A flood story

PORTLAND, Ore. -- For years people have been telling me, "It's all about who you know."It's usually in the context of business or getting a job, usually for the purpose of succeeding in a company. I have to admit, I always winced a little when I heard them say that, but today, I found truth in it.Only, I'd add, "It's all about who you know who will jump into a truck with you in the early hours to ride an hour and a half to a town called Mist to help flood victims and do so with little more knowledge than that."At about 3 p.m., I arrived with a truck full of trash at the Neil Kelly Company, where I work part-time, delivering cabinets and doors and cleaning up job sites. I was informed that rather than perform the deliveries and the cleanup I had scheduled for that particular Friday, I would instead be meeting up with a group called Medical Teams International (MTI) and heading to Mist to help with post-flood cleanup. By 4:30, I had all the information MTI could give me. I made my run to the dump to get rid of the trash. When I got back, I made some phone calls.At about 6, I had my housemate, Matt, saying he would go with me. At around 9, I got my occasional housemate, Brian, to agree to come along with us. We had to meet at the MTI office at 6:30 the next morning. We did so.Our information at this point was that we would be told on our arrival by somebody in the firehouse what we would be doing for the day.When we arrived, the three of us were directed to the house of Mike, a 78-year-old man whose front steps had been ripped from his porch. He had to resort to using a short ladder to enter and exit his house.We got to work. We pulled out his appliances, removed the sludge that covered his entire floor, took out the kitchen cabinets, pulled just about all his furniture and carpets out of the house and piled it all in the yard for the dump truck to retrieve.While we were there, a Red Cross representative showed up and said he was going to declare this a disaster area. I don't know if that was referring to the town or just Mike's house, but it meant Mike would get everything replaced that had been damaged -- or, at least, that's the story.Brian, Matt and I were all very impressed with just how sharp the man was at 78 and how well he was handling everything. He thanked us for our work.We were sorry we couldn't put in more time, but we had to leave at 3 p.m. to get out of there before dark. We met up with the MTI guy and his volunteers and all headed back to Portland.As I said, it really is all about who you know -- and sometimes, it's also about who you don't know. I know some pretty great people who were willing to put themselves between an old man and a natural disaster.I didn't know this man who showed admirable resilience and good cheer to three strange young men who showed up at his door one cold and sunny Friday morning.(Robert Ericksen, son of Hispanic Link News Service co-founder Hector Ericksen-Mendoza, is a student at Reed College in Portland. He writes poetry under the pen name L.S. Indio.)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)