River Friendly, River Wild by Jane Kurtz.
Illustrated by Neil Brennan. (2000) Reading Level: Ages 4-10. 40 pages.
Simon & Schuster. ISBN: 0689820496.. |
The Red River Flood Inspiration for:
River Friendly, River Wild
by Jane Kurtz
Illustrated by E. B. Lewis
On April 17, 1997, my birthday, my family and I evacuated our house on
Lincoln Drive to the house of some friends in the south part of town.
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Many households and businesses were able to bounce back fairly quickly
from the flood. Neighborhoods close to the river, though, were pretty
much wiped out. Houses like this one, down by the dike, were up to
their rooftops in water, and most of our old Lincoln Drive neighborhood
will soon be gone.
We took a bag of clothes, each, thinking we would be back home within a
couple of days. I also took a few of the things I share with school
kids, since I was scheduled to go to one of the Grand Forks elementary
schools the next day, where students were going to show me the
illustrations they did of Trouble before the book came out.
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Two days later, on our oldest son's birthday, a knock came at 2:00 a.m.
and our family had to evacuate for a second time. This time, we drove
through the night to the little town of Walhalla, North Dakota, and
slept in the church where my husband had been doing some work three
days a week.
Two things that survived the flood were the family cat and a nativity scene -- both treasures that are cherished.
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| In the early summer, this was the view from our
front porch--sandbags and trash lined all the streets. As things turned
out, our family did not get back to our own house for about a month.
David, Jonathan, and Rebekah finished school in Walhalla. I sat in the
basement of a borrowed house and worked on revisions of a novel, Storyteller's Beads
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I also started to write poems about what we were going through. I
focused on some of the same advice I give to students about their
writing:
- Look for the details that really show what an experience is or was like.
- Use the five senses.
- Find unusual comparisons that will help pull the reader into the experience in unexpected ways.
The little square machine with a wide mouth scooches along and picks up
refrigerators and stoves. The big machine with a long neck lumbs and
swings and nudges garbage into the street and picks it up in its teeth.
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On Belmont Road, a huge yellow machine bends its neck and gobbles the old clay of the temporary dike.
STOP
working
They all beep beep beep
with a high yellow sound.
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Readers will recognize the sights and sounds of this huge yellow
machine in a poem "The Most Terrible Part" which was included in River Friendly, River Wild
I kept writing all through the mucky, yucky clean-up and all summer,
while my family and I camped in-between the upstairs of our old house
and a FEMA travel trailer parked in the driveway. In the fall, my
editor at Simon & Schuster read my flood poems and liked them.
Three years after the devastating flood the poems I wrote became a
published book, River Friendly, River Wild. Something good had come out of the turmoil.
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My family lived in this FEMA trailer
while waiting for a new home
to become available. |
I spent a lot of time hauling out
stuff that was ruined by the floodwater. |
The water in my son's (David's) room
was as high as the arrow pictured here. |
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