How the Spring 2007 Floods Didn't Ruin Everything I Own--But Almost Could Have

The first thing my father said when he heard about the flooding was, "God, Field Court must be a wreck."

He was a pragmatic man, particularly in the ways of home repair and maintenance, and we'd had a little flood or two of our own in a house upstate.

My childhood home was one of a little block of town houses on Field Court in Bronxville, NY, a quiet suburban community in Westchester County, a federal disaster area if ever there was one in the wake of the spring floods of 2007. It's rare that our sleepy little town would ever make the news, but we were pretty good at getting coverage in flood season, due to our school and its surrounding environs-including my aforementioned childhood home-being based, apparently, on a patch of land maybe one step up from that swamp where the Muppet lives in "The Empire Strikes Back".

I grew up knowing of the region's potential to flood over, of course. What kid doesn't marvel with awe and glee at photographs of his school flooded to levels encouraging the immediate construction of an ark? So what if those floods were back in the 1940s. It could happen again. Right? Right? There was something about the stark black-and-white quality of the old historic pictures that gave them authenticity and weight, and God knows I wouldn't have minded missing middle school orchestra a couple of times due to torrential flooding.

As it stands, the worst floods we ever got would just take out the power and require some sump pump action in the basement for an inch of the wet stuff. I recall one day of school being cancelled my junior year due to flooding. Actually, the new physics teacher's car got washed over in that storm. That was pretty cool.

When my mom would complain about the basement getting flooded, I'd always worry. You see, my basement in that house was my little play area, my room of the house to myself. Sure, I had a bedroom, but it was small and well-removed from everything; I used it to sleep and to get dressed. The basement was where I worked and played and created; it stored my computer, books, games, papers, projects, collectibles and my piano. In short, a real flood in that basement would have effectively deprived me of non-wearable material goods.

The 'real flood' never came, and we left that house after I left high school, and moved into a second-floor apartment safe from watery terror. (When News 12 Westchester, "as local as local news gets", sends vans to your town, it means something interesting happened.) From there we had nice views of the Bronx River as it would occasionally flood, turning the baseball field into kayak-worthy lakes. You know, typical small-town stuff.

The storms of spring were the worst in recent memory. Bronxville School got on the news for being closed for weeks on end. We're talking entire classrooms being wiped out here; the orchestra room with all its instruments, my old locker, all the kindergarten rooms, all buried under yards of water that ruined everything it touched.

Small-town gossip spreads quickly, and I learned how much water my old basement on Field Court got.

Six feet.

An inch taller than me.

Somehow I lived in that house and kept all my stuff in that basement for about fourteen years and nothing that bad ever befell me; all the great flood of 2007 ever did to me was treat me to some nifty views of flooded fields. These sorts of things are so random, I've found; I guess I've learned to appreciate when I'm lucky enough to dodge these bullets. To appreciate when bad stuff happens to other good people.

Also, when I buy my own house, don't put the good stuff in the basement. Not even just the kids' good stuff. It's not his fault the property near the water table is cheaper. (And yes, we did try to warn the buyers that the place tended to flood. Evidently he didn't seem worried.)