1977

Stretched out on the bed reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, radical books were piled everywhere around her. The hair on her head was shorn to a stub, her legs were furry and unshaven, and the awareness that she had been a victim all her life was fastening itself to a new kind of identity for her. Fired a few months before while working in an all-male carpentry shop, she had since succumbed to a life of unemployment benefits and self-reflection. It was within this inner swirl of changing perspectives that the phone rang, disturbing her mind-altering reverie.

Her father’s voice spoke into the receiver, asking if she was ok. Of course - what kind of question was that? There had been news of flooding, he said. She might be in danger.

She thought about the voices she had heard a few minutes before in the distance and of her dismissal of them as noise from a raucous neighborhood party. Now questioning the assumption, she hung up and got up out of bed feeling somewhat dizzy at the motion, and walked down the narrow stairs of the apartment house.

As she descended the last few stairs, a strange scene began to emerge through the screen door that got clearer with her opening of it. Through a downpour of rain she saw that the sleepy, dead-end road leading to her house had become a Loch Ness monster of cars darting down a raging new river.

Her basement neighbor was asking for help. She stared at the frightened little man that she had never spoken to before, as if he was part of this grand fantasy. In his panic, he grabbed her arm and led her around to the side of the house. She looked down and gazed in at electronic amplifiers floating in the watery floor of his basement apartment. He wanted to raise them to upper bookshelves he had evacuated for the purpose of saving them. He sternly told her to grab one end of the closest black and silver box to help. Try as she might, she couldn’t manage the lift operation. Her muscles felt as relaxed as the standing water around her ankles.

As the storm water rose, her inability to help the man became less important. He yelled at her over the roar of pelting rain that they had to get out, and she followed him obediently. As they came around the house, they saw a man in the front yard holding onto the top of a small tree as he floated in the swirling flood waters. He was screaming and crying and basement man told her to get some sheets or towels.

The screaming man’s fear mobilized her. She flew up the stairs and reached into the closet pulling out a handful of carefully folded towels. Her hands, shaking and wet, found the warmth and symmetry of the tucked away cotton fabric strange and prissy, but the real danger of a drowning man had engaged her instincts and she flew down the stairs and back onto the outside scene with a stack of towels.

It’s all I could find, she told the take-charge man. It is ok, he said to her before discarding all but one and throwing one end of it to the frightened man, telling him to grab hold of this.

He did as he was told, taking hold of the towel just as the sapling unearthed itself and floated off in the strong current. A pudgy, soaked white person emerged rom the rising waters without his pants, his underwear soiled with feces. He was loud and upset and wanted to tell about his experience as the three of them walked up the stairs of the three-story apartment building. She avoided looking at his shivering, dripping flesh but listened intently, riveted to his shocking experience.

What they thought was safety on the third floor quickly shifted with the rising water. The view of single story houses across dwindled to the tips of roofs. As the swelling river reached the bottom of their third floor apartment house, the fat man’s panic grew and he fled the main room to the balcony where he began to scream help-help-help, in the manner of his earlier cries.

Basement man had scrounged through the kitchen, laying hold of a package of plastic trash bags, sat on the floor and began blowing them up and tying them off in hopes that they might act as life savers.

The woman lay down on the floor behind him, her eyes shut, praying. She was anxious with impending death, a new identity now only a few minutes away. She was ready in the wings, scared but willing to go on without a fight if need be.

We know now that the men’s efforts were fruitless. What is not known among those who relate the story is whether the woman’s prayers made any difference, but the rain did stop and the waters receded as quickly as they had risen and all three survived the incident.