river rat: Agnes made me a man. I was eight years old when she came into my life. Her force opened up worlds to me. From the time she hit nothing was the same and I was in love. Hurricane Agnes makes me excited over floods and flooding the way a pyromaniac gets wood when he sees a forest fire. It's a sick obsession, I know. People die and property is lost and time is wasted and I love every minute of it. I can't take my eyes off of a swollen river or stream. I need help.
Noses pressed against the steamy windows of the attic, my brother and I sat looking out over the river, barely able to make out the trees during the spells of sheeting rain and blowing leaves. The oaks our neighbor's mother had planted a thousand years ago lost the rich green canopy of leaves to the first winds and now showed bright yellow streaks of color where limbs ripped from the main trunks exposed soft fleshy wood underneath broken bark.
When the rain stopped the river rose. It rose and rose and rose for five days until the water was twenty feet higher than it had been a week earlier. Curt and I spent that week riding our bicycles from one creek to another pressing sticks into the bank and waiting five minutes for the stick to be covered. We'd measure the difference, calculate the rise of water over the next twenty four hours on pencil and paper, then we'd dance around jubilant over our discovery that in a mere 10 hours the elementary school would be underwater.
Of course the water never made it that high. Our math skills were not up to the on-your-feet calculus necessary to predict accurately enough where the water would be in ten minutes let alone ten hours. Even so, we'd ride back and forth from creek to creek, one end of town to the other with our pals pressing twigs into the sodden banks of Barner's Creek and Big Creek just for fun. The speculation was heady. Fist fights broke out over what part of town would be washed away even though nothing in town ever actually did wash away.
On the morning the river crested we woke up to 6 feet of water in our basement and the river lapping a few feet from our front door. Front Street wasn't covered yet but it was the only thing standing between the river and our living room. The highway and green were flooded and the river appeared ten miles across. It was a mud sluice thrumming with power like a hundred freight trains going twenty miles an hour down a single track.
Our father took us to the highway where we walked in knee-deep water chasing carp and catfish as big as lap dogs, their fins cresting the shallows and their wakes bulging ahead of them making us crazy as cats after mice. Armies of frogs advanced into the shallows of the green and the old war memorial in front of Matter's Garage. They holed up in there singing to us when the night fell, but singing in a way that was different, nervous somehow.
We stood on either side of dad, his hands on our shoulders as we watched entire homes float away down the river. A small herd of cattle drifted by mooing in a way that could only be described as panicky. Panicky mooing. I don't know which was worse, the sound of the cows or the sight of a lone man squatting motionless on the roof of his two-story home as it bobbled gently down the river. In the distance a helicopter tracked him; a hundred kids cheered and waved as he rode his home on the muddy water. He may have died, we never did find out about him.
Agnes made it possible for me to ride my bike alone from granny's house all the way up to Miller's General Store. She moved mountains, destroyed highways, unearthed coffins, and filled basements. Her force burst the cement containment ponds of sewer plants spilling turds into the river causing us to boil our water for weeks. Agnes showed me fish on the highway. She shut down work for everybody for a whole week. In my eight-year-old brain Agnes made me a man.
