Chapter 22 –
The beast comes for us
We were on a hill, not a mountain, but we had enough elevation that it never occurred to me we might be in any danger. From our vantage point, we were looking down on rooftops. Surely that put us above the flood, right? By the time the afternoon was over, I was beginning to wonder.
We could see the breech was getting wider. Where before we thought of it in feet, now we thought of its width in blocks. Kaskaskia is below where the Missouri meets the Mississippi, so the river is huge here to begin with, and this is June, so the water is always high, but now I started wondering what had been happening up river. Do I normally pay any attention to the weather? No. The winter in Canada is cold and endless. The summer is hot and full of bugs. That’s all I know about the local weather, and all I ever needed to know. What kind of spring had there been in the Dakotas and Minnesota? Had there been lots of rain? Was it raining up there now? Where before I had not the slightest interest, now I wanted to know.
I pulled out my phone and checked the weather. Since I had never used the weather app before, it took me some time to find the radar feature and then to expand the screen to look up river. Just my luck, a storm system was flashing red all across Minnesota. When would all that rainfall find its way down the Mississippi? One day? Two? In the meantime, we already had a breech four blocks wide and growing. The Mississippi was finding a new way south, and Kaskaskia was going to look very different by the time the process was completed.
In the hours we had been on our hilltop, most of the cars had made it out of town. A few more had been caught on various streets near the river, but the exodus had been largely completed. The cars were gone, as were all the car horns. The town was quiet as evening approached. We could see a few people on rooftops, and we even waived to one couple, but mostly people had gotten out. On our hilltop, there was just us and Paul, the concessionaire.
Elise seemed to have incredible battery life in her phone (it was probably made in America), for she was still giving non-stop reports to her people. We stayed mostly on the watch tower, but we also walked down onto the grass occasionally and walked the perimeter of the park. And twice we stopped and bought things from Paul, water mostly, but also snacks. We had a good view of the streets below, and we saw the progress of the flood waters as they approached our park. The general direction of the flood was south, away from us, but as the waters spread the blocks nearer to us became submerged, and then finally the water was right up to our hillside.
There was still time to leave. We could get down via streets on the north side of the hill, and if we moved quickly enough, actually if we ran like hell, we could cover enough space to get to some other higher ground to the north east. We suggested this to Paul, but he had not been given permission from his boss to leave, so he felt he was required to stay. We told Paul his boss was probably worried about other things, and we would vouch for his diligence if asked, but the kid didn’t want to go. Maybe he was still thinking about his overtime pay. Maybe he liked the drama. So he stayed, and to his credit, he continued to give us great service, carefully making sandwiches for us, and assuring us he not only had water for us, but wine too if we wished.
Why did we stay? Maybe duty. Elise had a good position to report developments. Maybe adventure. How often do you see a flood of this magnitude? Maybe we were just tired of running. We had started the day on the island, made it over the bridge and across many blocks. Maybe we just didn’t want to be pushed any farther. In any case, we could see the water rise, we saw it close street after street, closer and closer to our hill until more and more of the streets below were under water. By sundown we knew we were going to be cut off and isolated. But we stayed.
From our elevation we could see the water rise and take over more and more of the city. What we could not see was the currents within the water. From our height it looked more and more like a lake, even a placid one, but of course this was a river, one of the largest and strongest on the planet. Rivers have currents. They move. Once in a while we had evidence of this as we saw cars moving down streets. Ghost cars, they came up streets, and even turned some corners before plowing into a tree or a building and holding fast for a while, then breaking free and moving again. We saw one car get to the middle of an intersection and do a pirouette. Can you imagine? It sat and spun two revolutions before the current moved it farther to the south.
Ghost cars were actually fun to watch. Elise was busy giving her reports, but I interrupted at one point to point out a car coming up the road and then suddenly moving sideways up to a house as if it were looking to park itself. It parked itself in the middle of a hedge and then slowly sank. She watched and then went back to her conversation. I moved to another place in the park to see what other oddities might be happening around us.
I was standing on the southern end of the hilltop when I saw two things in quick succession. First, a grain elevator went over. It was a smaller elevator, and older from the look of it, but it still made a pretty large splash as it hit the water. Since these things are generally made of concrete, I assumed even with shoddy French construction they would stand up to a flood. Was the current so fast it could push over concrete buildings? Then the second building went down, and I began to understand what was going on. Barely a hundred feet from me, a house that had been built on the side of the hill, suddenly slid down into the water and collapsed on one side. Built on dirt, once the river tore the dirt out from under them, buildings were going to go down. The beast wasn’t satisfied drowning this part of the city, it was eating it too.
I found myself backing away from the edge. We were on a big hill, and it had trees and houses on the sides, so we were safe, right? Could the river eat the entire hill? The water was maybe eight or ten feet high around the base of the hill. Was that high enough to weaken the hill? Apparently it was enough to weaken the foundations of that one house, but surely not everything was just built onto a pile of mud, right? At that point a second house slid down the hill, and I got really nervous.
I walked back to where Elise was seated, and took her free hand (the other hand was permanently attached to her phone). Leading her to the south side of the park, I pointed at the two houses that now lay crumpled and partially submerged. “The hill is giving way.” I said, proud to keep any note of panic out of my voice. “Both houses slid down the hillside once their foundations were taken out by the current.” As if to confirm the accuracy of my account, a third house slowly made the slide down the hillside. Elise turned to look around at our hilltop, mentally measuring it against the rate the sides were being eaten.
“How much time do you think we have?”
“I haven’t got any idea.” I replied. I doubted my smart phone had an erosion calculation app. I did the same mental review of the hilltop as Elise and drew the same conclusion - we were in trouble. How much trouble? I had no idea. All I knew was my pleasant hilltop park suddenly seemed tiny.
“I’ll mention it to the Ministry.”
“I’ll go warn Paul.” So we split up, with Elise climbing the watch tower yet again to describe the current conditions along the river, and maybe mention we would soon be reporting from a submarine, while I walked over to Paul and said now would be a really good time to break out the wine. Based on how he smiled at my request, I got the impression he had already been sampling his wares.
“For local wine served in plastic cups, this isn’t really too bad,” I said. “By the way, the river is eating away at the hill.”
“Some of this has been sitting in the back of the building for a long time. Maybe it has aged well. Would you like some more?”
“Sure. By the way, do you have anything in the building that floats?”
“I don’t think so, but I’ll take a look.” I liked Paul. He was so eager to please. I wondered if he fully understood what I was saying. While he looked, I took a bottle and two glasses up the watch
tower to Elise. There was a wooden railing several inches wide. I set the glasses on the railing and poured. “I’m thinking we make a raft of empty wine bottles.”
Elise took a look at me and then interrupted her conversation. “Ettienne, we need to do some planning about our situation here. I’ll call you back later.”
“I have lost track of how many hours you have been on the phone, but I keep waiting for either your ear or your biceps to completely give out.”
“My ear is the problem. The phone is hot.” She put it down and turned it off. “Are you sure wine is a good idea?”
“When faced with an unsolvable problem, wine is a very good idea.” We each took a sip. Elise put her arm around my waist, and I put an arm around her shoulders.
“When were you scared today?” She asked.
“When we were crossing the bridge. I was okay the first time the bridge moved, but when it shifted again, I knew we were out of time.”
“Then you lasted longer than I did. I felt that first shift of the bridge and my heart almost stopped. We still had such a long way to go.”
“Well, we made it, and so did everyone else. I bet by now they have all made it to friends and family on the outskirts of town, and they are telling great stories over dinner.”
“And we are stuck on this hilltop.”
“No, not stuck. We have an entire park to ourselves, a great view of the river, and some of the best local wine to ever grace a plastic glass.” That line got me a kiss and a hug. I’m no fool, so I held that hug as long as I could.
“The Ministry said it would try to send something to get us in the morning. Maybe a boat, maybe a helicopter.”
“So I get you to myself all night.”
“Unless we need to share a raft with Paul.”
“This hilltop has been here for a thousand years. It will last another night. We will stay right here, watch the moon rise, and wait for the good guys to arrive at dawn.” And that is exactly what we did.