The Dilemma
What do you do when your home is wrecked by a flood -- twice?
Almost exactly three weeks after we were roused from sleep in the pre-dawn darkness to find water rising rapidly all around our home, forcing us to flee with almost nothing, the supercharged rains returned. Although we didn’t have to escape this time, our house was, once again, flooded. Κακοκαιρία Daniel, apparently, hadn’t done enough damage, so he sent his buddy Kακοκαιρία Elias to try to finish us off.
Kακοκαιρία — pronounced Kako Kairia — translates as “bad weather.” Something is clearly lost in translation, for this was not just another spell of bad weather.
The funny thing is, I was kind of looking forward to the second round of rains. The first one not only had filled up our house and covered our property in thick, sticky, slimy sediment, but it had also taken out roads, power, and running water. While the former two were restored after several days, the water service was not. That made it impossible to truly clean anything except what could be hauled up to our neighbor’s house which has a well. A good, strong rain would allow us to clean our concrete patio and fill up buckets for a first round of interior cleaning. I believed removing a layer of mud would restore our fondness for this home and motivate us to rebuild and make it our home once again.
***
My homeland is southwest Colorado. I was born there, grew up there, and now my work is centered there. Sage and sandstone and the particular light of the place are tangled up with my heart and bones. But we haven’t lived there since 2016 for various reasons. We did a stint in Bulgaria, which was wonderful and interesting, but was never “home.” And then, in the summer of 2021, we moved here, to the Pelion Peninsula in central Greece, where we rented a tiny little house amongst the olive trees for a whopping $200 per month.
It is surrounded by what we call The Ranch: a hilly collection of olive groves and uncultivated brushy areas with little two-track roads winding through it all. Most of it is private, I guess, but there aren’t fences or no trespassing signs or whatnot. It feels a lot like public land in the Western U.S., only there are far fewer people wandering around. We walk the dogs and I run and ride my bike on the roads. After a rain, when the evening sun blazes and the wind blows, the olive leaves resemble those of sagebrush.
This soon became “home” also. And though we looked for other houses to buy — older, more classic stone places; buildings with more southern light; abodes in villages rather than out in the country — none of them had The Ranch, which always brought us back to this place. And so, after arriving at what seemed like a reasonable price, we bought our house in June of this year, and immediately set out to remodel it. We wanted to insulate the cold, concrete walls, rebuild the leaky roof, expand the kitchen a bit, raise the walls as much as we could within the weirdly strict1 building design standards, add a sleeping loft, and, especially, a bunch of south-facing windows.
We hired a designer who came up with a plan for a complete makeover. I loved the result. I really did. We would essentially have a brand new house. But that was also the source of some reticence: We really liked our house as it was, we just wanted to do a few little upgrades. But it wasn’t so easy, given, again, the building codes. In order to redo the roof, for example, you had to change it to a different style, and so forth.
When Kακοκαιρία Daniel came, we were about a month into the four-to-five month permitting process.
***
As devastating and heartbreaking as that first round of flooding may have been, I soon came to see it as somewhat liberating, as well. With so many homes wrecked and damaged and in need of massive renovations, there simply would be no way for the building people to enforce the standards or require permits. Engineers predicted that they’d just turn a blind eye and somewhere down the road do a blanket “legalization” of all the remodels, repairs, and rebuilds.
That freed us up to do what we needed and wanted to do with our house without having to bother with all of the aesthetic standards. It meant we could spend about half of what we had planned to, yet get those things we wanted: insulation, a good roof, and southern sun. We could add a second story (that would be above the high waterline) if we wanted, or even build a structure on the hillside, which is part of our parcel and was untouched by the floods (and is warmer in the winter and has awesome views).
Of course, there was that little hitch of our house being in a flood plain. But I figured Daniel was some sort of 10,000-year Kακοκαιρία event, and we wouldn’t have to worry about that anytime soon. Even so, we are experiencing some wacky climatic stuff, so my plan was this: Upgrade our existing house to make it a nice summer place with plenty of outdoor living, a full-on outdoor kitchen and a wood-burning pizza-bread oven, stone and concrete built-in furniture, an attic to store things in when the bad weather is a coming. And then build, install, or assemble a tiny house — or maybe even a not-so-tiny house — on the hillside, which could be our winter/rainy season home.
But first we’d have to clean up the existing house. That’s why the idea of another round of rain, albeit only about two inches per day instead of 20 or more, seemed like just the thing we needed.
***
During the weekend leading up to Elias, while Wendy delivered Cookie to his new home, I spent the days at the house, mucking as much dried mud off the patio as possible in preparation. When the rain started really coming down a few days later, Wendy and I ran down in our rubber boots and started sweeping, shoveling, squeegeeing, and cleaning, so that by noon, when I had to get back to paying work, the patio was mud-free and Wendy was using the captured rain to wash salvageable items.
As I left, the rain was dumping from the sky. But I was heartened to see that there was no flooding whatsoever. It was going to be okay.
***
Until it wasn’t. Some 15 minutes after I left, the rain began falling in sheets so intensely that I couldn’t see down the hill to where the water starts accumulating before it really floods. Wendy delivered the report soon thereafter: The water was rising in our yard and would soon enter the house. The rain did not subside. The arroyos all filled up again, mud saturated the sea like a stain in fabric. My god, it was happening again.
This time the water was about four feet deep at our house. The patio was once again covered with a thick layer of mud. The furniture we had arranged and staged for cleaning had been lifted up, carried by the current, and piled in a ramshackle heap against the fence. The fence on the upstream side of the property was toppled.
Our progress was erased. And the optimism and hope we had felt just hours earlier was extinguished.
***
We now know it will flood again unless major changes are made to the drainages and to the culverts under the road, aka Koukouleika Dam. Given that several sections of roads elsewhere are collapsing, and given the unresponsiveness of the municipality, it’s unlikely that such changes will occur anytime soon.
So what do we do?
Do we abandon the property, stop making the payments and just let the previous owners deal with it?
Every time I go back to the house and its surrounding mud pit, and gaze upon the three separate water lines on the crumbling plaster of the walls; every time I inhale the scent of rotting apples and stagnant water; every time the mosquitoes swarm me and bite me; every time I walk past our belongings in a neighboring parcel of land, I think: Let’s get the hell out of here, now. We’ll take the insurance payment, whatever that might amount to, and combine it with our remodel money and buy something else, maybe in the Pelion, or Italy or France or maybe we’ll even find a reasonably priced (yeah, right!) property back home in Colorado. After all, the once-aqua blue sea is now polluted, the beaches have washed away and been covered with debris, the town nearest us mostly destroyed.
But then I walk up onto The Ranch. The olive trees and the strawberry fruit bushes and the cyclamens and the bay trees, all of which had been withered by drought and heat a month ago, are now flourishing. The air is clear. And I’m struck by the fact that floods — unlike, say, wildfires — mostly destroy human-made things. Get away from the roads and power poles, the pipes and houses, the heartbreak and depression and financial hardship, and you can’t even tell that anything happened. The Earth seems to brim with joy.
And I’m also struck by how lucky we are to have The Ranch, and how unlikely it is we’ll ever find anything remotely like it.
Therein lies the dilemma.
By which I mean they are strict aesthetically: Windows have to be a certain size, you have to do a hip roof with tiles, walls can only be so tall, etc. Also, you can’t add square footage or build additional permanent structures unless your land is at least 4,000 square meters. Meanwhile, they don’t care if you build in a flood plain (obviously) or if your structure can withstand an earthquake, so long as you have the requisite amount of land.