The Name On The Rescue Plaque

The water took the car

I was wrong about the water that morning, and I have carried that thirty years.

What I could not see from the hill was that the creek was still rising hard behind a bend upstream, and that what looked like a thin sheet over the slab was moving faster and deeper than any reading I had ever trusted.

I got about halfway across. Then the back end of the car just lifted, soft and sideways, the way a boat does when it comes off a trailer. There was no bump, no warning. The road simply let go of us.

The car swung around and the current carried it off the downstream edge of the slab into the deep pool below, and we started to go down by the front.

I remember the water coming up brown against the windows. I remember my oldest saying my name once, not screaming, just saying it, the way he said it when he wanted me to look at something.

I remember thinking, very clearly and very slowly, that I did not know how to do this.

I got my seat belt off. The water was already at my knees and climbing, and the doors would not open against it, and I could not make my hands do what my head was telling them to do.

I turned around to reach my oldest and I could not reach him. The car seat on the baby’s side had tipped and he was crying, and I was between them, and I could not get to either one.

The water was at my waist now and cold enough to take the breath out of me. The baby’s crying had changed. It had gone high and thin, the way it does when a little one is truly frightened and not just mad, and my oldest had stopped saying my name and gone quiet, and the quiet was worse.

I got a hand on the baby’s car seat and I could not get the buckle. My fingers would not close right. The water was pushing everything sideways and the car was nose down and I was fighting the slant of the whole world.

That is the moment I want you to understand. I was in the middle of my own two children, in rising water, and I could not save them. I knew it. That is a thing a mother is not supposed to ever know, and I knew it, there in the brown water with the farm report still playing somewhere under the surface until the radio finally drowned.