This essay,
Flood!,
is the companion piece to
Beach Gone!.
I cried. That's what caused it. I'm responsible.
* * *
It's late at night. Someone I love dearly accuses me of lying. What she
doesn't know leads her to that therefore seemingly valid conclusion. I
know saying what really happened will hurt her. Yet if I don't, I can't
live with my integrity out for not saying. I choose to say. Her face
turns gray as she listens realizing I'm serious. I've just bet
everything I own in the world on her precious love, and for all I know
I've just lost it all.
I go outside. I hardly notice the stars, usually plentiful at my place,
are hidden behind clouds. I hardly notice it's raining softly but
steadily. The tears start to come, blending with the rain on my face.
Soon I'm crying. I let it come. Sobs mingled with grunts and snorts
come out of me. When it finally subsides, I'm washed clean. I go back
inside and go to bed, spent. I don't notice the rain steadily
increasing. Home and dry,
sleep
comes easily.
* * *
At 5:00am my son Joshua and I wake. We get into the car and drive down
the hill to go
swim
laps in the olympic pool at our village gymnasium. We live on the
corner edges of a two hundred acre cattle ranch and a one hundred and
fifty acre horse stable and paddock. The
Cowboy
Cottage
we have the good fortune to live in is cozy and warm as we set out,
chatting amiably as we meander down the road.
If I could have done a classic double take as
'toons do, I would have. The familiar road in front of us
is now a ramp disappearing down into a lake. A lake?
What? How? Where? Questions flash through my still
not comprehending mind. The surroundings are eerily quiet. We are the
first on the scene. We turn right, looking for a way around. That way
is open. We drive, talking animatedly about what we've just seen, and I
avert my eyes from headlights pointing at me. Only they aren't moving.
They're shining from a car pointing wrongly upward, water up to and
clear through its windows, its entire chassis deep under another
lake which my racing mind is totally clear shouldn't be
there. This is supposed to be a road not a lake ...
"Josh" I say to my son who is also incredulously silent. "What do you
think?". "It's a flood, Dad" he says. No doubt about it. He's right.
We back up in our tracks, trying to find a way out of this rapidly
shrinking island. Back in the other direction, we see three cars coming
towards us, making wakes through a river washing over the
road. "Let's go through, Dad" Joshua urges excitedely, his wide-eyed
innocence completely oblivious to the danger. In front of our startled
eyes, the middle car is suddenly turned on its side, fills with water,
and as its terrified driver struggles to get out the passenger window,
is picked up like a twig and deposited unceremoniously on what was once
a guard rail.
"I don't think so, Josh ..." I say to him, turning around and driving
back in our tracks, following the road back to higher, safe ground. We
drive around looking for a way out, and we don't find one. Eventually
our curiosity gets the better of us. We park on high ground. Lifting
our jackets over our heads to protect us from the now driving rain, we
walk down to a bridge over the river. As we draw near, my jaw drops ...
all by itself. The river, usually a lazy fifty yards wide and twenty
feet below the bridge, is now an angry, raging torrent a half mile wide
completely covering the bridge, and the road is nowhere to be seen. A
huge metal dumpster filled with building debris floats incorrigibly by,
rocking crazily.
"Josh my Son, take this all in" I tell him. "You may never see
anything as mighty as this again as long as you live.".
* * *
The flood tests my stand. What do I mean by that? Things are what they
are, and they aren't what they aren't. This is OK, and it doesn't mean
anything. Can I stand for that in the midst of this? I look ... and I
notice I can. This is the nature of life in the world for human beings.
There've always been floods. There probably always will be. There's a
lot of make wrong here: from those who assert we did this
to ourselves by interfering with the ecological balance and causing
global warming, from those who assert our flood control measures were
inadequate, from those who assert in an apocalyptic sense
that this is some kind of cosmic punishment for us being
bad.
It's none of the above. It's a flood. That's what it is. And that's all
it is.
And ... in the midst of that realization, I'm deeply
compassionate for those in my community who are no doubt severely
inconvenienced by this, for the people of Bande Ache over whom the
tsunami swept, for the people of the village of Bam in Iran who woke up
to their homes collapsing on them in a 6.6 earthquake when all that
happened to me was my tee shirt got rained on and I got some mud on my
cowboy boots.
* * *
Over the next few days Joshua and I and Christian my other son and
Alexandra my daughter drove around our village as the waters rose and
then receded. We watched the waters rise four feet into a hotel where
friends of mine once stayed. We looked into a basement parking garage I
parked in when attending a court case, now a deep
swimming
pool. We peered through the glass doors of the box office of our local
cineplex where the children and I spent many happy times together
taking in the latest "Harry Potter"s et al, now a mud bath replete with
soggy sandbags as eloquent testimony to a harried and hopelessly
inadequate attempt to stem Mother Nature's
inexorable
tide, and a sign plaintively, obviously, telling us "Closed
until further notice.". We watched as shopkeepers waded up to their
chests down usually bucolic avenues trying to save whatever they could
of their goods, or at least move them to higher places, chagrin all
over their faces.
I noticed my office, perched dangerously on the right bank of the
normally quaint river, was completely spared. Six inches of creamy mud
covered the entire street in front of our lobby, proof of the night the
waters rose. Yet not one drop had entered our building even as
neighboring tenants shoveled buckets of mud out into the street. And
the office we had just moved from three days earlier was even more
remarkably spared. As Joshua and I walked around it, stepping carefully
over debris deposited there by the river now subsided and one hundred
yards away, we noticed what appeared to be a crescent shaped invisible
protective barrier of avoidance in front of our old premises. I looked
through the windows of the now shuttered building expecting to see
water and mud damage inside and on the floors. Instead I saw the fresh
tracks of vacuum cleaners in the pile of the rugs we had cleaned before
vacating the premises. Yet just next door were people in
wellington boots cleaning their street level garages, the
entire contents of which were now dirty chocolate from a two foot wall
of water and mud.
Go figure.
* * *
I finally create the opportunity to go back to the girl who accused me
of lying. I apologize to her. I tell her I apologize for the
way I said what I said, not for what I said, the
truth of which I assert she had to know, and I ask her to
forgive me.
Without missing a beat, she kisses me, says it's "OK", then suddenly
throws her arms around my neck, embraces me, and says she loves me.
She got it. Thank God! I breathe a sigh of relief as I say I
love her too. She gets that too, like a contact high, and she says
"That's awesome! That's so cool ...".