The Chinese Students Went Into the Iowa River

The Chinese Students Went Into the Iowa River in a stolen boat during the flood of 1993, launching it on the wet lawns of City Park, paddling over the baseball diamond, letting the small current tug them past the branches trailing near the children's slide, the top step showing, and over the tracks of miniature train, somewhere beneath the muddy surface, around the carrousel, the horses' manes and opened mouths in a windy gallop just above the waterline, then past the lower buckets of the ferris wheel, full, dripping, and because the students were fishing, enjoying the stillness, no cars along the flooded roads, and because they were remembering a river at home, wider and faster, crossed by anyone in any season, and because one leaned over to kiss the other, the third laughing, no one in the boat could clearly hear the undertow sweeping them out to the gut ofthe river, until it was too late, shooting them under the Park Street Bridge, under the footbridge, under the Iowa Street Bridge, people along the shore clustering together, flapping their hands, their faces like rain clouds, their words a wind that might have meaning, something like "swim to the shore," but out on the river, splashing and pulling, the voices rolled under so the students clung to the underside rim 80 ofthe now capsized aluminum rowboat all the way to the Burlington Street Bridge where hundreds of onlookers lined the streets and forty rescue workers cast out ropes and rings and launched a boat whose motor failed, the captain hauled up with hooks, while the sirens played their lonely song, red lights stroking the underbelly ofleaves, and on the other side ofthe bridge was the dam, its foam chopping the air— "No one survives that," said the quiet policeman after he clasped arms with the last student and pulled her up, teetering on the bridge's piling rushed with high water, garbage. "A close call," everyone agreed, the artist selling coffee from an outdoor cart, the stationery salesman on the phone, glancing out the window, chewing his nails, the woman jogging, pausing to talk with her neighbor, everyone saying, "Yes, they're Chinese." Kathryn Hall 81 ...