The Name On The Rescue Plaque

The low-water crossing

My name is Carol, and I am fifty-five years old, and for thirty years the most important person in my life was a man whose face I never clearly saw.

He pulled my two boys out of our car when it went into Cedar Creek in the spring of 1994. Then he was gone before the ambulance came. All he left behind was a bone-handled pocketknife on my dashboard with two letters stamped into the end of it.

I kept that knife in a drawer for three decades. I am going to tell you how my grandson finally gave it a name.

It rained for two days before it happened. The kind of rain that comes sideways and does not quit, the kind that turns the ditches into little rivers and makes the gravel roads run like creeks themselves.

We lived six miles out of town then, on a rented place with a leaky porch, and the only way in was over the low-water crossing on Dawson Road. It was a concrete slab poured right across the creek bed, no guardrail, a white-painted gauge pole on the far side so you could see how high the water stood.

I had driven it a thousand times. Everybody out that way had. You learned the water. You learned when it was fine and when it was not.

That morning I had both boys in the car. My oldest was four and buckled in behind me. My youngest was two and strapped into his car seat on the passenger side, chewing on a vanilla wafer and watching the wipers.

I had to get to the clinic in town. The baby had an ear thing, had been up half the night pulling at it and crying, and I had already put the appointment off once because of the rain, and I was not going to put it off again.

My husband was forty miles away pouring concrete on a job that did not stop for weather, and the phone on the wall at home did not reach him, and there was no such thing then as a phone you carried in your pocket. There was me and the two boys and the road.

I remember I had the radio on low, a farm report, the man reading hog prices in that flat even voice they use. I remember the heater was going and the windows were starting to fog, and I had my oldest reach up and wipe a circle clear on his own window with his mitten so he could watch for cows.

I came down the hill toward the crossing and the water was up over the slab, but only a little, and it looked like it always looked when it was only a little. The white gauge pole on the far side showed maybe a foot. A foot was nothing. A foot you crossed every spring.

I have run it over that gauge a hundred times. I thought I knew what a foot of water on that slab meant. I had no idea the water was lying to me.