Parkersburg Area Tour

On my way to pick up my daughter's yellow Lab, Izzy, last Saturday, I made a point to drive through Parkersburg, the town hit by an EF-5 tornado on Memorial Day weekend.

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The twister cut a path of destruction along the south side of town; this watertower stands undamaged a bit to the south of that area. (Something else I did notice, in connection with something I wrote about in a previous blogpost, is that that the same high-voltage electric line runs just south of Parkersburg near where this watertower is.......meaning the tornado basically followed that electric line all the way east to the Dunkerton area! At least, I presume it is the same line.) That pile of stuff on the left is ruined household appliances!

There was lots of clean-up activity going on........dump trucks and endloaders at work everywhere in the rubble. These photos aren't terribly good.......click on them to see them larger.

Notice the A-frame house in the photo below.........it remained mostly intact while houses around it were destroyed. The Waterloo Courier had an article about this........the shape of the roof offered nothing for the wind to latch onto to rip it away! (I tried to find the article on the Courier website, but without success....... click here to go to the WCF Courier archives for articles about the Parkersburg tornado.)

In the foreground below is a signboard spray-painted with "Lincoln Street".......that's how they label the streets right now.

East of Parkersburg, and just west of New Hartford, this road was washed out in the recent flooding of Beaver Creek.

Below are the damaged grain bins of Sinclair Elevator Co., east of Parkersburg, near the intersection of county road T-47 and highway 57. Floodwaters from Beaver Creek are still hanging around.

Now, this was just too unusual and lovely to pass by.......a random patch of colorful flowers on the ditch embankment on the north side of highway 57, just east of Parkersburg. There were no farmsteads nearby. Mostly, the blooms were "forget-me-nots".........someone would have to have planted them here sometime in the past. I wonder why........did someone have an accident here, once upon a time, perhaps......and these flowers were planted as a remembrance???

Oh, brother........we couldn't get through the day without seeing a storm, of course!! I first noticed this one as Izzy and I were getting set to head east on U.S. 20 from I-35. I thought, "No problem.......those clouds are far away to the south......nothing to worry about."

Ha! Little did I know........the further east I traveled on U.S. 20 (which, by the way, and to my dismay, had unusually heavy semi-truck traffic on Saturday because its the detour for I-80 due to the flooding near Iowa City), the closer my path came to intersecting with the storm clouds! To avoid the nasty-looking mess, I turned north on highway 14 and went through Parkersburg again, stopping to snap this photo on the slope below the curve south of New Hartford.

Then.........onward Izzy and I drove, keeping our eyes on the patch of blue sky which was our goal, to reach home there, "on the sunny side of life", beyond the border of the menacing storm clouds!!

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This is going to sound completely idiotic, but as I drove around, taking pictures, a dog beside me there in the pickup cab.........I suddenly was reminded of Robert Kincaid from the novel, The Bridges of Madison County. Of course, he was a photographer on assignment for National Geographic.......but, he did drive a pickup......and had a dog with him, I believe.......and survived mostly on Snickers bars, apples, and Coca-Cola........sounds good to me!! (I read the book years ago because the setting was in Iowa, the author being from Cedar Falls.) Eventually, I watched the movie, too, which was filmed in the vicinity of the covered bridges in Madison County, Iowa, near the town of Winterset. The movie was so-so, but there's one scene in it which I found absolutely gripping......when Francesca [Meryl Streep] is on the brink of jumping out of her husband's pickup and running to Robert Kincaid [Clint Eastwood]'s truck, which is leaving town for the last time.....!!! Oh, I'm such a sap.......my heart was in my throat! What did Francesca decide to do?? Read the book or watch the movie to find out!!)

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Back to reality.......my son just returned home from playing summer league basketball and informed me he accidentally tossed his retainers into the garbage can at McDonald's!!! Arggh! Well, there goes $200, and we'll have to make another trip to the orthodontist's office for impressions. My son will pay the bill himself, and hopefully learn a good lesson!