The Side Effects of Endorphins

What’s your top tip to be successful in life?

Avoid Large Disasters

Dear Agnes

This is a piece about the flood of 1972. By definition, it is a work of nonfiction as these events did occur. I hope this to be an accurate representation, yet who knows how memory serves us.

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A local volunteer stood in our kitchen scraping and scrubbing a porcelain cookie jar. It was the first sunny day in weeks. The house smelled of river dirt with an undertone of sweat and dank air. The water from the storm reluctantly retreated to where it came. The volunteers were a special breed. The woman continued cleaning the porcelain with a newfound urgency as our mother walked into the room. She broke out in a heartfelt laugh breaking the underlying tension in the room. Our mother laughed infrequently, but when she did, she did it for a reason.

 

“That stain you are working on is part of the design. That is the woman’s face. It is some lady from a pancake commercial. The woman set the cookie jar aside and went to the next soiled item in the kitchen. Mom handed her a Pepsi.

Mom contemplated whether all the work was even worth it. There was no getting the smell of the river dirt out of that which sat under water two days ago.

 

June 22, 1972, it had rained in Birdsboro for days on end. There was a certain dread in the air. I sat in bed the night before and listened to the insistent rain on the roof tops. The wind was not the distinguishing feature of the ever-present hurricane. The constant battering rain implanted a slow dull ache in the psyche. Who knows what goes through your mind when you are a twelve-year-old. However, that night, I remember being aware and afraid. It was the beginning of summer, and we had an entire summer ahead of us. This year was different.

 

To this day, I cannot even believe I lived in a town called Birdsboro. It was a small town in southwest Pennsylvania with a trickle of a stream running through it. Hay Creek flowed into the Schuylkill River about a mile from town. My brother and I used to fish in this stream for hours on end. We waded in our bare feet. The water was clear, peaceful, and tranquil. We caught trout and swam in the cold clear water.

 

The morning of June 22, MomMom and Pop went to work as usual, and they dropped my little brother Rob at our aunt’s house. For them it was any other day. They went to work to put food on the table. We were a little bit excited as we planned to head to Fenwick Island for the following weekend. As a family we enjoyed these trips. It started like any other day, albeit with Hurricane Agnes sitting right on top of the Eastern seaboard. And she was not going anywhere in a hurry.

 

My brother and I were home alone. It was obvious we were not going to fill our day doing our usual routine of playing baseball, riding our bikes, or going fishing. Still, we held out hope that the weather would break. We were in for the day. Our only real contact with the outside world was radio station WRAW and it was crackly at best. I do not remember any dire weather warnings or anything out of the ordinary. I do remember hearing Don Mclean’s American Pie as well as Neil Young’s Heart of Gold playing on the radio. If there was any unusual activity on the street, I do not recall. The plumbing shop next door seemed busier than usual. On the deserted streets, a few sirens blared in the distance.

 

My brother and I settled into an intense game of skittle pool. It was his favorite as I preferred the bowling version. Mid-morning, we received a phone call from one of our parents asking us to take things to higher ground. We did know exactly what that meant so my brother and I took items from the floor and stacked them on tables, counters, and the top of kitchen appliances. In retrospect we did a half assed job as we wanted to get back to our game of skittle pool. Our dog Freddy sat contentedly under the table. The cat was hiding somewhere.

 

Things started happening fast and we did not see it coming. We were not listening to updates on the radio and the steady rain only served as a melodramatic background. We glanced out the front window, and the rain was coming down steadily and determined. This was the new steady, as this was different than yesterday. The day was growing dark, and it was only a little past noon. We also noted the streets now filled with water. A steady stream of water rushed ankle deep down Main Street, and people in authority were walking the streets. It certainly was not the standard thoroughfare. Minutes later water started seeping in under the front door. It was a cold, angry, uninvited, dirty water. The water was up to our front door and rising steadily. Things were changing rapidly. Yet it still felt like a situation well under our control.

 

We looked out the side window and saw my mom and stepdad wading toward the house in waist deep water. My stepdad had a whimsical look on his face and our mother looked more concerned. My first thought was what were they doing here. They held our little brother in their arms. Things must be serious if they left work early.

 

When they entered the house, the water was now ankle deep and the air smelled of river mud, electricity, and distant fire. We quickly unplugged as many electrical outlets as we could. The water on the living room floor felt electric. Who knows how real that was? The items we moved to higher ground would have to be moved soon.

 

We soon retreated to the second floor with our beagle Fred and our cat Mathew. We moved to the front bedroom and stared out the window with amazement. The water was now up to the second floor as boats with people floated outside the bedroom window. This was no gentle pond outside our window, rather an angry torrent headed out to bigger waters. We watched an older lady across the street gingerly board a boat from a bedroom window. I have a lasting vision of her accidently dropping her bird cage into the raging waters as she entered the boat. She broke down in tears. Who could blame her. A furniture store two blocks away caught fire, making the atmosphere even more surreal.

 

Another boat meandered up to our bedroom and let us know it was mandatory to evacuate. We were told to leave our pets there and get in the boat as quickly as possible. That sinking feeling of leaving our pets behind adheres to me to this day, The five of us adeptly entered the boat with awkward precision as we were guided toward higher ground. I remember a man who tried to swim away from the danger. He clung to a twelve-foot metal cyclone fence as the water feverishly rushed by. We would later see him in the fire hall down the street wrapped in blankets, very much alive.

 

It was a four-block boat ride to higher ground. We could smell the smoke from the furniture store. Sirens blasted in the distance muting the rain. The smell of river mud singed our noses as our house faded into the past.

 

I do not remember ever being afraid. The only time I had a moment of terror sitting in bed the previous night listening to the building of the wind and rain. The day of the actual flood was calm in comparison. Agnes had planted her seed that previous night.

 

We got out of the boat five blocks from our house where the Main Street of Birdsboro gradually snaked up hill. We slowly walked toward a fire hall. We  were given blankets to combat the cold. I do not remember being even vaguely cold. I do not remember feeling much of anything other than for the lady who lost her bird. I was despondent over our pets back at the house with the waters still rising.

 

We ate a bowl of soup and had a few glasses of root beer as we listened to the town being devoured by Agnes. I wanted to see our next-door neighbors, but they were not there at the firehouse. Most of all I wanted it to stop raining. It eventually did. We found Fred and Matthew sitting on the bed a day or two later nonplussed by the situation. They were fine.

 Eventually we would recover all our clothing, and it took awhile the remove the acrid river smell. Agnes destroyed our house. We lived in government housing for awhile. Our housing was right along the same river that destroyed our house in the first place. Everything else was not worth salvaging. I did get a gift certificate from a local charity. I bought a clock radio and listened to the same radio station we listened to as Agnes approached. I may have reconstructed this in my head. I remember Johnny Nash playing on that little radio.

I can see clearly now the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind

 

This was fifty years ago. There is a moral to this story, but I am not going to tell it to you. That is for all of us to figure out. There are no wrong answers. Agnes it was good to know you.