I saw the pictures of the floods and I couldn’t believe it. Only days before I had been watching a YouTube walking tour of the very streets that disappeared completely under the breached banks along with all of the villager’s doorsteps. The videos of rushing water carrying cars and kissing the underside of high bridges are not as painful to me as those of the obliteration of thresholds between the inside and out. There were warnings but in the end it all happened more quickly than anyone was prepared for. The water moved from the sky in an enormous volume to the river which swelled at an enormous speed. It spilled in every direction and in this village where two arms of two rivers intersect, the streets became new tributaries. I imagine that some watched the crest slip past their doors but that some just couldn’t stomach it. There was an extended story about the many elderly people that had to be rescued from their old age homes. Firefighters carried them one by one through doorways that suddenly looked short because of the high water. Each was wrapped in a blanket and placed in the rear of some farm equipment that had been hastily converted into a rescue vehicle. A tractor pulled them away and eventually they were loaded onto a charter bus in a location where there were presumably still roads. Liz said that she had permitted herself to Google the risk of flooding to our neighbourhood. It’s high but our relationship to the possibility is tenuous because it hasn’t happened to us yet.

Around the same time that I watched the village walking tour, YouTube recommended some videos about Isamu Noguchi, presumably because I had been admiring all of the available variations of his Akari lamps online and the hidden forces that follow me all over the web had noticed. I watched one of Noguchi installing Water Stone at The Met. A monolith sits on a bed of stones as though it is a dry river bed. A bowl structure is carved out of the top of the monolith suggesting an intention to catch rainwater but the work was conceived specifically for this room at The Met. It was never intended to be outdoors but I think Noguchi wanted the outdoors to be present in this way. Or perhaps that he wanted us to know that it could be.

In the video which dates from 1987, an enormous crew are installing the work, and everyone is looking to Noguchi’s studio manager for approval at every step. Noguchi is unhappy with the way the river stones look—he is afraid viewers will be able to see the mechanics—and he needs the monolith to sit perfectly level. This is not a conceit but an uncompromising requirement for the performative quality of the work. The water for the fountain does not fall from the sky but rises up from the bed of river stones below, up through a channel in the monolith via a pump, drawing water into the bowl until it spills over. Noguchi permits them to try it. The reflective surface of the water shimmers and grows as it fills the bowl. Eyes are fixed. Curators and installers and artist and assistant. As the bowl reaches its capacity the edge of the water bends and wobbles before the edge finally breaks, running across the top of the monolith, decidedly in one direction first but then also in every direction. A curator approaches Noguchi and asks about one edge of the monolith which isn’t wet like the rest. Can we do something about this? We can but don’t try to do too much. That’s kind of an accident of nature.

A photo essay was just posted online of what was left after the water receded. The image I remember was the one of dishes: stacks of plates, the tallest with two teacups nestled insides one another on the top. There were three round, plastic containers stacked next to them and their contents like all of the patterns on all of the plates were obscured by mud. Mud brown mud. Not chocolate brown; mud brown. Not a warm brown nor a cool brown but a brown from below. A brown that is the basis of all things. A brown at home in riverbeds and around tree roots. A brown that will not come out easily in the wash.