But today I think for fun I’ll go the other way. Toward sunny optimism, partly because the one redeeming thing about Friday the 13th is that they at least had the courtesy to schedule it on a Friday.

We are currently at the point of the story where the the ladder we walked under was swept away by unexpected floodwaters. They are deep and still rising. There’s the TV guy in his high boots who has just gotten his cue to start sloshing toward the camera and hyping the calamity. He gestures to the lady sitting on her roof waiting for the little motorboat approaching her, the cow floating by still being milked by a hardy local, the bobbing Uber car with surge pricing, and the doughnut store sign whose “o” is exactly where a meteorologist told the reporter that the water will be cresting overnight.

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So where’s the good news? It’s there in that account. It’s not that there’s a doughnut store nearby. That the water will crest. Because for all the damage that is happening now, and it’s a lot, and there will be more, the fact is that the water eventually will recede. This was a 200-year storm, sure, and it overwhelmed all the worst-case scenarios, but the waters will drop. We will assess the extent of the losses and damage, and the people will return, as they always do. When will they return?