Our tendency to grow a story was legendary. But the stories that grew that night revealed a terror none of us recognized.
The rain came in on a Sunday morning in mid-September, a rare storm that stalled out over the entire Front Range, straddling 300 miles of mountains sluiced with canyons that emptied into plains. The month had already been unusually wet and now each narrow valley overflowed the way it did in spring when winter snowmelt filled gulch and gulley. The water ran down, down, following gravity, as it flooded dozens of creeks and rivers on its way to the plains.
In Pine, our tiny mountain town, nobody was worried. Waterfalls crashed along the north and south slopes of the canyon that held us emptying into the swollen Piney that ran straight through town as kids rode their bikes parallel to it along Main Street, trying to see who could make the biggest splash. Main was the one paved road in town and connected us to Left Hand Canyon and the Front Range and Boulder to the east. To the west, it climbed away from the Piney to follow a seasonal creek, the Little Pine, upward to the Peak-to-Peak Highway, which ran perpendicular to the canyons along the Front Range.
It was business as usual that Sunday as Salish, a sleek black-and-white husky, got out, again, and had to be rounded up by a posse of people dressed in rain jackets and rubber boots calling for her. At the Merc, the heart of our small town, a group of regulars sat on the porch rating the spray from cars by holding up numbers scrawled on pieces of cardboard purloined from the town’s recycle bin. A few people lit early fires in their wood stoves and dreamed lazily of autumn, the woodsmoke reminding all of us that summer would soon end.
Inside the Merc, Roxy, the Merc’s newest owner, served brunch to a soggy crowd. She flipped pancakes and poached eggs while her husband Al, a big-hearted man with curly black hair, served coffee, and Rooster, who’d been a fixture in town for nearly four decades, held court at the big table in the back, spinning disaster tales.
We were all talking about the rain.
“They call it a hundred-year flood,” he said, tipping back a pint-sized “Merc-mosa,” one of Roxy’s innovations, served in a pint glass, the liquid inside a potent, watery orange. “but that doesn’t mean it comes every hundred years.” He laughed. The event was defined not by its frequency but by its probability—each year there was a 1 percent chance of an occurrence. “This,” he grinned, waiving his hand at the weather outside, “ain’t nothin.”
Rooster simply could not imagine a force big enough to take him out, and that included cancer. As proof, he bragged about the tumor that a doctor said should have killed him within a matter of months. He’d outlived his death sentence by more than a decade, even though it caused him to lose most of his hair and the thin grey ponytail he’d sported since the 80s.
Pine had flooded at least twice that we knew. The last time had been in 1967 when the Piney threatened to cross Main Street from the Little Park to swamp the Merc and the town hall, both historic buildings. Back then, folks shoved old cars into the half-acre space to block the flood-swollen creek. In the aftermath, the Little Park was reengineered as a catch basin to give the flood waters a place to pool. This meant we walked across Main and down into the park, now sunk below a house on one side and the Post Office on the other.
As Roxy set a plate of smoked trout and eggs in front of Rooster, Floyd, dressed in his signature Hawaiian shirt, arrived with Adam, his latest roommate. The two carried 20-gallon stock pots full of pork-and-veggie green chili. Since moving to town and in with Floyd, Adam, who was 30 years younger, had become his shadow. They were an odd pair; where Floyd was effusive, Adam was silent, with wide, unblinking eyes, that gave him the look of someone who was perennially astonished. We’d heard he had suffered a head injury, and so was slow to speech and a little off, but sweet and gentle, always ready to lend a helping hand. While Adam put the pots in the walk-in, Floyd slapped Rooster on the back, then walked into the kitchen. Since selling the business to Roxy, he’d been enjoying his retirement with daily doobies and frisbee golf with the guys, a much nicer version of the old cranky man he’d been when he ran the place after his wife Donna wandered off to Mexico a decade ago. Now he helped Roxy by making the chili, which covered the Merc’s famous burritos and acted as the unofficial “Mayor of the Merc,” waiving “Hiya” to anyone passing by as he tended the flower boxes outside or put out coolers of water for the cyclists who rode the 15 miles up the canyon from Boulder.
“Are we on for Wednesday?” he asked, and she nodded as she plated some eggs. Roxy often stopped at Floyd’s on Wednesday nights after she finished selling Merc Bars, her version of the popular sports bar, at the Farmer’s Market in Boulder. After she stored what she hadn’t sold in Floyd’s garage to keep the town bear from getting to them, she and Floyd had a few drinks and talked about Merc business, as Floyd offered advice.
Floyd hugged Roxy and stepped onto the porch for a cigarette. Adam joined him to watch as the rain continued to fall.
There would be no Wednesday visit that week.The entire Front Range was nervous about the rain and the weather was making people do strange things.
After three days of improbably hard rain, the whole Front Range was saturated. Wednesday was the 12th anniversary of September 11th and the world felt gloomy. Roxy cut short her Farmer’s Market gig because all of Boulder was underwater. Her Subaru plowed through ten-inch pools at intersections shooting translucent blades at passing vehicles, and her wipers, flicking frantically back and forth, couldn’t keep up.
As Roxy turned west up Lefthand Canyon toward Pine, she saw a man riding a horse out of its mouth. He was fully loaded with gear which included a backpack strapped to his shoulders, saddlebags, and a duffle bag with a shotgun case tied bedroll-style behind him. He wore leather and an oil-skin duster. A soggy border collie balanced between his legs. Rider and dog turned in front of her onto the highway, traveling north.
The entire Front Range was nervous about the rain and the weather was making people do strange things. Just then, a cyclist sped past Roxy, heading up Left Hand Canyon into the deluge and rising rivers, out for a daily ride.
Roxy drove through the heart of Pine, slowing in front of Floyd’s just four houses past the Merc at the bump in the road where Bachelor’s Gulch—named by Floyd himself in the bitter aftermath of his divorce—drained into a metal culvert beneath Main Street. She waived to the lilac-colored house with its collection of pink flamingos scattered in the yard and called softly, Goodnight, Floyd.
The air was too wet. She wanted to get home to her kids.
Roxy lived at the last house on Ward Street, the old four-wheel-drive road that curved away from Main at the confluence of the Piney and the Little Pine to follow Piney Creek up a narrow gorge. Her cabin was part of the old Murch property that straddled the Piney, the “big house” on one side and two tiny cabins on the other. Roxy and Al bought one of the smaller cabins after the Murches died. The house was a two-minute drive from the Merc but set back into the woods so that Roxy called it her own private Shangri-la. Al had put up a small fence to keep the kids in when they were toddlers and Roxy strung café lights in the trees out back over a grassy patch with a picnic table, near the sandy bank where the kids swam naked in the summer.
At home, Roxy looked in on her children, a boy and a girl three years apart, who liked to sleep in the same bed, one buried beneath a pillow, the other with the covers flung wide. She told Al there was too much water and she worried about the creek jumping its banks, but he said, Don’t worry, and held her until he fell asleep while Roxy kept watch in the night.
Back in the heart of town, Floyd went to bed with a book as he always did, his cat Shadow, a sleek black feline with a skittish nature, curled by his feet. In the front room facing the street, Adam painted. Floyd had had a series of ne’er do well roommates—all young, all guys. He opened his house indiscriminately, so over the years he’d housed cheating husbands and potheads and even one heroin addict, guys who left him in a lurch when it came to rent and food, guys who helped themselves to beer at the Merc and smoked all of Floyd’s dope. That changed with Adam, who had paying work as the janitor at the school high on the hill overlooking the Piney. Some of us thought they got along because Adam was so quiet, so shy. Others were more plain: Adam was the first roommate Floyd had who wasn’t a dirtbag.
The water sheeted outside and Adam knew the gulch next to the house was churning and full. Floyd had told him about the mudslides that had filled it every year since the fire on Porphyry Mountain above. Now, each year during the August monsoons when afternoon thunderstorms exploded in 30-minute pockets of hard spikey rain, a mudslide filled the gulch, which widened a little each year. As predictable as robins and cyclists returned, Floyd said.
“One year,” Floyd told him, “my house will fall in and then I will sue the town and retire to Costa Rica on the settlement money.” He winked. “Someone always pays.”
Adam swirled paint on a canvas, the brush gliding through thick pools of liquid. It must have felt good to him to have been taken in by Floyd and by the rest of us. Unlike so many of the people who moved to Pine to try us on for a season or two, people who bullishly proclaimed themselves and were out to see what they could get in a place where it looked like the getting was easy, Adam felt like one of our own—a little odd, but gentle, someone who discreetly took his place in Pine and among us. He fit. And he and Floyd fit. It was, Floyd liked to say, better than marriage.
The rain fell and fell. The creek roared.
Across Main Street from Floyd’s, Lulu Farmer wondered on the QT, the town’s online message board, if a flood plan had been put in place. She said she could hear the boulders rolling in the creek and the ground shook as they knocked together. The town clerk replied, “Sandbags were at the ready” and if a flood came, the emergency siren would go off to let everyone know to climb to safety.
All of us went to bed that night like it was any other night.
No sandbags had been placed.
No sirens sounded.
The whole town slept.
The logic of water is down down down and down it all went; the mountain was a river now, a cement-like concoction of everything it had passed over. It filled Bachelor’s Gulch and surged through and around Floyd’s to cross Main Street and merge with Piney Creek just west of the Little Park and the Post Office, effectively slicing the town into upper and lower halves and nearly shoving Lulu’s house into the creek.
The living room around Adam exploded, and for a moment he couldn’t see a thing, but he was being pulled toward the front of the house by a riptide of water and mud. He had the feeling he got on the beach when the water goes out and the sand beneath his feet began to fall away, the ground trickling from beneath him. Everything was night and oozing earth and water. The wall in front of Floyd’s room was bowed out like the hull of ship.
“Floyd,” he called as he half-lunged, half-crawled toward the bedroom door.
It was cemented into place by whatever was on the other side.
The house moaned and lurched again. He heard timbers crack.
Adam did not remember how he got out—a window? Did he push out the screen? But when he emerged, he was more earth than man. He’d lost his shirt and shoes, but he still held his paintbrush in his hand. Water and mud and rocks were everywhere. The road in front of the house had disappeared.
He plunged toward Lulu’s blue house, thrust in part by water.
“Call 911,” he shouted, pounding on the door, “Call 911! I can’t get Floyd.”
By then it was already too late.
The sound of the slide, like a dynamite blast, set us in motion. If not for the thundering boom of it hitting Floyd’s, if not for Adam loosed into the night like poor Tom on the heath, more would have been lost. In addition to the slide, the Piney, a creek where kids waded in the summer and bathers gathered on July-hot days, had jumped its banks in several spots, carving new ledges and widening the reach of the once tranquil river.As the flood erupted, it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, its path wild, chaotic, random.
As the flood erupted, it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, its path wild, chaotic, random. It was astonishing to hear reports of the different conditions in our tiny town, the footprint of which was little more than half a square mile. Depending on elevation on the canyon wall and proximity to the Piney, some posted to the QT that they were “safe and dry” while others watched in terror as the river rose visibly ten feet from their doors. There was so much water coursing down Main Street that cars had begun to slide in the current.
Adam left Lulu and ran up Main Street to the west edge of town, the distance of about two blocks, and then into the narrow canyon of Ward Street and the angry mouth of the Piney, yelling “Get out! Get out!” as he passed the handful of houses there on his way to Roxy and Al’s. Ronnie, a Viet Nam vet who lived in the basement of a house, stood in the street, water running freely over his bare feet and ankles. The detonation from the heart of town had sent him out into the road.
“What is happening,” he said as Adam ran by. It wasn’t a question but a statement of fact.
Ward Street was a river now, too, rushing toward the confluence of Piney and the Little Pine at its intersection with Main Street. Adam slipped as he ran, falling over rocks and sliding in the moving waters.
Roxy opened the door to an out-of-his-mind Adam. He’d sprinted the half a mile from the center of town.
“You don’t want to hear this. You don’t want to hear this,” he panted. She barely recognized him, bathed in mud and bleeding.
She tried to pull him inside, but he resisted: “Get the kids and get out. Now!” and then yelled “Go!” and disappeared across the bridge to the big house where a young couple had just started renting so recently, they did not have a phone.
Roxy hoisted her sleeping kids from bed and shoved them into the Subaru with pillows and blankets while Al rounded up water and flashlights and camping gear. It was difficult to see through the rain and the mountain dark, but the sound they could not ignore–a roar like a jet engine. Roxy remembered to grab jackets and her laptop but forgot Daisy’s shoes. The cat, always a loner, ran off into the dark.
Roxy and Al saw lights on at the Murch house and knew Adam and the couple would not be far behind so Al aimed the Subaru down the river of Ward Street, half rolling, half sliding. Water rained off the hillside on one side of the car and on the other, the Piney surged and chopped, exploding over rocks, carrying whole pine trees.
Al stopped to pick up Ronnie who was still standing in the road, rushing water so deep now it threatened to topple him.
Roxy pointed to the Little Pine, no longer a trickle, but a churning river.
A log blocked the road and their escape near the confluence of the two creeks.
“Hold on,” Al said as he gunned the engine.
Minute by minute more water ran. It sprang from canyon walls, poured from the sky, sluiced along both creeks turned raging torrents to meet on the west end of town, beneath Ward Street. Below that, the Piney surged east where it wanted now, a mass of chocolate churning water, relentlessly reconfiguring its course and the town.
Al and Roxy joined a line of backed up cars heading to higher ground on the west end of town. Their evacuation was blocked by another slide that poured over the road toward the Little Pine 200 yards out of town. People stood out in the rain talking about what to do.
In the back seat with the kids, Ronnie chanted, “What has happened, what has happened.”
At last, the sirens went off.
Our town was divided into four islands now, split in perpendicular directions by the flooding Piney and the mud slide at Floyd’s. No one could get in or out and our calls for help went unanswered.
“Shelter in place,” said the 911 operator.
Folks in threatened areas on the south side of the Piney gathered at the elementary school on the hill, but it was the north side of town that was in trouble. Residents from Ward Street and people living near the confluence had only one option: a house owned by Nolan, one of Pine’s bachelors, an inventor and banjo player who had a house and workshop on the western flank of Porphyry Mountain, overlooking the Little Pine, just outside the town limit.
That’s where Roxy and Al took their kids. Lulu showed up after someone finally rescued her from her porch, where she stood in a raincoat with an overnight bag and her two leashed dogs. She thought to take makeup but left her partial, her mother’s silver, and all four of her guitars.
The couple from the Murch’s showed up, but Adam was not with them.
Nearly 30 people gathered. Bottles of wine were opened along with cans of beer as people, revved up on adrenaline, went over and over what was happening. Lulu cried a little, thinking of Floyd and her house. Like everyone she privately horse-traded with the weather gods, listing the things she could do without and the things she couldn’t. Please, please was her prayer. One woman, a small brunette with short hair who none of us had ever met, sat on the floor in the lotus position and laughed and laughed.
So many rumors circulated about what was happening. Cars in the creek, whole homes moving in the waters. A mountain lion swimming the floodwaters. The sow we’d seen this summer roaming the streets in town, bawling for her cubs. People dead. Someone said the flooding Piney reached all the way across Main Street to the Merc now and the place where the town gathered on Saturday nights was flooded. Water was everywhere. Rumors circulated that the eastern road out of town was “under water” but we could not imagine it. Piney Creek, even at its height in spring, flowed 20 feet below the paved canyon road. There were also whispers that in a canyon nearby, a 30-foot wall of water had wiped out the little enclave of Sunset and a dozen homes.
It was natural in our small town to make a tale more colorful, to let the whiff of rumor flesh itself out as it was passed around the circle of people who lived here. Our tendency to grow a story was legendary. But the stories that grew that night revealed a terror none of us recognized.
In town, the VFD put up yellow tape on the roads in and out of town, across the ends of both bridges and placed cones on both sides of the slide at Floyd’s, their ranks, like the town, split into four groups. The rest of us tried to cinch ourselves together, like connecting rafts on a river. We posted police scanner reports and spread the word to stay put. Someone went through the town directory, making calls to account for each person in town.
Among the missing, Adam.
At first he couldn’t see in the dark and he stumbled and slid along the mud-steep slopes, but then his eyes adjusted to the night and the rain. He climbed tree to thicket searching for shelter, but too often the soil began to ooze away from his bare feet and forced him higher. He was scratched and bleeding, a deep gouge on his leg and one on his arm. He saw deer scrambling up the hillside, over rocks, across open patches, and he followed them through the rain until they came to a stand of currant bushes on the edge of the abandoned gold mine, 200 feet above the confluence of the Little Pine and the Piney. From here he saw the flashing lights on either end of town and houses completely lit up. Everyone was awake. There was Floyd’s home, his home, standing closer to the road than it had been. A dark hulking pile spilled from it. He could hear nothing above the cacophony of the two rivers. Figures moved antlike below, holding flashlights. No human sound reached his ears.
There were a couple of old out-buildings, remnants of a gold mind, tin sheds he could climb into but Adam moved closer to the deer instead. When he bedded down near them, among the currants, they did not seem to mind.
Together, they breathed in the dark.
The night passed into day. We thought we’d seen the worst of it—the slide, poor Floyd who we hoped never knew what hit him, and us, isolated from help and from each other.Others talked about what might happen next, going over escape routes and contingency plans. It was life as usual on the edge of living and dying.
But still the rain came and the waters rose.
Our electricity and the phones went out. Cell coverage could only be gotten by climbing up a hillside and too often that wasn’t safe.
The Little Park was under water and so were both bridges. Lulu’s blue house, crumpled accordion-like over the creek, the river suctioning contents from beneath. Gone was her baby grand piano, last seen surfing flood waters below town. The house up canyon to the west from hers had simply been erased. There was no sign that it had ever been there. Near Ward Street, two more houses were ripped from their purchase on the canyon wall. The red roof of one lay flattened, washed up on a boulder pile on the edge of Little Park and the owner’s green Toyota was seen sliding into the creek, slipping under both bridges, coming to rest three miles down canyon, a heap of twisted metal identifiable only by its color.
Up at Nolan’s, the atmosphere was like a big camping trip. Kids, thrilled they didn’t have to go to school, built forts and played hide and seek while the adults organized food. They grilled thawing meat from the freezer and built a cheery fire. Nolan played the banjo as Lulu sang and strummed along on one of his guitars. For a little while, the place felt cozy and warm, as if they’d gathered for a holiday, old friends getting together.
People cried, laughed, talked, drank. Another evening descended. Some slept, sitting upright in chairs. Others talked about what might happen next, going over escape routes and contingency plans.
It was life as usual on the edge of living and dying.
At one point the deer stopped, mid-flight, in the open meadow. So Adam stopped too. A boom sounded from across the canyon, earth and rock falling in the dark. And there was a great roaring below from the creek that was not the creek. Louder now than before. A wall of water stronger and mightier than the canyon had ever known. Instinct told the deer to halt, identify the danger, then flee up, up, up. Adam knew what they knew and ran with them, one of them. A man might have hesitated, but Adam was no longer a man. He knew which way to run as together they headed west along the incline back into the forest on the hill between the two rivers.
Everyone jumped away from the mountain-facing windows to gather at the stairs in the center of the house. Where to go? The kids were asleep in a bedroom on the second floor and Roxy ran toward them.
Al and few others raked the hillside flash lights. The rumbling dissipated.
On the other side of the house, the Little Pine roared, louder now. Someone thought they could see waves in the canyon. There was no road below. Only river. Water muscled through the narrow ravine, a bully, and exploded into a wild, deep chasm of churning water, hurricane loud.
Pitched between the possibility of more slides and the rising river, the group tried to think what to do.
Someone offered it might be possible to evade a slide by running uphill out of its path. Al thought they could walk down the dirt road, closer to the creek, and stand near, but not close, to its banks. Both options were impossible. Roxy was reluctant to wake the sleeping children and scare them. So far they had remained blissfully unaware of the danger they were in.
No one said it, but each of them wondered if they were going to die.
At last, they decided the best thing was to stay put but be ready to run. Lulu put her dogs on their leashes again, preparing to flee. They would take turns keeping watch outside. The few extra backpacks were handed out and each adult was armed with a flashlight and a water bottle tied in a plastic bag at their wrist.
It made sense at the time.
Roxy went upstairs again to be with her kids. Her only thought: Let them live. She wrote out a note wrapped in a plastic bag and put it in her pocket. It was addressed to her parents and her children, telling them she loved them. She settled in beside her kids. Al was there too. Together they listened to the echo of more slides and to the endless, hammering rain.
Minutes were hours, each was a triumph and also a defeat.
Friday morning dawned.And then he understood. The knowledge came suddenly, like a key sliding into a lock with a click. He was a man.
A robin sounded its urgent morning call like it was any other late summer day. Adam felt sun on his skin. The warmth, a relief. It reached him through the branches of a big ponderosa on the edge of the meadow.
The deer were gone.
A sadness settled over him. The ground squished as he rolled over on his back: above, a sky as blue as if nothing had happened. He had the urgent feeling that he should remember something. For a long time, he lay there looking up trying to think of what it was—a secret knowledge that lay beyond the words he knew.
He felt the mountain air in his lungs. Felt his chest rise and fall. Felt his skin caked with mud. A vague throbbing in his leg.
And then he understood. The knowledge came suddenly, like a key sliding into a lock with a click. He was a man.
And he was alone.
Adam sat, then stood, testing his limbs, touching the dried blood on his leg and arm, rubbing his palms against his belly and thighs. He pinched the pale skin on his arm, touched his lips and eyes for confirmation, then walked east across the meadow to the edge of the small butte between Ward Street and Main.
To his left, the Little Pine was a churning chocolate-colored river, wider and deeper than even the Piney in spring. The riverbed was full and overflowing, carving a chasm where once there had only been a sleepy trickle. The flooded creek rose 20 feet in spots and had taken parts of the blacktop on the higher western edge of town. On Adam’s right, the end of Ward Street disappeared into a torrent where the Little Pine converged with the Piney; the house that stood was missing its creek-facing wall so that, dollhouse-like, he could see the contents of each room.
Beyond that, Adam saw the town had been remade.
The corridor along the Piney as far as he could see was carnage. It took a minute to understand that entire homes were missing. Light poles had been toppled and bands of electrical wires draped over rubble piles and the road. The fringe of Lulu’s house was floating, one wood wall fluttering like a piece of cloth on the water.
Below that, the Little Park had been detonated. Boulders and downed trees and mounds of mud filled it, a roof shipwrecked on top. He could see a splash of pink, one of Floyd’s flamingos, at the top of the last tree standing there.
He began to cry.
Together, they walked down to the Merc, climbing over the rubble pile in front of Floyd’s. One of the guys from the self-titled “Guns and Hoses Club,” the bachelor faction of the VFD, had a chainsaw and was inexplicably cutting the last trees standing in the Little Park. Roxy watched as a pink plastic flamingo at the top of a blue spruce being cut flew briefly, then crashed abruptly into the river and disappeared. A couple of men dressed in camo patrolled the streets or what was left of them, guns holstered in their belts.
It was the Wild West all over.
Roxy was surprised to find the Merc intact. The water had risen only to the porch which was full of sand. Al grabbed a shovel and got to work as Roxy went inside.
Six people sat around the big table near the bar drinking beer and eating bagged chips. They’d simply helped themselves. It was 9 a.m.
A young woman in leggings and a dirty skirt, someone Roxy had never seen before, was baking a pie and mixing brownies in the kitchen.
The woman smiled sweetly at Roxy from the kitchen and said, “Welcome.”
The Little Pine was 20 feet deep as it entered town to fill the Piney. Instead of collecting water to save the town, the Little Park had acted like a staging area for log jams and flood debris. A mass of water and wood collected there in a giant, deadly swimming pool. When its pent-up waters finally let loose, they poured from the heart of town east to create a new channel along the dirt road that angled away from Main on the lower end of town toward Elysian Field, the big park where we held our July Fourth celebrations. Three of the dozen homes that lined the road were lost outright, still more filled with four feet of dirt and sand. But the damage was indiscriminate: the river swamped some homes and left others untouched.
Both roads in and out of town were washed out, the pavement collapsed in large sections as the river carved a new path downward inside the canyon, going where it wanted to go, ignoring property lines, riverbanks, culverts, and blacktop. The landscape forever changed.
Rooster’s yellow VFD helmet was found near the banks of the Piney as it exited town near the lower bridge, his wet dog, McGee, curled up beside it. He was last seen at the Fire Hall on the eastern edge of town the night before. We searched up and down the river, calling McGee to help, but the dog would not leave the helmet near the river. Rooster must have gone out for a closer look when the embankment collapsed. Later, his body would be found pinned next to the totaled green truck down canyon, looking like he was laughing still.
But Adam emerged.
He was barefoot and naked, clutching his paintbrush which looked like it was sharpened on one end. He had scratches and bruises all over his blood and earth-stained body.
He did not speak much.
Roxy took him by the hand and walked him to Nolan’s to get him cleaned up. She heated water and made a bath and put Adam in, sponging off his caked hair and back as he cried wordlessly. When she turned to let him finish the rest himself, he croaked, “Floyd,” and she looked at him and shook her head, closing the door quietly behind her.
The next day, a bunch of us gathered to dig Floyd out from six feet of earth and mud. We took solace in the fact that he looked peaceful, lying in his bed as if he had simply gone to sleep. We carried him on a stretcher down to lower Main and Elysian Fields over a road rutted and filled with debris to await the first National Guard rescue helicopter, singing “This little light of mine.” Floyd was covered with Roxy’s best quilt. Adam followed behind, howling like an animal.
When the helicopters came, more than 250 of us, including Roxy and Al and Lulu, boarded them in batches, uncertain when and if we’d ever return.We call the hillside, replanted with wildflowers, Floyd’s Last Stand.
About two dozen die-hards stayed behind.
Most were folks who had lived in town so long they couldn’t imagine leaving and their houses had survived the flood intact. People who had wells and generators and enough food to last a month. Others, whose survivalist fantasy had brought them to Pine in the first place, stayed so they could “go back to the earth,” gleefully embracing disaster and the apocalyptic moment. One man wandered the town in buckskins with a knife in his belt and lit bowls with a mirror he kept in his pocket. Others bathed in the creek and dug through the debris for anything they could use or sell.
A few lost pets appeared, including Roxy and Al’s 20-year-old cat, who looked fat and happy from all the displaced rodents she’d feasted on, and Salish, who’d run off at the first sound of the helicopters landing. She crawled out from the carcass of Lulu’s collapsed house to follow Adam, who’d refused to leave as well, as he poked in the rubble of Floyd’s looking for paint tubes. After that, they were inseparable. The dog slept back to belly with Adam, his paws curved around Adam’s outstretched arm. We often heard him speak whisperingly to the animal as he tended to the other pets still left in town, walking among the ruins.
A month later, as soon as western access to town was restored, Roxy and Al returned. Their little house on Piney Creek, where Adam had been living, survived intact, standing at the mouth of a freshly carved canyon. During the flood, the empty cabin next to it had acted like a barrier, collecting debris and parting the waters so they coursed around Roxy and Al’s.
A miracle.
Gone was the four-wheel-drive road that had followed the Piney up into woods for miles and miles. In its place, a wider, wilder creek and, to the children’s delight, a new 50-foot expanse of sand near Roxy and Al’s, a big beach, ten times the size of the old one.
By that time, Floyd’s house had already been demolished. None of us could bear walking past it so one of the guys with a backhoe pulled it down and shoved the debris across the street where an impromptu remains pile had formed.
Adam returned often to the place where the house had been. He sat on an iron bench recovered from the debris, his hand moving in circles in the black and white fur on Salish’s neck. He found what remained of Floyd’s pink flamingos and arranged them carefully on the site of the excavated ruin. They looked like a flock of migrating birds, with the exception of two that stood together, heads bent toward each other, as if sharing a secret, apart from the rest.
He spoke to the dog in whispering tones. Sometimes his eyes watched a group of deer move over the hill.
For a long time, people stopped in front of it to talk about Floyd.
Karen Auvinen is a poet, writer, mountain woman, outlier life-long Westerner, and author of the memoir Rough Beauty: Forty Seasons of Mountain Living. She is on the graduate faculty in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University and also teaches first-year students at the University of Colorado-Boulder. This story is from her completed collection The Porn Star of Pine. Learn more about Karen at www.KarenAuvinen.com.
Header image by Alan Frijns, courtesy Pixabay.
