What We Found in the Flood

In 2013, there was a flood in my city. I remember my walk at lunch that day; I thought at the time that the river was singing a strange song – or was that only something I said to myself later, after what happened?

What happened was that at 5.45 p.m., the overpass that I take to get to work every day was under twelve feet of water. Photographs of my first world city were beamed around the world, showing water lapping at the feet of skyscrapers.

Our community runs along the river. Normally, the water is a source of pleasure for the people who live here, but that day we all had to flee to the homes of friends and family who lived on the hillsides. My neighbors Molly, Elizabeth and I, like the rest of our city, watched helplessly as two big rivers burst their banks and thundered into our neighborhood. Huge trees were jammed at awkward angles halfway up other trees. Bridges were submerged. Some people lost just about everything they had.

We were out of our homes for two weeks. When we went back, it felt like we were in a different world. I will never forget that smell of dirty water, with notes of sewage and destruction.

In Molly’s basement, part of a wall had collapsed, revealing a quantity of bones. She called the police. The police called the archaeologists. It turned out the bones weren’t human. They belonged to bison who had lived in our area for millennia before settlers got here. There are records by people who witnessed some of those herds. Look to the north as far as you can, look to the south as far as you can. The herd is a mile wide, and it passes you by for an hour. You would remember a sight like that for the rest of your life. When the settlers came, the slaughter began. It was the biggest environmental and humanitarian crisis that you have never heard of. The bones were cleared away, sent back east to be made into fertilizer, or bone china. So even if you’d lived in our city your entire life, you may never have seen anything before that would link you to our signature species.

Elizabeth’s basement wall collapsed too, spreading water and sludge halfway up her cellar stairs. A sharp corner of … something … was angled out of the mud. Excavating revealed a drenched suitcase of a rather dated design. When the clasp of it, which was almost welded shut, was at last persuaded to open, it vomited out a sodden collection of dollar bills. It’s funny how even when it reeks of sewage, no one is ever so disgusted by the sight of a lot of cash that they decide they don’t want it.

Elizabeth called the police as well. But when their efforts to locate the person the money belonged to didn’t turn up anyone, she got to keep the $20,000.00. How on earth did it come to be there? We will always wonder. Could someone simply have forgotten it? Was someone saving up for something, and then something happened to them and no one else knew about the money? But in any case, she got to keep it. She paid some bills and took her two little girls on a vacation to Arizona the next winter. She said they didn’t want to be anywhere near water, so they celebrated their find with a holiday in the desert. It didn’t make up for the wanton destruction, but it didn’t hurt, either.

As for me, the whole time I was staying at my friend Jack’s house, waiting to go home, the only thing I could think about was what was happening to my own greatest treasure. Only two months before, I lost my beloved dad after his fight with cancer. The shock and loss were still so great that I was only able to process it a little at a time. He had left a collection of journals – the little black books where he had written his life. My dad was a storyteller, and these were his personal diaries. They were irreplaceable. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to read them, but they were stashed in a box under my bed … which was on the first floor of my house. All I could think about was what was happening to them. Water is not kind to paper. Would they be illegible, destroyed? My heart ached as I thought about it. I reproached myself for not keeping them in the attic or on a shelf. But it had made me feel close to him – and who would have ever dreamt what was going to happen?

The day that I got to go home, whilst Molly was being interviewed by archeologists and Elizabeth was talking to the police, I walked slowly up the steps to my little house. I opened the door and walked down the hall to my bedroom. The filthy watermark was more than six inches up the wall in places.

The carpet was still drenched, and I could see where the water had crawled through the door and crept up closer and closer to the bed. I knelt and looked underneath. The water had stopped two feet short of the cardboard box. With a choked cry, I pulled it into my arms. The box was dry, and the contents were completely unharmed. The books were not even damp. I sat down and opened the books wonderingly. The neat, familiar script in that beloved hand looked up on me.

The destruction in homes, businesses and parks took years to clean up. Actually, nothing was ever quite the same. But a while ago, I was speaking to someone who works in one of our city’s parks. They explained that although the devastation had been overwhelming, there had been gifts too. The river had swept away one hundred-year-old trees without pity. But the rich silt dredged up from the river bottoms had also encouraged the growth of new things. Animals rerouted trails; birds found new sites for nests.

That was what we found in the flood. Loss, and new life.