Disastrous Rites: Liminality and Communitas in a Flood Crisis

LINDA JENCSON

Department of Anthropology Appalachian State University Boone,NC 28608-2016 SUMMARY A sense of communitas, well noted by social scientists, occurs in human societies during times of natural disaster. Using the Red River Valley Flood of 1997 as a case example, it is found that disaster communitas has similarities to ritual communitas specifically because people consciously ritualize and mythologize their actions during disaster. While this sacralization of practical action serves to optimize disaster response, it also creates an expanded sense of self, community, and purpose that can leave many survivors of disaster with a sense that they have undergone a profoundly meaningful peak experience.

Scholars have researched the spontaneous sense of communitas that arises in human societies in times of natural disaster. Some attribute this "disaster solidarity" to a simple process of practical cost/benefit analysis by disaster victims (De Alessi 1975; Hirshleifer 1988). Others ascribe it to deeply felt emotions brought on by the stress of disaster, with stress defined broadly and vaguely. But no one has ever sufficiently investigated it in its details (Chappie 1970; OliverSmith 1999). One assumes disaster to be stressful and leaves it at that. But is the stress emotional, involving grief, worry, and fear, or does it include physical stress as well, that of injury, cold, and hunger? Are there aspects of disaster in addition to communitas that resemble ritual? Are the similarities accidental, or are they conscious cultural creations? And importantly, is there something about the active process of coping with stress that is the real creator of communitas in both ritual and disaster? Considerable progress has been made in the anthropological study of disaster over the past few decades. We have come a long way since Wallace's pioneering disaster studies of the 1950s (1956,1957). Yet we still have a long way to go, as Oliver-Smith points out in his recent co-edited volume devoted to anthropological disaster studies (Oliver-Smith 1999; Oliver-Smith and Hoffman 1999). In particular, Oliver-Smith cites a serious lack of holistic studies linking expressiveemotive human responses in times of disaster to those of practical action. Yet he views this link as manifestly real andalthough mediated by specific cultural settingsas essentially universal, at least in potential. I agree with his assertion that greater understanding of the ritualized and emotive aspects of disaster response, especially communitas, will contribute practical knowledge of use in the mitigation of disaster consequences in an increasingly imperiled world. To investigate the question of disaster communitas, I will focus on the North Dakota/Minnesota Red River Valley Flood of 1997 in search of particular stresses, human choices, and rational and emotional motivations and actions. This particular flood produced a deep sense of communitas, which led many to describe the month-long battle as "Our Finest Hour" and caused many victims to describe the process by which they lost their homes as "a positive experience." Listen to the voices of flood survivors: "You live by the river, there's a chance
Anthropology and Humanism 26(l):46-58. Copyright 2001, American Anthropological Association.

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you're going to get wet. But / can see it coming. Theflooditself was not a negative, bad experience. It was something I don't want to go through again, but we made lemonade out of the lemons. And so that aspect of it was a very positive, good thing that happened to us down here." And, "I think the camaraderie was just amazing. I mean people that I wouldn't have even thought of joining in, coming out from the lab, were here and just so glad to be here It was wonderful." Though much of the neighborhood is gone, during thefloodthere was a "carnival atmosphere." Some struggle with confusingly positive feelings about events that led to widespread destruction, as can be heard in one woman's argument with herself: "And it was kind of a social thing, actually We were preparing, but ah, it was fun, and it was a lot of people bringing food. I don't mean that it was gay. I'm not saying that it was a gay time, but it was, people had all their friends here, and it was people were helping one another. It was a very, it was just a wonderful time in that sense of coming together." Why is the loss of one's cherished home or neighborhood regarded so positively? My hypothesis is that due to the convergence of certain natural events, practical intervention, and symbolic human action, "victims" of this flood experienced it as a ritual of transformation, intensification, and revitalizationhence, as a peak experience. The Red River Valley Flood of 1997 was no flash flood. It was the result of a record year of snow in a climate so cold that snow does not melt between snowfalls. That winter nearly ten feet of snow all began to melt at once during the approaching spring at the end of March. This meant that people had weeks to prepare, but diking and sandbag operations were interrupted by "the Mother of All Blizzards," a killer storm with raging winds that began as rain on Friday, April 4, and turned to ice overnight. The ice and wind pulled down the largest part of the power grid in the region and did not stop until late Sunday when people emerged from frigid, darkened homes to find everything but the deepest, faster moving floodwaters turned to ice. But what looked like solid ice often had several feet of floodwater beneath it. Prefilled sandbags had turned into "frozen turkeys" that would not stack and settle to fill holes. Sump pumps and smalltown sewage stations failed without power, and the rest of the week saw the evacuation of farmsteads and several small towns. Tens of thousands of citizens mobilized to build dikes, to rescue neighbors, and to staff shelters. By mid-April in besieged Fargo, North Dakota, the Red River was beginning to crest at a remarkable 23 feet above flood stage. On April 18, the next largest urban area in the region, Grand Forks/East Grand Forks, began the rapid evacuation of some 40,000 people. On April 19, water rushing through breaches in the 18-foot-high dikes defending "The Forks" became mixed with Grand Forks' recently restored electricity. As a result, downtown Grand Forks and many homes went up in flames above the icy water. The Grand Forks Air Base and the cities of Fargo and Moorhead, Minnesota, huddled behind leaky dikes, then became the center of increasingly urgent relief operations. I did not arrive as a researcher after the fact. I experienced thefloodwith fellow residents of Fargo, like Malinowski's fateful stranding in the Trobriands, this was participant-observation by default. During the flood I served as a sandbagger and a Red Cross disaster volunteer. I also photographed, audio and video recorded, and took notes. I began my interviews at commemorative festivities marking the first anniversary of the flood. I taped interviews with over 50 individuals from Fargo and neighboring areas: city officials as well as ordinary citizens.1 In this article, I focus on Fargo, a city that battled the flood and won (for the most part) although half of my informants came from devastated neighborhoods

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within Fargo. Reactions in towns harder hit, such as Grand Forks, await further study. During the flood I noticed aspects that reminded me of classic anthropological descriptions of ritual communitas, but it was only after going back to the literature that I realized how perfectly the flood meets scholarly criteria. I have chosen a list of traits of liminal ritual communitas described by Victor Turner in The Ritual Process (1969:106-107) against which to test my hypothesis. The reader should keep in mindin all cases where I cite examples or quote survivorsI am editing for space: there are innumerable examples of everything I describe. Ritual communitas takes place within a specific, sacralized, bounded space. The flood created bounded space in a quite literal sense. Most roads, including interstates, were under water. Cities, urban neighborhoods within them, and small towns and farms that survived did so as diked islands in a lake of fresh ice water some 8,000 miles square.2 Access was often by boat and helicopter. The final blizzard of the record snow season that caused the flood knocked out the power grid for the eastern half of North Dakota, leaving many with a sense of "being cut off from the 20th century." As news broadcasts told of town after town going under all around the major cities, residents of Fargo became increasingly motivated to suspend normal activity and engage in disaster response on a full-time basis. This sense of isolation lent itself to metaphorical comparisons with a war zone, and parades of veterans were interviewed in the media to validate the metaphor. The bounded space became "Fort Fargo" defended by "Team Fargo," in citizen and official descriptions of the ongoing "battle." Now, four years later, people continue to tell stories of individuals they encountered during the flood who were moved to relive events such as the London Blitzkriegbrought back into mind by the battle against the Red River. Rites of passage and intensification usually create communitas in the process of reenacting traditional myths, allowing participants to experience roles in the sacred history of the people. The war metaphor became the core of a myth that was created about the flood fight as it was fought. This myth was essential to control strong emotions and ensure full participation of citizens. It appears to have been generated at an interpersonal level, perpetuated by mass media, and carried to an even greater number of people by word of mouth. As in ritual communitas, there was acceptance of intense pain and suffering. Said one proud husband, "Amy, my own wife, came home and she had two wrist braces on. I said, 'Well what's goin' on?' and she said, 'Well, I was up sandbaggin', up at the Solid Waste.' And I said, 'Well, we're tryin' ta set that up for two-hour shifts, you know, cuz it's demanding work.' She was there six hours!" This shared acceptance of hardship was a tremendous part of the sense of belonging generated by the flood. Folklorists have noted endurance of hardship as a key component in Midwestern regional identity (Carlin 1992; Danielson 1990). After passing through the transformation of a Midwest disaster, coping with hardship becomes part of personal identity, but the expanded sense of self is embedded in a strong sense of community. Regarding sandbagging injuries, "Several people were talkin' about it after thefirstfew days. One guy says (and' I been havin' exactly the same problems he's havin'), he says, 'I can't feel my arms.' And it's truenumb! It would take a full 15 or 20 minutes to get the feelin' back in your hands some mornin's." Even the significance of bodily sensations was constructed out of shared experiences. According to Turner, ritual communitas requires simplification of life. As Oliver-Smith and Hoffman note, "Disasters take a people back to fundamentals" (1999:11). Flood life in the Red River Valley became simplified in many ways.

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Conversation dwelled on basic sandbox topics: piling things on top of other things so they don't fall over, dirt, lots of dirt, getting dirt, good dirt: "I'm cold." "When will the food get here?" "Can I take a nap now?" One extended family described the daily arrival of the Red Cross and Salvation Army food trucks as their neighborhood battled the river. They described the family grandfather chasing the truck down the road, lest it pass them by, shouting, "Wait for me, wait for me!" like a child chasing an ice cream truck. The scene is now part of neighborhood folk history, as well as family myth. As with ritual communitas, regular activities stopped. Schools dosed for weeks or months. The three Fargo /Moorhead universities adopted a rotating community service schedule whereby one school held classes, another did sandbag duty, and the third held classes on standby. Businesses released employees to dike one another's homes. In one case, when a single mother's outlying farm home .was completely surrounded by water, her employer "just said, take all the time you need. They didn't make me dock sick leave or vacation days, and I started going back to work half days after five weeks." Sports competitions halted; the sports segment of news broadcasts reported how various local teams (as well as the Minnesota Vikings) were sandbagging. For over a month, dtizens responded to TV, newspaper, and call-in radio requests for hundreds of volunteers a day in Fargo alone. Regular structure was replaced with an emergency structure that eliminated statuses or turned them upside down. "Todd is our executive director, and so when it came to, 'What are we going to do?' he was really respectful of my knowledge in the area and became more my assistant.... Actually, it was kind of funny because someone asked if we were married. We had worked so much together that we could finish each other's sentences." An odd mixture of famous, high-status individualsmusic stars Travis Tritt and David Crosby and politidans Al Gore, Elizabeth Dole, and Bill Clintoncould be seen along the river, talking and working with the people. Chain gangs were released from jail to throw sandbags side by side with those of high rank. Mayor Lanning of Moorhead has continued to indude in political speeches his time spent bagging with the dry's convicts. Stretch limousines, a symbol of elite luxury (and ritual occasions), were used to transport grubby sandbaggers to crisis spots. And in a complete reversal of the usual U.S. media litany of "lost youth" stories, constant praise was heard on radio, TV, and street corners about "our youth: the pride of the state, the saviors of the dties": And those are very affluent areas, there's not a $100,000 home, most of 'em are . . . $300,000 or more. And there was about 300 kids, I mean they were all ages, but most of 'em were young people standing there in that rain [sandbagging]. Not complaining, or whining, or running for cars or cover or whatever. So then as I continued south, I got to 52nd Ave. and went by Greenfields, which is kind of affordable housing. And there was 400 people standing there. And there was no dass structure in thefight.I mean, you could be . . . standing beside somebody that had a lot of money! As the flood myth expanded, symbolic culture heroes were created to inspire all to greater efforts. One was Mayor Pat Owens of Grand Forksa secretary who thought she could run the town better than the bureaucrats above her, so she ran for mayor and won just in time to take the helm of a sinking ship going down in flames. In mythic terms, Pat Owenswho comforted her people through the spectacular loss of their dty to flood and fireserved as a role model "Lady of Sorrows." Her famous words, "My own home is going under, I'm in the same boat with all the rest of you," are well remembered. To compliment her role as noble sufferer, she and her dty were comforted by a person given the

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eponym "The Angel," an anonymous billionaire donor who gave $2,000 to every household in the ravaged cities of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks. Unlike the unfortunate Owens, Fargo Director of Public Works Dcnn is Walaker the Superman to the Southled his people to victory. Walaker went from being the head of "the guys who drive the snowplows" to a position of fame and admiration. A middle school actually sent him a superhero cape, and an editorial cartoon in the Fargo Forum (Stark 1997) showed him wearing it. In keeping with the ritual reversal of status, both great leaders, Owens and Walaker, were of common origins Walaker received increasing fan mail during the latter blizzards and subsequent flood, much of it including prayers for his strength, endurance, and well-being (see Figure 1). Like that of sacred priest-kings of early city-states, his well-being was identified with that of the city. One letter told him, "You'll no doubt find it interesting to hear that our pastor, in his sermon about service to each other this morning, referred to you as 'Saint Dennis.' " Another wrote, "I recall during the War, on the Island of Saipan we were going out on a dangerous mission, and before our squadron took off, the base chaplain came down and I recall his words which seems like yesterday, 'Greater love than this hath no man that he lay down his life for his fellow man.' These words certainly depict what you did for your people." The symbolic flood heroes were loved deeply, as one bonds with ancestors, fellow initiates, and the gods in sacred rites (Turner 1969; Van Gennep 1960). And through identification with the heroes, the battle myth of the flood was lived by all. People often slept with the radio on, waking when voices became overexcited or when Walaker's voice came over the air. News of the heroes was spread by word of mouth as well as mass media: some excitedly

Figure 1 A visibly tired and distressed Dennis Walaker, Fargo's flood leader, survey the Oak Grove Neighborhood after the dike breach. Photo by Colburrt Hvidston III. Used by permission of The Forum, Fargo's daily newspaper.

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tell stories of breathlessly meeting Walker on the street and fawning as if he were a top movie star. Turner states that communitas erases gender roles. During the flood, traditional gender roles were negated as women hurled bags on the front lines with the men, taking leadership roles within family and neighborhood. Contrary to findings in some other disaster events (Hoffman 1999), survivors' stories of this flood reflect gender equity and reversal of standard roles. Walaker described the gender of sandbagging to me, "And once in a while, you know, sure you think about a football player, 275 pounds you know, and workin' out all the time, but there was women that wereunbelievably wiry!" One little girl describes a typical situation in her proud fan mail to him, "My mother and I sandbagged while my father and my sister helped to run a Salvation Army food mobile." Turner also reports that status is concealed in communitas by a uniform mode of dress. Muddied rubber boots or waders, jeans, fatigues or work clothes, muddy jackets, shredded gloves, and ear-warming caps became standard garb. This did the job of erasing gender and class distinctions, but also clearly distinguished flood survivors from outsiders: ever since the flood, neighbors from the flooded Oak Grove area of Fargo call the boots Walakers. They have become part of a standard costume at neighborhood partieseven in dry seasons. Private property distinctions faded away, as all property was at risk, defended by the same dikes. "And to do that, you see," one man told me, "you have to connect with your neighbors. If you don't get along with your neighbors, you both sank." Violations of general reciprocity were dealt with swiftly and effectively. One woman recounted a story told to her by her friend, Crissy, who had been leading sandbag volunteers: There was this other house where it was raining and really cold, it wasrightwhen the blizzard was starting, but it hadn't turned yet. And she said there was a whole bunch of them taking and sandbagging this house, and they were cold and wet, and they went to the door and ask if she would make some coffee for the people that were volunteering to help save her home. And [the woman in the house] said, "All I have is gourmet coffee, and I'm not going to feed them that" And Crissy said, "Fine." She went downstairs and she said, "Lef s go everyone," and they left. Normally, neighbors gave freely of expensive pumps, generators, and other equipment. KFGO radio ran 24-hour flood coverage that included requests not only for sandbaggers but for needed equipment as well: "Well I was in the basement working and somebody was callin' to me through the basement window, sayin', 'What do you need?' You know, it was like a shopping list. You need flashlights, you need pumps, you need generators?" This man went on to tell me, We had maybe a total of six or seven pumps. Well I had one that we had bought. See, the one we had bought, we never took out of the box until we heard on the radio that there was a crisis at [a specific address down the block]. And we realized it was this guy Moreno, next to Carter, and we didn't know them very well, so we took the pump down there and said, "Do you need this?" And he did. And he used it for a day or two, to solve his immediate problem Our pump bailed them out in the short run. Then he lent the pump to Schaffer. [The major dike breach that finished off Oak Grove occurred in Schaffer's backyard.] And our pump ended up at the bottom of Schaffer's . . . under water. So then we had Freestone's pump. When Oak Grove flooded, power had to be cut to prevent fires in flooded homes. This act doomed additional houses to flooding because their sump pumps stopped. The Lutheran Aid Society was there within what seemed like

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minutes, with a truckload of gas-powered electric generators for free distribution, but there were not enough. The man in line for the last pump was an elderly gentleman who turned to the young man behind him and said, "You have a new baby, you take it." There was no question of "if," in this case: the man knew full well that he had just doomed his own home for the sake of his neighbor. In the ultimate sacrifice, the Woodland Drive area voted to be "diked out," to be on the wrong side of an emergency dike built to save the northside sewer system if their backyard dikes gave way. Both of these incidents fly in the face of "cost/benefit analysis" theories. Communitas values far outweighed any consideration of delayed material gain or personal safety through cooperation: personal property was sacrificed for others. As in ritual, flood communitas erased boundaries between one's own well-being and that of others. Another trait of communitas is humility. Humility was practiced to the utmost. Sandbaggers who dedicated days or weeks of their lives to helping others accepted no rewards and were in fact, difficult to find for interviews, although residents of crisis areas came forward for my research project eagerly to praise them. After the flood, when citizens donated thousands of dollars for a dream vacation for flood hero Dennis Walaker, he gave it to charity and spent his own money to print commemorative posters to give volunteers. Although he received hundreds of pieces of fan mail for leading "Fort Fargo," Walaker struggled for words when I asked him to summarize the experience: "The process was not aah, it was emotional, it was com, it was humbling, the best word, it was humbling." Flood survivors all tell stones of people they wish they could thank but do not know who it was that came to save them that day. Turner lists foolishness as a trait of even the most intensely religious communitas. Well, in nonliminal times, the free giving of power equipment worth hundreds

Figure 2 Local dialect humor with a serious message outside Kragness, MN. Photo by Sharon Grugel. Used by permission.

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of dollars would be perceived as foolishness in the United States. It would be foolish in ordinary times to vandalize one's own home with spray paint, but graffiti became a norm for homeowners faced with destruction. Slogans expressed a variety of puns, thank yous, threats to idle tourists, prayers, andespeciallysilly sayings (see Figure 2). Consciously ritualized group foolishness was also a factor. After the Oak Grove dikes failed, a florist boarded a canoe and decorated the breached dikes of flooded houses with potted flowers that many cherish in their new yards to this day. Oak Grove neighbors had a barbecue amid their flooded homes, placing a grill in the icy water, mingling in hip waders, and climbing onto scaffolding draped around a flood-damaged home for a party. Those who did not wade in arrived by canoea new form of neighborhood recreation. Silly songs composed on sandbag lines are still remembered three years later: City sidewalks, busy sidewalks, dressed in Red River clay. In the air there's a feeling of panic And, Red River, wider than a mile. I'm diking you in style each day. You old scream maker, you back breaker. Wherever you're going, I haven't a say For Turner, true ritual communitas requires sacredness, sacred instruction, and continuous reference to mystical powers. We already have a flood peopled by personae like Saint Dennis and the Angel. Here I am making some substitutions for these categories. I propose first that we examine a new category, "sights and wonders." Tribal people know that a goodriteof passage requires revelation of sacred objects and miraculous happenings. This is a primary medium for sacred instruction, which is rarely by word alone.3 During the flood, visual examples of the miraculous transmitted the idea that something of a supernatural nature was transpiring, but rather than being mere enactments, they were uniquely real. For instance, when the Oak Grove dikes burst, neighbors rescued a car by carrying it to dry ground. Onlookers and participants were understandably impressed. Folklorists have noted that amazing stories of objects out of place are features of Midwestern tornado narratives (Danielson 1990); so too with the flood. One Oak Grove neighbor described seeing from his window on the river "a couch, that looked like if you could get to it you could have laid down on that couchon a particular ice floe." Another family received the river's gift of a canoe. Other out-of-place objects were placed by human hands. Lindenwood neighborhood used a glowing plastic Santa atop its dike as a nighttime beacon to signal Moorhead residents on the Minnesota side of the river that the dikes in Fargo still held. While Santa "gave proof through the night that the dikes were still there," Minnesotans on the Moorhead side of the river flashed Christmas lights back at North Dakotans. Holes in dikes were plugged by tennis balls; big holes required basketballs. Neighborhoods literally owed their continued existence to these small items of sports equipment. The city of Moorhead found a similar use for garbage trucks, parking them atop manhole covers in areas where water pressure had been blowing them into the air on geysers of flood water. Further up the north-flowing Red River, Winnipeg was threatened by flood water stirred by ten-foot waves. The city protected its dikes from erosion by building a break wall out of its school buses filled with rocks. Some out-of-place objects hence

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became testimonies to the power of nature, and others, to the powerful wits of fellow flood fighters. Other miraculous sights and wonders were produced by a "higher power." The Hale-Bopp comet hung in the sky throughout the month-long ordeal, drawing eyes to the heavens as people patrolled neighborhood dikes and worked on patching them. For example, "the glory of the Creator" is revealed in the narrative of one midnight crew leader. He had come outside to find his dike patrol crew missing. A brief search found them, staring agog across the swollen river and into the sky. As he approached them shouting reprimands, he realized what they were gaping atthe northern lights dancing above in the sky and below in the water as well. He remained for some time, awestruck, with the rest of the crew. He tells listeners his tale that God sent the flood to lure the lazy out of bed to witness the beauty of His late night sky shows and other creations. No one I interviewed interpreted the flood as God's wrath. In all cases, nature sent a flood, and God sent communitas. As everyone will tell you, no one died in the larger cities, not even in the flooding and burning of Grand Forks, not even hospital patients, loaded abruptly onto buses and humvees with no time to retrieve medication or medical records. Stories circulate among scientists from regional universities: the Army Corps of Engineers inspected Fargo's backyard sandbag dikes after the water went down and proclaimed them scientifically incapable of holding back that much water for mat long a time. Yet they held. "It's a miracle!" the agnostics proclaim. No ritual elder was necessary to transmit the sacred instruction in this case. Every citizen became a bearer of sacred, miraculous messages, repeated often, in the media and at home, school, work, and church. Back now to the relationship among stress, ritual, disaster, and communitas. For example, rites of passage mark the transition of an individual from one status to another, a type of change often accompanied by considerable personal stress in the form of doubts and fears about an uncertain future: "Will / be any good as a spouse/warrior/adult/mother? Can / give birth? How am I going to manage adult behavior and achieve adult wisdom? Will others recognize me as deserving my new status? How can I do something I've never done before?" Rites of passage serve to mitigate these fears by symbolically re-creating them in a ritual universe successfully navigated by mythical ancestors. Initiates role-play being the ancestors, face the fears, are thereby made stronger, and are transformed by the process. For example, southwestern American Athabaskans (Navajo and Apache) require girls to act out many feats of physical strength and endurance during their initiation into womanhood (Basso 1970; Farrer 1994). In view of guests the girl must run, kneel, and dance for many hours, for many days. With the aid of elders, she acts out the creation myth of her people and is transformed into the founding mother goddess/ancestress of the tribe. Among the Navajo she also displays her cooking skills by producing a gigantic cake cooked in the earth. In addition to the stress of physical endurance, theritualcreates the performance stress of being on display, in order to mitigate future stresses. In times of future crises the new woman can recall her successful performance during theritual,her experience of oneness with the great ancestress, and proceed to face life with great confidence. So effective is the creation of ritual stress to alleviate real stress in the course of a lifetime that both the Apache and Navajo are experiencing a revival and elaboration of old pubertyrituals,investing considerable money and effort to make their daughters into capable women. Otherritesof passage heighten the degree of experienced danger even further to incorporate the fear of loss of life, dismemberment, and loss of communitythe

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ultimate fears in real disaster. Australian aboriginal (Stanner 1966, Tonkinson 1974) and African Ndembu (Turner 1967) manhood rituals for boys incorporate these features. The rites occur in secret, the boys having never witnessed what is to happen to them. Circumcision is involveda "genuine" dismemberment. Boys are allowed to believe that some initiates are likely to die and that castration (not just circumcision) is a real possibility. Rather than undergoing these rites surrounded by the community, they are secluded from it, fearing permanent banishment from home. The emotional impact of the transformations undergone by participants is thus heightened to a maximum, they have faced death, dismemberment, and social ostracism and have emerged victorious. If the ritual functions properly, the greater the amount of controlled stress survived in ritual, the stronger the "survivor" of the rite will be when faced with future trials in the world of physical realities beyond the ritual. Rituals also incorporate an artful balance of physical and emotional stress, often using the former to alleviate the latter. Physiological stress aids in the creation of trance, which is related to faith and suggestibility. Thus physiological means are used to enhance belief and depth of positive emotion. Among the common physiological stresses used in religious rites are sleep deprivation and repetitive rhythmic motion (Lewis 1989; Lowie 1954). Residents in Red River Valley crisis areas reported as little as two hours sleep per 36 hours, for weeks at a time. This serious lack of sleep may have something to do with the silliness, but it also contributed to the overall depth of communitas. Do not forget the two-hour sandbagging shifts and the people who stayed at it for six hours at a stretch. Furthermore, anyone who has ever stood in a sandbag line knows it is something like a line dance. People stand in parallel rows facing partners. As the bags come down the line, one sways to the left to receive it and then to the right to pass the bag. If done properly, the full weight of the 35 to 60 pound bag is never

Figure 3 Out-of-place objects testify to local ingenuity: highway marker cones inverted on a slanted board allow sandbags to be filled and passed rapidly at crisis sites.

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carriedit is shared with those on either side. Hence the rhythmic motion is coordinated with others, and communitas is enhanced physiologically (see Figure 3). We sway together: to break the rhythm is to risk injury. As in ritual, Fargo musicians toured crisis areas to provide a better cadence for the dance of the sandbags. If we are to have a full analogy to the type of communitas evoked by a rite of passage, we must ask, Did people feel truly transformed by disaster as they do by rites of passage? Was there a permanent change in psyche or status role? For many, indeed there was. Take, for instance, the changes in "Pioneer Woman." She spent an entire month alone on the family farmstead, her children staying with friends in town. Without electricity, surrounded by icy water, wading out daily to scavenge firewood from downed trees felled by the final blizzard, waking throughout the night to refuel her single pump, she saved their home and the family's animals: It was a real experience. My brothers call me "Pioneer Woman."... Actually, it wasn't that bad. It was something I'm glad that I went through because it made me stronger. [During our divorce, prior to the flood,] my ex-husband was very cruel towards the end. He told me I wasjust a big zero. And so, my self-esteem was very low. And going through something like [the flood] made me realize that I'm not a zero, that I can reallyI can do things! I can take care of things. Like Athabaskan, aboriginal, and Ndembu initiates, she too learned to face the future by enacting the strength of her ancestors, becoming a "Pioneer Woman" just like them in the process. I think, after this still sketchy analysis, attributing the sense of communitas in disaster to a vague and general "stress" or to an animal response to necessity can be laid to rest. Necessity is involved, but it is no simple matter. In times of emergency, humans must agree on new norms of behavior and create material productions at a whirlwind pace. To do so, they enlist the realm of the religious because religion and culture are intimately connected and religion is the ultimate cultural motivator. Ritual is a profoundly effective tool for the alleviation of stress. So people create sets of symbols and a mythos of culture heroes, supernatural powers, miraculous feats, visions, and messengers from the gods. They place themselves within that mythos, redefining themselves by the symbol set, and by doing so, they take action, and by acting, they survive. Oliver-Smith says, "Perhaps there needs to be less consideration toward the delivery of more aid and more attention devoted to devising culturally appropriate ways to nurture the potentials represented by postdisaster solidarity" (1999:168). I say get rid of the "perhaps," and let us also not forget: in some types of disaster like the Red River Valley Flood, the solidarity /communitas need not wait until the water stops flowing, the wind stops blowing, or the earth stops rumbling. Disaster communitas is a powerful force, equal in many cases to the power of a raging flood, a hurricane, or a major earthquake. Notes 1. Names of Red River Valley residents have been changed to protect anonymity. Names of famous persons, politicians, government leaders, and city officials are unchanged. 2. For an overview of the sequence of events and statistics related to the Red River Valley Flood, please refer to Bakken et al. 1997, Sprung 1997, and Stensrud 1999. 3. In aboriginal Australian boys' initiation rites at Jigalong, there is in fact very little verbal instruction to accompany sacred objects: repeated seeing and ritual context are the means for transmitting the objects' sacred meaning (Tonkinson 1974:88).

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References Cited
Bakken, Ryan, Miles Jacobs, Hohn Stennes, and Bill Akofer 1997 Come Hell and High Water. Grand Forks, ND: Grand Forks Herald. Basso, Keith 1970 The Cibecue Apache. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Carlin, Phyllis Scott 1992 That Black Fall: Farm Crisis Narratives. In Performance, Culture and Identity. Elizabeth C. Fine and Jean Haskell Speer, eds. Pp. 135-156. Westport, CT: Praeger. Chappie, Eliot 1970 Culture and Biological Man: Explorations in Behavioral Anthropology. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Danielson, Larry 1990 Tornado Stories in the Breadbasket: Weather and Regional Identity. In A Sense of Place: American Regional Cultures. Barbara Allen and Thomas J. Schlereth, eds. Pp. 28-39. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. De Alessi, Louis 1975 Toward an Analysis of Post-Disaster Cooperation. American Economic Review 62(1)580-590. Farrer, Claire R. 1994 Thunder Rides a Black Horse: Mescalero Apaches and the Ritual Present. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland. Hirshleifer, Jack 1988 Economic Behavior in Adversity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hoffman, Susanna M. 1999 The Regenesis of Traditional Gender Patterns in the Wake of Disaster. In The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective. Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna M. Hoffman, eds. Pp. 173-191. New York: Routledge. Lewis, loan M. 1989 Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession. London: Routledge. Lowie, Robert 1954 Indians of the Plains. New York: McGraw Hill. Oliver-Smith, Anthony 1999 The Brotherhood of Pain: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives on Post-Disaster Solidarity. In The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective. Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna M. Hoffman, eds. Pp. 156-172. New York: Routledge. Oliver-Smith, Anthony, and Susanna Hoffman 1999 Anthropology and the Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective. In The Angry Earth: Disaster in Anthropological Perspective. Anthony Oliver-Smith and Susanna Hoffman, eds. Pp. 1-16. New York: Routledge. Sprung, Christopher 1997 Fighting Back: The Blizzards and Floods in the Red River Valley, 1996-97. Billings, MT: Fenske. Stanner, William E. H. 1966 On Aboriginal Religion. Sidney: University of Sidney Press. Stark, Steve 1997 Cartoon Accompanying DeAnne Hilgers, Dennis' Menace. The Forum: Fargo, ND, January 19: sec. El. Stensrud, Karen 1999 Fighting the Flood, 1997: Plans, Action, Mitigation: A Resource for Public Officials. Fargo: City of Fargo. Tonkinson, Robert 1974 The Jigalong Mob: Aboriginal Victors of the Desert Crusade. Menlo Park, CA: Cummings. Turner, Victor 1967 The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 1969 The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Press.

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Van Gennep, Arnold 1960 The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wallace, Anthony F. C. 1956 Tornado in Worchester: An Exploratory Study of Individual and Community Behavior in an Extreme Situation. Disaster Study Number Three. Washington: Committee on Disaster Studies, National Academy of Sciences-National Research Council. 1957 Mazeway Disintegration: The Individual's Perception of Sociocultural Disorganization. Human Organization 16(2):23-27.