In my Sunday School, I learned how God replies when it seems the whole world turns against us. The Divine sees such adversity and counsels, “Know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good.”
This doctrine has definitely proven true for me, and what I lived through fifty years ago after the Teton Dam sent a torrent of water flowing down the Teton and Henry’s Fork River channels.
That day I was moving sprinkler pipe on the Egin Bench perched above the Henry’s Fork River bottoms. 1976 was ‘pre-smart phone,” so I was listening to a Walkman and had heard no news of the catastrophic failure of the dam. What I saw was a wall of debris carried by a blanket of flood water sweeping through the river bottoms.
I was 15, and my immediate concern was for the small herd of cows and calves grazing the river bottoms below me. From that moment, lessons “for my good” poured into my life. They include:
Lesson #1 — Cows float. I watched roughly 10 cows and their offspring engulfed by water. But they weren’t “buried,” they were “lifted.” The irrigated field I was working on jutted out over the river bottoms and became a peninsula in the sea of floodwater. The entire herd was lifted and swept out of sight as the torrent flowed around the peninsula.
The massive tragedy unfolding before me petrified my body. I was unable to move, turn my head, or even blink my eyes. A thousand electrical currents bombarded my cerebrum, leaving the rest of me paralyzed. This trance broke only when a calf started bawling behind me. Turning, I saw the herd that had been in front of me one second was now crawling up out of the water that had eddied to the west side of the peninsula a second later.
Lesson #2 — Material wealth is fleeting. Plano, the rural community outside Rexburg where I grew up, sits atop the Egin Bench and was mostly spared in the flood. But my father’s office at the college, and all of our family vehicles, just happened to be in Rexburg that day. The homes of all my close friends were flooded, their bikes, snowmobiles and guitars (the “wealth” important to a 15-year-old boy) disappeared.
The son of a high school science teacher recently hired by Ricks College, I went from being the poorest kid in my “clique” to instantly being the lone survivor still owning a bicycle. Physical possessions are fickle, I decided. If they define you today, they can ruin you tomorrow.
Lesson #3 — No secret is forever safe. After the floodwater receded, I was part of a youth group volunteering to recover personal belongings from flooded homes. Lifting the mud-coated mattress in another teenage boy’s bedroom revealed a stash of magazines the kid obviously hoped would never be discovered. Hiding “secrets” is futile, I learned.
Lesson #4 — There is a reason we love our moms. Standing next to us as we lifted that mattress was the kid’s mom. Her reaction was priceless: “Oh, my! Look what the flood washed in.”
Lesson #5 — Some things are important, some not so much. Those who know my public side think I live, eat and breathe politics. But that is superficial. Engraved in my memory was the June 13th meeting at Ricks College’s Hart Field House, where Governor Evans and Secretary Andrus assured everyone, “it’ll all be fine. The government did this, and they will pay.”
The two politicians could barely be heard. It was the first community gathering after the flood and, in many cases, the first chance to compare experiences. Everyone was talking.
And then the next speaker was announced. Spencer W. Kimball, President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had been invited to address the gathering. Immediately, you could have heard a pin drop across the street in the Manwaring Center. President Kimball reminded everyone to be of good cheer, for “all these things shall give thee experience.”
And so I learned that politics, as important as it can be to my day-to-day life, pales in comparison to faith, where timeless truth is taught. I hadn’t really thought deeply about that before the flood. That day in June, the lesson was so obvious even I couldn’t miss it.