Rabbi Gerson considered my questions, smiled at me and said, Liz, stop looking for good omens. A deep frown pulled my chapped lips down my face. I tied up my jeans with a brightly-colored scarf. I had lost a pant size, and lacked a belt. My clothes were a mismatched selection of whatever was not ruined or hopelessly filthy. I had magenta streaks in my frizzy brown hair. I try to picture myself, the way I looked back then, as a teenage girl during the time of the Big Flood. I should have been cheered up, but at that point in time, I could only see a band of luckless, but ridiculously optimistic, primates floating on the open sea. People on the decks of the other boats managed to shout greetings and wave. I looked around and saw our companion crafts, Devil’s Island, Bayou Drink, Moby Dick, Sisters of Mercy, and Mighty Duck, bobbing all around us. We hauled the battery-powered devices out of our storage shack and estimated that each of us would need to fill and empty the heavy things at least half a dozen times. In fact, our mission that morning was simply to take our wet/dry vacuums and get rid of the pools of water. His chapped lips were set in a stoic grimace. The rabbi’s untrimmed beard waved in the chilly wind. He wore a borrowed sweatshirt and baseball cap because his other clothing had been ruined weeks before. His dark pants had faded from being splattered and badly cleaned so often. Rabbi Gerson had on gym shoes, and they were soaked through. I wore flip-flops, and my feet were cold, wet, and blistered in a dozen places.
Little streams of water kept flowing around the rails and structures on the deck.
On the horizon, the water just blended into the gray sky. Choppy gray water stretched out in all directions as far as I could see. It had stormed the night before, and everything felt damp and clammy. I remember asking Rabbi Gerson about rainbows and omens one morning when we stood on the deck of Leah’s Folly, the little homemade boat that saved us from the Big Flood. Faced with recounting my family’s survival story, I feel mocked by the work of men and nature.
My nicely-mounted certificates and diplomas surround the window on both sides. It is all beautifully framed by my office window. I can see bands of color fade in and out against a slice of washed-out sky. I saw plenty of rainbows suspended over a horizon of murky water as I hugged the deck of Leah’s Folly during the time of the Big Flood. Years before the catastrophe, childhood friends showed me a Sunday school workbook that suggested every rainbow contained a promise that the world would never flood again. Fifteen years after the Big Flood, I still regard every rainbow with suspicion.
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