They Tried to Wash Us Away

See what the hurricane brought me.

Sunday, Aug. 4

As usual, I’m not following the weather closely enough. I’ve heard a hurricane is on the way, but truly that’s all I know.

I’m not following the weather also because yesterday afternoon I picked up my newborn granddaughter from the NICU at Memorial Hospital in Savannah. I had a day’s notice. There has been some kind of problem with her young mom and dad, causing Family & Children’s Services to get involved, and the baby is going to live with me for a while.

I am not prepared for a newborn, one that doesn’t even weigh 6 pounds. The hospital rounded up a carseat for me, plus they were generous with bottles and nipples, diapers and wipes. I stopped at a consignment shop on the way home and bought a bassinet.

Raven is away on a trip, so it’s just me, a newborn, and a hurricane.

1 p.m.

Raven texts me.

Maybe Mr. Ramos can show you how the generator works. We don’t have gas in the cans. It may be good to get gas. The storm is only Category 1 but it looks like rain is going to be the big thing. I’ve seen where people said Savannah could get 18-24 inches. The forecast has the storm sitting off the coast for a couple of days.

“I know we need gas,” I replied. “I’m trying to figure out how to get it without putting gas cans in the car.” With a baby, I don’t need to add.

“How is she doing?” he asks.

Mostly she sleeps and the rest of the time I hold her. She’s an angel baby, and she looks at me with great understanding. I call her Little Fawn.

I’m teaching her the word bottle. “Do you want a bottle?” I ask her as if she’s ten years old, and when she opens her mouth for it I praise her. After the bottle I tell her it’s time to burp, emphasizing the word burp so that she’s not surprised by me pumping her on the back. Before I pick her up I say, “I’m going to pick you up.”

She’s teaching me how furiously and how long a newborn baby can scream.

Monday, Aug. 5

9 a.m.

It’s really starting to rain. I go for gas.

Raven texts to say that Debby has made landfall in the Big Bend of Florida. “Don’t forget that, with the new fiber, if the electricity goes out, the landline won’t work either.”

If I lose power there’s no wifi calling, no landline, and already no cell service where we live in the deep rural.

“You’re sweet,” I text back. “I’ll be okay. I can use the cell. I may have to drive a ways down the road.”

Deep down I know I’m not okay if phone services go out. The hospital sent me home with three thermometers. If the baby’s temperature goes above 100, she needs to get to a hospital.

11 a.m.

Already 6 inches of water is flowing over the pond dam, which the road crosses. That’s the shortest way to town. If I go the other way, I add 8-10 miles to the trip. I’m hoping the dam doesn’t blow.

2 p.m.

Raven calls me to say that the eye of the storm is directly over the Suwannee River ESE of Madison, FL. It’s supposed to cross the Florida-Georgia line just before 10 p.m.

“When will it hit here?” I ask. I don’t know how fast the storm is moving, but the wind is picking up at the farm.

“Sometime tonight,” he says. “Around 2 a.m. ”

“What is the wind going to be like?”

“Twenty to 25,” he says. “Gusts to 45.”

“Okay,” I said. “That doesn’t sound bad.”

“Well,” he says, “although it’s not a strong storm, there are supposed to be unprecedented amounts of rain.”

Heavy rain is falling now, and the ground is pooling with water.

5 p.m.

The electricity goes out. The hurricane hasn’t even passed yet and there’s no power, not a good sign.

There is no way to call 911.

I have gallons of water in the crawl space under the house, but it’s old and stale. I should have drawn fresh water. I never imagined the power would go out before the storm even arrives.

I sterilize stale water to mix with baby formula.

8 p.m.

The baby takes a nap so I do too. What else is there to do? I can’t work. Rain is pouring down and the house is dark. I wake to a light knock on the door. I get up off the sofa, groggy.

My neighbor Wes is standing there.

“You weren’t answering the phone,” he said. “Pam and I decided to come check on you.”

I am barely awake, trying to understand.

“There’s a tree down with live power lines to the south,” he said. “And in the other direction the dam is breaching. You need to get out with us. Grab the baby and come stay with us tonight.”

“I’ve gotta stay here,” I say. “I have animals to take care of. We’ll be okay. But thank you, Wes, for coming to check. That means the world to me.”

He begs me again to get out, stay with him and Pam, and again I decline. Later I wonder how they got through. The downed tree was large and covered the entire road. I realized they had driven through the floodwaters of the overflowing dam.

Somehow a text comes through. Raven sends me a map of the flood zone. I can’t pull it up, which is probably best.

I feed up at dusk in the pouring rain, wearing rubber boots and carrying both a well-wrapped baby and an umbrella that the wind turns inside out. No way would I walk barefoot through the rising water across the farm. I am extra careful with everything. I get out candles and hurricane lamps and a flashlight.

Monday night

Things get blurry now.

I make bottles, feed the baby, burp her, change diapers. The electricity comes back on, flickers out again. That happens one more time, then it goes down for good. The wind howls around the house. Trees thrash and fling off limbs. Sometimes an unripe pecan, still in its heavy green husk, hits the tin roof like a gunshot.

I try to sleep. I’m not worried about the hurricane, but I do worry about tornadoes. Will I hear one in time to get to a deeper part of the house?

Tuesday, Aug. 6

We are good. The storm has passed, and rain is slowing. I need to go out and do chores. Everywhere I go, the baby goes. I try to use my Prius to do chores, to keep Little Fawn dry, but I bog it down 20 feet from its parking place.

The farm is flooded, even on what I consider high ground, and the water is deeper than I’ve ever seen. Two chinaberry trees are sprawled across a fence, and one of them has smashed a metal farm gate.

I can’t communicate and I don’t have power.

The road is destroyed. It has become a stream bed, and tons of running water gouged 3-foot-deep gullies in it. The road is full of downed trees. There is no way to get out and I doubt an ambulance could get in, even if I could dial one.

Otherwise, things look good. I keep worrying about the big trees staying upright.

Somehow, miraculously, Wes comes back. He sees that I’m okay and have everything I need. He leaves again. He is Hero #1.

By afternoon a piece of large machinery comes through. I hear that crews are at work on the fallen oak and the downed lines. The fiber line went down with that big tree. A crew crawl by in their machinery, a tractor making access for the electric company.

8 p.m.

My neighbor, Russell, becomes Hero #2. His regular work is with the state highway department so all day he’s out on hurricane cleanup, hard work all day. Still, at night he gets on his personal tractor and works on clearing and grading and filling our road. He does this even before he knows I have a NICU newborn, and after he finds out about the baby, he works even harder.

10:30 p.m.

One other amazing thing happens. After hours of worry, unable to reach us, Little Fawn’s mother calls the sheriff’s department for a welfare check. At 10:30 p.m. two deputies, shining their ultrabright spotlights in my windows and drenching the countryside with flashing blue lights, unlatch my gate and drive close to the house. They can’t get to the door because of water. They beep a loud horn.

I go wading out through the floodwaters barefoot in pajamas, holding Little Fawn wrapped in a blanket. I have no idea how the officers made their way to my farm. I think they crossed the flooding, collapsing dam. I’ve never seen more beautiful people than those two men. I was overjoyed. I wanted them to spend the night, be my personal protection agency, keep me and Little Fawn safe from the big, bad, climate-changing world.

Wednesday, Aug. 7

1:30 a.m.

The electric company restores power. I see the flashing lights on their large machines rolling through the darkness down the ruined road. Their lights are burning bright, and they move like a little circus through the destruction. I think about the linemen, how little sleep they’re getting.

I’m not getting much sleep myself. Sometimes the baby has a crying jag that lasts a while.

Daylight

Crews are working.

4 p.m.

Now the road is cleared enough for me to risk it in Raven’s 4-wheel-drive Ramcharger. I drive to my office in town for three reasons.

1. I need to call the fiber company to report the wifi outage, so that I can work again.

2. I need to not feel trapped on a flooded farm.

3. I need to know that the world is carrying on in some semblance, that life is normal on the outside.

I run into an old and dear friend. I feel shell-shocked, I feel mute. I want to explain the feeling of lying in the dark house alone with an infant as wind howled and trees raged and rain kept falling and falling and falling. The feeling is of being undone. Many people fared much worse.

“How much rain did you get?”

“I emptied the gauge at six inches,” I say. “I couldn’t keep running out to empty it. So there’s no way of knowing. Did you monitor yours?”

“I couldn’t keep up either.”

I’ll say at least ten inches of rain fell. I’ll say a baby arrived on a hurricane that at times tried to wash us away. But look, we’re still here, the baby and I.

My front yard.

I don’t have great photos of road damage, but my county commissioner showed me hair-raising photos on his phone. This is the pond-dam. Cattails floated up onto the road. What you can’t see her is a canyon where the dam caved in. A car can still cross on one strip of land, although crossing is not a safe thing to do.

What you’re looking at here is a pond-dam at Rogers State Prison that breached. You see the gouge where all the water in the pond rushed through. The pond is now mostly dry, except for a strip of water at the back, where some cows are standing.

Ginger lily in the rain.

Little Fawn.