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13 After the Flood On June 27, 2000, Pat Owens, Ken Vein, Lisa Hedin, and other city and Corps officials gathered near the banks of the ≤ed ≤iver. Owens placed her silver shovel halfway into the gravel near the ≤iverside Park dam and posed for pictures. The next day her first and last mayoral term would officially end. In the two weeks following her defeat, she was presented with even more awards from organizations outside of Grand Forks, even from the city just across the bridge. The city of East Grand Forks gave Owens a ceremonial key to her hometown. North Dakota’s mythical navy, created by former governor William Guy in the 1960s to honor those who display unusual skill at managing state water resources, made Owens a member. fema offered Owens a job traveling across the country to disaster-affected towns and offering guidance, which she accepted. The Corps’ $360 million dike construction project, finally approved by the city of Grand Forks, was slated to begin the next day, and would take an estimated four years to complete. Pat Owens would not stick around to see it finished. It could sometimes seem that each day to which the people of Grand Forks awoke was really just part of one Joycean day—one that dawned the day the ≤ed ≤iver broke through the dikes in 1997, a day that is still unfolding , filled with considerable pain, and with considerable hope. Jim and Mary Lien moved into their new house after accepting the city’s buyout offer in January 1998. They deliberately built their new home outside the Grand Forks city limits, on a lonely, poorly lit two-lane county road. From the outside, their elegant white split-level house seems the perfect home, with its generous lawn and its two-car garage. Inside, too, it seems ideal: spotless plush white carpet, roomy kitchen, vaulted ceilings. 235 But the Liens can’t help but think about their demolished home on East Elmwood, the one that had fewer than ten years left on its mortgage. Jim, who is sixty, anticipated retiring in five years. Now he has a twenty-sevenyear mortgage. “That’s what I resent,” Mary said. “I resent being this age, and being as calculated as we were, as educated as we were, and how well we had things planned out. And now . . . ,” she trailed off. “I mean, our parents could stay in their home. We were hoping for the same.” The Liens anticipate having to move out of their new house when Jim retires, perhaps just as the antiseptic aura of the newly built house is shading into a feeling of home. “We’re starting to get memories in this home,” Mary said, “and now I am starting to get attached to the home. I don’t know if I’m going to want to leave when we have to.” Mary laughed. “And it’s no big deal; I know a home is a material thing . . . but if you can have only one ‘thing,’ shouldn’t it be a home? It’s going to be hard for me to move again,” she said. “That might be my demise.” On a chilly day in September 2000, Kelly Straub and her children drove down to the old house in Lincoln Drive, rolled up their sleeves, and dug nearly two thousand bricks out of the hardened mud surrounding her home. Kelly had just won the buyout she had been demanding for more than three years. “I’ll be darned if I didn’t get everything. I got the $25,000, got to keep my insurance money; I got it all.” Because her home had been in the footprint of the proposed dike, the city said it needed to acquire her property before starting the project; this was not exactly correct. The dike could have been constructed with Kelly’s home in the floodplain, and once it had been built, and Kelly had found herself on the wet side of the dike, the city wouldn’t have had any obligation to purchase her home. It could have, finally, condemned it, and let the federal government deal with her. So the buyout of Kelly’s home—the concession to her demands—could be seen as an act of generosity or, perhaps, penance. Most likely, though, it was a way of getting a thorn out of their side. Kelly and her children piled the bricks into the back of their car and...

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