Operation Bass Save

Operation Bass Save

Okay, so the house. First off, while most of the houses around us had the spray-painted “X” ours did not. They must of looked in, saw we were renovating and nobody lived there and moved on. Thankfully, all the “X”s had a 0 in the body spot. If you don’t know how those work, I’ll pass it along, ‘cause I’m now someone who does know. Generally, and it varies a bit, the idea is the left side of the X carries an abbreviation of who checked the house, the top is the date when the house was checked, the right indicates if the house was entered or not and if there are structural problems, and the bottom is the number of bodies found. Again, a big “0” at the bottom of the “X” on all of the houses on my block.
We could see the water line on the front of the house. There was six or seven feet of flooding and it had peaked about two or three feet up from the floor level. I couldn’t get the key to turn in the front door lock, so I went around the back of the house. From my backyard I could see some houses that had been opened up by falling trees – you can see right into one because its back wall no longer exists. A tree came down in the backyard of the place next to mine, but thankfully (for me) it fell the other way. I got the key turned in the back door, but the water had swelled the door shut. After much kicking, I finally got it open.
So I was in the midst of moving from my apartment to the house, and had boxes and boxes and boxes of books and cds and dvds and kitchen stuff in the house. All on the floor. If you’ve ever wondered what happens to books when they spend a couple of weeks floating in toxic water, I’ll tell you. They turn into sludge that glues itself to the floor and then grow so much mold you can no longer tell what book they used to be. And they stink. Wow, do they stink. Of course, all the boxes and bags the books were packed in totally disintegrated, so the books, the cds, everything, floated about the house and came to rest wherever they were floating when the water finally receded. I put most of the boxes in the front room, and yet there were still books and bottles in the back rooms.We weren’t really equipped to spend any time there, so Arwen and I tromped through the house, quickly taking pictures. Since everything was on the floor, everything seemed ruined. The last thing I had done before leaving locking the house (five weeks and a day before I was able to get back) was to put the bass guitar on the stove which had just been delivered the day before and wasn’t even out of its box. The bass case was covered in mold. I opened it right there and, unbelievable, the bass was fine. Perfect. I grabbed it and we got the fuck out of there.