August 1st, 1985

That is the day that floodwaters swept into my families home and stole away my collection of He-Men action figures and replaced them with a new feeling....powerlessness. 


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June 15th, 2003

This is the day I was introduced to my "new normal"  It was the day where I allowed autism to swallow me up in it's floodwaters of self-pity and absolute powerlessness.

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The storm approached Cheyenne in the late afternoon of August 1st, 1985 looking like just your typical run of the mill system that often developed over southeast Wyoming during the summer months.  However, as it drew closer to our fair city it became increasingly clear that there was something far more sinister and far less typical about this particular storm. Hidden inside the belly of this beast were 70 mph winds, various funnel clouds,  golf-ball sized hair, and 7 inches of rain that it was ready to unload. I remember riding in the back seat of my parents car and looking up at the sky through our cloudy windows of our clunky white Zephyr.  After I inspected the churning heavens I reported to my father that the clouds looked weirdly green. 

I had never seen a cloud that was anything other than white or black, unless you count the many images in the Dr. Suess books I read, where apparently the residents of those colorful worlds had to live under the shadow of many a pastel colored thunderheads....but my green clouds looked far more menacing.  My dad did not join me in giving "one half of a rats ass" if the clouds were a different color just as long as they did not produce hail that would "ruin his garden".

My dad loved his garden the way a mad scientist loves his mutant.  He loved to toil under the sun while planting and nurturing the seeds that he had placed so tenderly into the soil. His favorite part was visiting his garden day after day to see how much progress his vegetation creations made during the previous night.  Nobody will ever be able to argue that the Roedel's are an artistic bunch.  I have the drawing ability of a piece of microwavable bacon, (this has been verified by the fine people at Oscar Myer) and to my knowledge there is nobody in my immediate family who has ever created a piece of art that has drawn anything more than a horrified gasp from the person who had to look it over.  But if one were to consider gardening an art form then they would have to regard my father as an equal to Monet. 

His vast garden were a sight to behold that would even cause a slob like me to take notice.  The gardens were like organized chaos with large tomato bushes and huge zucchini's s weaving their way out of the earth and spitting vines across every path.  The many rows of peppers, carrots, and beans had produce that was so big they seemed to cause the ground beneath to swell up around them.  The garden was something out of  "Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory". It was just so over the top... Although I often wondered if my father ever used some crazy and most likely illegal fertilizers to help him produce such enormous vegetables, I never dared asked because the garden was large enough to hide my buried body.

There was something very eerie about how slow those green clouds moved in. They just crept along like a one of those killer tigers in Disney's family movie "African Cats".  (Side note:  I saw African Cats with my family and although it was well made and interesting I am still trying to sift through all the blood and throat ripping "family" moments  to find out exactly why Disney thinks my 5 year old needs to get a front row seat to the brutality of the circle of life) Once we go home  my dad and I spent a few minutes looking straight up into the swirling dark-olive painted clouds.  We just sat there waiting for the rain to come down.  I could tell he started to get a little worried by how he kept going on about his garden and the forecast that he heard on the radio that morning.

"I don't remember the forecast calling for a big storm.  But I think we are going to get a real downpour."  My dad said as the two of us squinted up into the green sky.

He kept saying that the thunderheads sure looked "fierce".  I loved it when my dad used words like "fierce" in everyday conversation.  He could have easily just used the word "bad" or had he just got done surfing and hitting the bong he could have used "gnarly"...but he choose the word fierce.  Fierce was the perfect word to describe the evil green clouds that had blanketed our city like an alien mothership that was about to make it's move.  After a few moments we heard one sharp clap of thunder straight above us and the rain began to fall and fall hard.  There was no gradual build up in the rainfall amounts...it was fierce from the onset.  

We stood out there on our front lawn for a few moments staring up into the opening heavens.  Before we knew it we were both completely soaked to the core.  My dad could tell that I was becoming a little unnerved.  He picked up on that through my subtle hint of clinging to his leg and announcing that I was ready to go in.

"Alright Jay, let's get inside before my mom thinks I am trying to drown you for insurance money" My dad remarked.  Jay had always been my nickname he had used for me since I was born and the fact that he was using it now calmed me down quite a bit.  

The two of us started to briskly walk inside the house and as we got to the front door I heard my father plead with God "Just don't let it ruin my garden..." As the tornado sirens started to wail in the background my dad whispered a very soft but meaningful "Oh Shit". .

Oh Shit indeed.

Little did my dad know that by the time this green storm would have stopped it's once-in-a-hundred-years assault on Cheyenne his perfect and beautiful garden was going to be the least of his concerns.  He had no idea that it was going to pour rain and heavy amounts of hail for seven hours and when the last drop would have fallen it  would have claimed 12 lives and inflicted close to 62 million dollars worth of damage.  Neither of us knew that in a few hours the two of us as well as my mom and brother would be scrambling up our basement stairs as the water exploded through our basement windows.

                                                 
Cheyenne flood -1985                                                                   Downtown Cheyenne -1985


It was going to be a fierce storm indeed.

In the aftermath I remember both of my parents lamenting the fact that they had not seen the writing on the wall that a flood was coming. My father was particularly harsh on himself because he thought he should have been able to tell by the approaching discolored clouds that this was a different type of storm system.  They would have been able to have saved more pictures and memories from our basement if they had more warning...but as it was we were lucky to be unharmed from the rushing waters of the overflow.  I always thought my parents were being too hard on themselves...who could have seen this coming?

Who is ever actually prepared for a flood? 


to be continued.....


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June 15th, 2003

This is the day that my wife and I were officially forced to quit lying to oursevles and to each other that there was nothing seriously wrong with our three year old son, Noah.  It's the date we had to stop denying the truth that Autism had tightly coiled itself around our baby boy.  It was the day we came to grips with the fact that the storm of Autism had already been battering our family for years...there was no preparing for it's arrival....it was already here. The floodwaters of autism had breached our home a long time ago...

Things like this happen to other families. To other dads.  Not me.  I was not equipped to handle helping raise a child living with a developmental disability.  My skin is as thick as Cool Whip.  I knew I did not have the fortitude to survive the countless battles that would be heading my way.  People always told me that God only gives us what we can handle.  On that day Noah was diagnosed I remembered that saying and happily commented to myself that I found it to be laced with serious amounts of moose poop.

If it was true that God only gives us what we can handle then why in the hell was he allowing my son to live with autism.  The Lord knows what he is getting out of me and he knows he did not construct me to be that kind of father who could handle the rought road ahead.  I can hardly manage preparing microwaveable popcorn.  In my mind there was no way I could handle this.  Obviously God had some sort of mix up in his "who-can-handle-what"department.

I can still see my teapot-ish figure sitting in those damned chairs in Denver having the very pleasant doctor tell us our son was going to be labeled as "autistic".  I kept wondering how things had come to this point....how did we not see autisms approach earlier?  The real truth is, that we had seen the diagnosis coming for a while.  We had seen the storm clouds forming on the horizon. We had seen Noah's unusual behaviors blossom right after his six-months birthday.  His lack of speaking, his tantrums, and his overall quirky mannerisms had been a concern of ours from the very beginning.  Since he was our first child we did not know what to think of it.  Maybe all one year old's did these things....maybe they didn't..we had no idea.

So we took our concerns to the world and all of them were met with the standard "Noah is just being a boy" answer.  We heard that from doctors, other parents, and books on parenting.  I wish back then someone would have completed that sentence for us and just said "Noah is just being a boy with a serious cognitive disability".  To be fair I am not mad at anyone else for not noticing what was right under my nose.  How did I miss the storm clouds forming?  How did I miss the rolls of thunder?  How could I not be more alarmed that my nine-month old spent more time crying than he did sleeping...or how he was not making the sounds that were typical for his age?  How was it that I missed the fact that he was so sensitive to lights or even the gentlest of noises?

As Noah grew older he was not talking at all,  instead he communicated with shrieks.  He also had serious sensory issues.  Baths and diaper changes were an absolute warzone.  The amount of terror he would experience during those moments were gut-wrenching. .

There were sirens and alarms ringing for both me but just kept closing my eyes and kept repeating my favorite mantra "he is fine. he is fine".  I had that mantra until the moment when the warning alarms were so deafening that I could not ignore them anymore. It was a almost a year before his diagnosis of autism that we realized that he wasn't fine.  He was not fine at all.

We went to a BBQ with a bunch of college friends we had not seen in a long time. A lot of them had kids the same age as our sweet now two-year old Noah.  It was only then when we were able to see him alongside his peers that we were able to see how serious the situation was.  I could go into detail explaining what set our son apart from the "typical" children that were at the party, but I would have to write about 2000 more words explaining it.  In short it was like our Noah was an alien who was visiting our world for the first time. He was not like anyone else there. 

My wife and I drove home from the party in silence.  We were both worried and heartbroken.  Looking back now that moment was the first time I ever considered that something was really wrong.  I had been too big of an idiot to know that the storm clouds that had been on the horizon a year ago were now hovering over our heads.  It had been raining for a while now and I was done trying to convince myself it was sunny out.

Soon after that we enrolled Noah at STRIDE Learning center.  It was a preschool for children who needed some extra help and it was there that the "just a boy" label was replaced with "developmentally delayed".  That was a label that I was okay with.  It did not sound scary at all.  Delays happen all the time at airports, and they are always temporary.  For the next year we spent a lot of our time in speech therapy, occupational therapy, and other types of therapies to try and help Noah catch up from his "delay".

The catching up did not happen.  In fact it seemed like things were getting worse.  He wasn't sleeping, he had created his own language, and showed very little interest in the world outside his own mind.  Noah was growing more and more frustrated, angry, and much harder to work with.  Sometimes he would get so full of emotion that we would have to hold him so he would not hurt himself.  The storm was in full force now....and we were losing our son.

It was a very fierce storm.

I had never planned on having anything like this happen in my life.  My parental forecast was supposed to be clear with a zero percent chance of complications.  None of this made sense to me and I began my spiral into a very dark place that would take me years to recover from.

It had been suggested that we needed to take Noah (who was now a three year old boy who had the emotions and cognitive ability of a ten month old) to an Autism clinic in Denver to have him evaluated.  Autism had been a word that I had become familiar with over the past few months leading up to our visit there.  It was a word that kept me up late at night.  From what I had read it made sense that this was something that Noah had.  All his behaviors indicated that he was smack in the middle of the spectrum.  But I could not allow myself to believe that this was an eventuality.  If the doctors said that Noah was considered autistic I was going to fight that result and have them prove it to me beyond a reasonable doubt...Florida Jury style.  If they were going to tell me that my boy was autistic I was going to respond with a "Oh yeah?  I don't think so."

Of course that did not happen.  The doctors helped me and my wife realize that we were in the middle of a great flood. It was too late to prepare for the storm...it was upon us right now.  We could not afford anymore time in wondering if our son was in serious trouble because we could rest assured that he as.  The choice we were offered was simple.  We could allow the flood of autism sweep our budding family away or we could start swimming. 

Despite all the warning signs of it's coming my wife and I were left in quiet silence when the doctor confirmed what are hearts already knew. Noah was autistic.  "Oh shit" I whispered to myself.

Oh shit indeed.

There was no use in waiting for the rain to start coming down.  It was here.  The dark clouds moved in while I stood on the lawn watching it and hoping that it would pass me by.  It did not.  I stood staring up at the sky wishing instead of acting for too long.  Now that I was awake to the reality of what was happening I recognized that we were already surrounded by rising water.  I had to stop being so hard on myself.   It was time to save Noah from the flood.  We had to save as much of him as we could before it was too late.

I felt lost and powerless.  I felt swallowed up.

My first step was to stop being angry that I did not see the warning signs earlier. My wife and I had to learn to stop being so hard on ourselves. Who could have seen this coming?

Who is actually ever prepared for their child having Autism?



to be continued.......



Peter Gabriel > Here Comes The Flood by beepbeep44





Here Comes The Flood

Peter Gabriel


when the night shows
the signals grow on radios
All the strange things
they come and go, as early warnings
Stranded starfish have no place to hide
still waiting for the swollen Easter tide
There's no point in direction we cannot
even choose a side.

I took the old track
the hollow shoulder, across the waters
On the tall cliffs
they were getting older, sons and daughters
The jaded underworld was riding high
Waves of steel hurled metal at the sky
and as the nail sunk in the cloud, the rain
was warm and soaked the crowd.

Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry.

When the flood calls
You have no home, you have no walls
In the thunder crash
You're a thousand minds, within a flash
Don't be afraid to cry at what you see
The actors gone, there's only you and me
And if we break before the dawn, they'll
use up what we used to be.

Lord, here comes the flood
We'll say goodbye to flesh and blood
If again the seas are silent
in any still alive
It'll be those who gave their island to survive
Drink up, dreamers, you're running dry