids who'd took that dive into dark water and cracked their necks on rocks they couldn't see.  And in the dark, after the sun had cleared the trees on the other side, a diver would disappear from the air into the black water, and other than a splash no one would know for many minutes that they were under and not coming back up.

 But that never happened.  We sat on the rocks and watched the divers until there was no one left willing to fall into the icy night water, and we'd pack up and trek back through the woods, a completely foreign land in the dark. We'd come out of the woods hundreds of yards from the car and we'd have to walk down the berm of the highway to get back to where we'd begun.

I traveled with a strange mix of divers: kids from small towns who'd come to Iowa City when their parents booted them out when they were barely teens.  Kids who'd grown up on the res, knew just by looking at the darker gray on the rocks whether the water was too low for diving, whether or not the corp was letting the water out or damming it up higher.  Gang bangers from Chicago who'd come down with their parents, some, but mostly come because Iowa was just next door and an open market for drug dealers who were organized and had unlimited product to sell.  We'd all stumble through the woods together, sit on the hot rocks and watch the pink sky, jump into the water and sit, shivering, drinking Old English beer from thick bottles.
Someone would have brought some weed and know how to roll it and would pass the joint around, many hands held up to keep the wind from knocking the fire off the top of the lighter.

My dad kept a speedboat at the Jolly Roger Marina on the res-- an eighteen foot Crestliner that I learned to drive when I was fourteen. When we came in from speeding up and down the reservoir the man who owned Jolly Roger would pull the boat up the ramp with an old tractor.  The man was young, and his wife had a kind of cancer that caused small cysts to grow over her entire body.  Her hands, her face, her eyes swelled with the gray cysts. The last summer I went to Jolly Roger before my dad died and we took the boat to my sister's barn I saw her again. Her cancer was cured and I was stunned. She was beautiful.

My high school boyfriend took me to the spillway once.  I was fifteen and he had a new car, and he drove me out and we stood with the water spraying against our faces and the sky full of stars. They hung low and were textured in a way they never are in the city.  He took me home after, and soon we broke up.  I was too young and not very interesting, I'm sure. But when our lives converged again he took me back to the res, sat next to me on a bench at the deserted fall beach, asked me to tell him what had happened to me while he had been gone.

My daughters petted their first cat fish there by the spillway when we were in Iowa visiting.  An old black man had been fishing straight into the churning waves, pulling up fish after fish.  He held the cat fish still and told them to watch the whiskers, cause there was poison in there, and he smiled but didn't correct them when they told him how cool it was that he'd caught this ugly pet.

My sister had a house down by the river, miles below where the Corp of Engineers had dammed it off. She lived on a dirt road with no lights, her neighbors on one side a lesbian couple who I loved until I found out they were also cousins, and then I didn't know if I was allowed to love them or not.  Down the other way a house where a woman had been found in winter, naked, dead in the snow.  At the end of the road, deep in the woods, a man with mean dogs that meant you had to carry a stick if you took out walking.  We'd ride in intertubes from semi truck tires we bought at the tire repairman's in the river, then stand up and walk out, dragging our tubes, when it got boring or the bugs came out. But in 93, not so long before I left town for good, the rain up north got too heavy, and the engineers did their best to dam up the water and save the homes and farms below, but the water would not be held, and it foamed up and over the dam, washing everything near the river away.  My sister lost her house, and her cat, though the dogs swam to land.  We took her stuff out on a canoe we borrowed-- as much as we could.  The government took that land back when the floods receded and said no one could build there anymore.

I had spent my childhood swimming at the beach, waiting for the day I had the strength to swim all the way out to the buoys that marked the swimming area, then the next year shocked by how close those buoys actually were.  They weren't far at all. I swam in secret coves off the back of my dad's boat and dug my feet into the three inches of loose mud at the bottom. But when I came back years later with my daughters, excited to take them there and let them swim, I didn't hardly remember the place anymore.  It was small, and hot, and the water smelled like dead fish and scum. I remembered my sister's cat lost in the flood, and the way the water had slapped softly against the brick shower houses and toilets on the grass behind the beach when the roads opened and we could drive out and see what damage had been done by the big flood. I told my daughters they could go in, but not to put their faces in the water, to not swallow even a drop of it. The sand was rocky and the grass was brown and hard on the feet. The spillway looked small and old, and I couldn't imagine what had ever drug me there, had ever made me love the place at all.