Читать книгу Disaster in Paradise - Amanda Bath - Страница 6
ОглавлениеChapter 2: In Limbo
Friday, July 13
The morning dawned overcast but calm. I’d worried the lake might be too rough for a boat trip. Osa had arranged with family friend Deane to take us over. I was up and dressed before six a.m., barely able to swallow a bit of toast and a cup of tea, anxious to be off. Every second counted, I figured, if my little Ozzie was still alive, terrified, perhaps injured. I indulged a brief fantasy in which I heard his voice calling from the wreckage as he ran towards me, his tail held high, indicating unbounded delight and relief that I’d come back for him.
Osa arrived on foot with their battered old beige cat carrier. It cheered me no end that she’d thought to bring it. Deane’s truck pulled up. Uli, who’d stayed the night, waved us off in his batik sarong.
Deane is a skilled boat operator, calm and professional. At the Kaslo marina he went over the safety drill, handed us life-jackets and checked the boat, a sixteen-foot white fibreglass Bowrider runabout, with a 50 hp outboard motor.
“I was over twice yesterday,” Deane said, zipping up his jacket and donning a knitted cap. “I brought Rachel Rozzoni, her three children and their dogs to Kaslo, then went back for the household essentials on the second trip.”
It seemed to take forever to unmoor and putter out of the bay at “Dead Slow” speed. It was getting close to 9:30 a.m. My heart was racing and I felt like screaming: “For God’s sake, hurry up, come on, let’s get out of here!”
Deane told us that RCMP and Kaslo Search and Rescue boats patrolled the shore. “I doubt they’ll let us land today.” I could tell he hoped that would be the case. Osa and I gave each other a look. We were definitely landing today.
Finally we were outside the bay and picked up speed. The wind tugged at my hair as the boat bounced over the waves, heading north across the great grey expanse of water under looming clouds. I soon got cold. I’d had so few clothes to choose from that morning and had made do with a pair of horrendous blue and white striped gardening pants, an old cotton tank top and a yellow work shirt that held no heat. Osa, well-prepared as always, handed me a windbreaker jacket.
It was nearing ten a.m. as we approached the Landing. A helicopter circled overhead but abruptly turned and sped up the hill. Had it seen something? The bay was empty except for one boat with a news camera. Osa said, “They’ve no right to be here filming people’s misfortunes.”
I nodded, thinking only about how I was going to rescue Ozzie. I knew he hated cat carriers. Would he be too frightened to let me pick him up?
We slowly cruised the shoreline. The boathouses, the canoes and other watercraft were already pulled high above the inundated beach. At the end of June Christopher had used the winch on George the pickup to drag the Burt boathouse three metres back because debris in the water was slamming into the front posts.
We continued round the bay. I saw Christopher’s two sentinel driftwood trees, partners to our garden gateposts, standing next to our beach path. “Everything looks so normal!”
But what came next made us gasp: a rampart of logs stacked as high as a house sat at the mouth of Gar Creek. Greg was right: the landslide had halted right there at the edge of the lake, and barely any debris floated around it.
The lakeshore itself was untouched except for the effects of the high water, which had covered many landmarks. I craned my neck to catch a first glimpse of our home through the underbrush. Where was it? “There!” I shouted.
“Oh my God!” cried Osa.
Pinned against the tall fir trees, the deck slanted downwards, the corner post snapped off. The walls were gone and the roof lay on a crushed tangle of cedar shakes, broken glass and deck furniture that included my lounger. The house stood only about ten metres back from the new high water line. I saw my planters and geranium pots, bright smudges of red and salmon pink, still clinging valiantly to the edge of the deck.
Deane cut the engine. “This isn’t a good spot. It’s dangerous and I don’t want to let you off the boat.”
I cajoled and insisted. “Deane, I just want five minutes to call Ozzie. Surely we haven’t come all this way just to look at the house from the water?”
Osa chimed in. “Yes, we’ll be okay. I really want to have a look too.”
I gazed at the destruction in front of us. “It’s been twenty-four hours since the landslide and everything’s exactly the same as in Greg’s photos yesterday. Go on, Deane. Surely five minutes on shore won’t make any difference?”
He nosed the boat in, bow first, and I jumped out onto the rocks. Osa shimmied off and went racing away towards the house.
“Are you coming?” I asked him.
“No.” He shook his head. “Listen, stay close to the boat. Tell her.” He gestured in Osa’s direction. “Stay close to the boat.”
I nodded and placed the cat carrier on a log. I took one photograph of the weirdly deformed deck, put my camera away in my pocket and called out to Ozzie.
Just seconds later I heard an ear-splitting cracking noise above us. I thought of the sharp thunderclap you hear when a storm is directly overhead. I looked up: was this a thunderstorm? The snapping and cracking became more insistent. What was that deep roaring sound?
Deane shouted at us: “Run! Run! Run! Run! Run!”
I flew back to the boat, didn’t notice the rough, uneven rocks. My feet didn’t even get wet. Osa, however, had farther to go. From the boat I watched her scramble over logs, trip, recover, then she was at the shore. Deane already had the motor in reverse as Osa struggled to climb over the bow. Deane yelled at her to jump, and I hauled her in by her jacket, pulling on her upper arms.
For a split second that felt like eons the weight of the two of us in the bow held us pinned to the rocks. Trees just above the shoreline were beginning to bend towards us. The noise was deafening.
Osa screamed, “Go! Go! Go!” Deane was already revving hard and we were off the shore, thrusting backwards at full throttle as trees toppled. A mountainous surge of mud and debris thundered down over the spot where we had just been standing. The boat accelerated backwards.
As the mudslide hit the water it created an enormous disturbance that tossed us like a cork. Whole trees submerged and leapt skyward like torpedoes all around the boat. Any one of them could have capsized us. A tsunami-like wave, with log debris behind it, followed us out from shore, higher than the boat, catching up fast. It was right on the bow when it seemed to shrink slightly and gave Deane the opportunity he’d been looking for to turn the boat around, bow to the lake. Then the great swell hit us.
Deane gunned the engine into forward. Debris hit the propeller; the motor slammed left. Deane pulled back on the throttle, wrenched the wheel right and jammed the throttle forward again. We sped a hundred metres out before we stopped, the boat rocking wildly. Mud washed down the hill in wave after brown wave.
My eyes were glued to the place on the shore where we’d just been standing, now unrecognizable, as the creek disgorged its innards. The house disappeared under mud. There was no hope for Ozzie, or for salvaging anything. I stood up, grasping the rear seatback with frozen fingers as we rocked. The slide went on and on.
Francis Silvaggio and his cameraman, Mike, a Global News TV crew, were in the other boat and had filmed everything. I beckoned them over, urgently wanting to talk. Silvaggio interviewed me as we held the two boats together with our hands. This was the first of many media interviews I gave over the next seventy-two hours.
I felt calm and strangely clear-headed. I don’t know where the words came from; they tumbled out. Fully formed sentences emerged containing concepts that struck me as surprisingly profound. Part of me was utterly detached from the interview and watched as—I was to see later—the stricken-faced woman with wind-blown hair in the ugly yellow shirt poured her heart out into the microphone. I told them why we’d come, my need to look for Ozzie.
Mike and Francis were in a state of shock themselves because five minutes before our arrival, they’d been walking over the slide debris, filming the devastation.
Osa’s throat was so sore from screaming in fright on the shore she’d lost her voice. In response to one of Silvaggio’s questions she managed to croak, “My house in the Landing was okay last night but I don’t know how it’s doing now.”
After ten minutes we said goodbye and Deane turned the boat away from the mudslide that was still gushing down the hill. We headed back towards Kaslo. On the ride back I lost control of myself. I’d been perfectly calm and articulate talking to the reporter. Now I screamed, I cried, I shook till my teeth rattled. I howled because I had witnessed the reality: our place really was gone, swallowed whole. Ozzie really was dead.
As the boat came level with Shutty Bench, a community a few minutes north of Kaslo, I knew I needed to ask Chelsea Van Koughnett for help. Osa had her cellphone and, even in the midst of hysteria, I remembered the phone number. When we arrived at the Kaslo house, Chelsea and her husband, Ken, were waiting.
I lay down on Chelsea’s massage table and she placed her hands on my head and gave me reiki, a soothing, calming treatment. I trembled at my core. Tears poured from the corners of my eyes, filling my ears, tickling my neck. I relived those seconds on the shore and the horrifying alternative: what if…? We’d cheated death by mere seconds. The anguish inside my head felt as massive, in its way, as the trauma suffered by our home and the landscape. What if we’d not made it back to the boat? Caught by the mud, I am trapped, dragged, smashed, beaten. And Osa lost too.
Christopher, on his way to Kaslo from Eugene, had driven through the night, stopping only for naps. He’d bought a cheap cellphone that worked until he crossed the border, and somewhere near Spokane I spoke to him. Still close to hysteria, I tried to describe what had happened. Christopher’s voice was faint and far away, filled with pain and desolation.
He arrived in Kaslo at two p.m., looking years older than when I’d waved him off on Monday morning. But it was so good to see his lean figure jumping out of the car and coming towards me in his jazzy Amnesty International T-shirt, to see his caring face and mop of blond, sun-bleached hair. He told me how kind the officer at the Canadian border had been. “He asked me the routine question, ‘Where do you live?’ and it hit me: I had to tell him I wasn’t sure anymore where I lived. We talked for quite a while; everyone there at the border seemed very shocked.”
I remember our tight hug, his bony frame squeezed against me, his strong arms circling my back, his warm breath on my neck, and a dampness as we let go and cried. At least we had each other.
Uli’s partner, Seán Hennessey, joined us from Argenta on Friday afternoon. He advised us to get lots of physical exercise to metabolize the adrenalin coursing through our bodies, and as soon as Christopher had recovered from the drive, Seán dispatched us on a brisk hike. It was good advice. Under broken cloud and sunshine, Christopher and I walked the Kaslo River Trail and sat a while at the viewpoint, watching the Kaslo River pounding below us in full flood. Glad and relieved to be safely together again, we talked, swapped thoughts, raised ideas and tried to make sense of it all.
A tiny part of me felt euphoric. We were alive! For just a little while, walking the trail with Christopher, everything seemed possible. We were free of all possessions! They’d been a burden, an albatross around our necks! All the old projects had been swept away, and a world of new opportunities lay before us! We could do anything we wanted…
The euphoria saw us through that afternoon. But when I curled up on the bed after our walk it was the wrong bed, and there was no Ozzie to feed, pet or talk to. There would be many tears.
Saturday, July 14
I dream I’m lying in the pink bathtub in our cave-like, cobweb-festooned bathroom in the Landing. In my dream it’s Thursday morning, seven a.m., and I’m going to Kaslo with Jillian in a couple of hours. I love a morning bath and lie back dreamily, luxuriating in the hot steamy water, fragrant with lavender oil. My eye wanders over the cedar shakes that cover the walls. They are dark brown, random and characterful; they add a delicate scent to the room, and repel water from the shower, but if you brush against their rough edges you could catch a splinter. A length of string pinned across the wall above the counter displays my extensive earring collection, pair after pair, a line of silver and multi-coloured trinkets.
A pattern of ripples spreads across the bathwater. I glance through the open window, then shift my gaze to the bathtub and watch fascinated as the tiny wavelets fan outwards. I lift my foot then let it sink underwater again. Odd. I’m not causing these ripples, am I? No. The tub is vibrating. Now my whole body feels it. What on earth…? An earthquake? A surge of fear follows the thought. I hear a noise, an unearthly growling roar. The whole house shakes. I grab the sides of the bath, heave my torso upright, get my legs under me and leap from the tub, sloshing water over the floor. I yank my towel off the rail and flee.
Ozzie, on the bed in the living room, holds my gaze for a fleeting moment; our eyes lock. He breaks our eye contact and streaks for the stairs. When anything frightened him he always headed for his lair: a folded blanket on a high shelf in a back corner of the basement.
I throw the towel around my shoulders, dizzy, naked and dripping. What should I do? Front door? No time to get across the yard. I sense the “thing” as it rushes towards me down the creek. Instinct shrieks: Get out of the house. Get out from under the roof! Deck! I must get onto the deck. I yell Ozzie’s name, beg him to come back upstairs.
It’s hopeless.
Befuddled by the thundering din I run, trembling and clumsy. My wet feet slither on the kitchen floor and I almost fall. I pound across the kitchen, round the dining table, send a chair flying. I throw back the sliding patio door and fumble with the screen door behind it. The latch is clicked shut and I wrench at it in rising frenzy, ripping the screen. I emerge onto the deck and the booming, ear-splitting roar engulfs me. Sharp grit on the dirty deck floor bites into my bare feet. I dash to the far corner. I want to jump but falter at the edge; the deck’s too high. I seize hold of the post and wrap my arms around it, my lifebelt, my buoy. The stinking wave of trees, boulders and mud crashes against the house...
I jerked awake from the nightmare with a yell and sat up, soaked in sweat. Thunder rumbled outside the bedroom window. Drum-beating rain pounded on the roof. Christopher rolled over and reached for me. Why was he here? Why was this bed so hard? Oh yes. Kaslo. We’re in Kaslo. I fell back, convulsed by paroxysms of coughing. I could barely grab breaths between the harsh, gut-wrenching hacking.
I thought about Ozzie. His deep yellow eyes had shot me the message that he was terrified, regretful that everything had to end this way, and unutterably sad because this was our goodbye.
After my coughing fit eased Christopher and I lay entwined like spoons, his arm holding me close against his belly. I gazed out at the crack of grey daylight below the window blind and we listened to the rain. The sound frightened me. I asked him, “Sweetie? What are we going to do?”
He held me tighter. “I don’t know, babe. I want to go up there and see it for myself.”
“No! Oh no, please, you mustn’t. I couldn’t bear it if you were… At least wait until the rain stops.” I turned to him and buried my face in his neck. He smelled so reassuring, uniquely completely himself. If anything happened to him, the last shred of meaning and purpose in my life would be gone. We held each other close for a few minutes, and Christopher agreed to hold off on his trip to the Landing for now.
Uli and Seán were up and moving around on the squeaky kitchen floor, making the everyday breakfast sounds of coffee grinding and toaster popping, punctuated by Seán’s warm, chuckling laugh. Still coughing, I rolled out of bed and put on my dreadful check-pattern dress. One of these days I’d take great pleasure in burning the detestable thing.
The rain soon let up a bit and the morning brightened. The sky echoed to the beat of helicopter blades as rescue crews and media were ferried up the lake. CBC News reported that Vancouver’s Heavy Urban Search and Rescue (HUSAR) task force was on the ground with heavy lifting equipment, assisting the rescue effort. But the weather was not cooperating. Violent thunderstorms in the early hours of Saturday had knocked out power lines and brought down trees on the Argenta–Johnson’s Landing road.
I looked out on the grey, drizzly day; it matched my mood. I was cold and my chest felt constricted. My summer sandals were sodden and beginning to peel apart. I envied Christopher his suitcase of clothes and three pairs of shoes. And his passport! All my identity documents were lost, including my British and Canadian passports. I’d booked another flight to visit my mother, departing for London in mid-August. How would I manage that trip now?
Uli and Seán helped us prepare toast and eggs for breakfast, and Uli distracted me and made me laugh with stories of his chickens, ducks and geese at their homestead. After breakfast Uli and Seán left for appointments in Trail, two hours’ drive away. Christopher sat down to call friends in the Landing. Most of the phone lines seemed to be working. As an experiment I dialed our number. It rang and rang, somewhere out there in the void. Obviously the line had been ripped out, but callers were going to wonder why the answer machine didn’t pick up. I imagined our big telephone/fax machine encased in mud, swept rudely off the beautiful curved and varnished wooden shelf Christopher had recently built for it beside the chimney.
I left Christopher to his phone calls and went out bareheaded, scuffling along in my broken sandals, to see if the thrift store, beside the Mohawk gas station, might enlarge my wardrobe. Honora Cooper, president of the hospital auxiliary society that runs the thrift store, greeted me warmly in their tiny brick building. She’d already instructed her volunteers to let the “Johnson’s Landing refugees” take anything we needed, free of charge. I gratefully grabbed a bright blue rain jacket, pants, a black wool sweater and a white shirt. But footwear would be more difficult. Second-hand shoes usually felt wrong, and anyway, the store had nothing remotely suitable that day.
In the street outside the thrift store, three local women stood in a huddle, deep in conversation, raincoats dripping, umbrellas up. They recognized me, put down their umbrellas in order to hug me, and asked how I was doing and what Christopher and I needed. I gazed at the kindly faces and didn’t know what to say. What did we need? Well… just about everything. Every time I tried to grapple with this subject I was overwhelmed and went blank. I could barely string words together. But some needs were mundane and immediate and I was able to reel off a few of them: toiletries, a hairbrush and comb, tweezers and a magnifying mirror, moisturizing face cream. And shoes.
The Red Cross had set up its headquarters a couple of blocks from our house, in the Kaslo Seniors’ Hall on Fourth Street. I crossed the road from the thrift store in my new rain jacket and poked my head round the door. Jillian and John were waiting to be interviewed. I went in and embraced them. John’s face was ashen. I badly wanted to ask him about his escape, but he looked fragile and I didn’t like to raise the subject just then.
Jillian looked exhausted but resolute. Like me she was in the same clothes she’d been wearing three days ago. Her grim expression told me they were going to do their damnedest to get through this nightmare. They’d stayed two nights with our friends Gail Spitler and Lynne Cannon in the Landing, and were off to stay in a Nelson hotel after lunch, while they used their emergency vouchers for clothes and provisions. Ann MacNab had got word to them from her palliative care bed in the hospital, to offer temporary accommodation in her house in Howser, north of Kootenay Lake. She and Jillian were old friends.
“How generous of her,” I said. “Have you found Tumbles?”
Jillian shook her head. “They won’t let us look for him. Too dangerous.”
“What a worry for you,” I said, thinking of my dream, and Ozzie’s ominous and sorrowful countenance, feeling sorry I’d brought up the subject of cats.
Al, the Red Cross team leader, was upbeat and welcoming, introduced me to their team of four, and offered coffee and cookies. He told me to come back with Christopher for an interview. Meanwhile I should write down our immediate needs on the flip chart next to his desk. I wrote: “size nine women’s trainers, orthopaedic pillow, small backpack, MacBook computer to borrow,” followed by our names, phone number and address.
I noticed that our Landing neighbours Colleen O’Brien and Patrick Steiner had listed diapers and other baby needs. This information told me they’d evacuated from Kootenay Joe Farm with their three-week-old baby son, Maël. Colleen’s parents, Patrick and Carol, must be here too: they’d arrived in the Landing on Tuesday, elated to meet their first grandchild. I wondered where they were staying, and what Patrick and Colleen were doing about the farm animals left behind in the Landing. Too exhausted to enquire, I drifted out of the seniors’ hall, enveloped in a mental fog. Osa would know where they were.
I wandered back to the house, damp, shivery and decidedly unwell. I’d had a slight cough ever since I got back from England but thought nothing of it. Since the boat trip it was much worse; my chest felt gripped as though by a tight band of metal. I couldn’t remember anything quite like it. I felt almost frightened as I walked along, gasping for air between coughing fits.
As I reached our yard two cars drew up. I opened the front door and shouted up the stairs to alert Christopher, then greeted Linda Portman and Maggie Crowe, who introduced themselves as local volunteers working on behalf of the provincial Emergency Social Services (ESS) program. They would be providing us with vouchers for basic supplies. I didn’t know Linda, but Maggie was a former, long-time resident of Johnson’s Landing. She gave me one of her powerful bear hugs. Maggie’s a lady of substance, tall and broad, and I felt reassured by her solid embrace.
Michelle Mungall, our provincial Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), and her partner, Zak, got out of the second car. Young, attractive and dynamic, Michelle introduced herself, commiserated with us and requested permission to join our meeting to help her assess how BC’s emergency response service functioned in practice. I welcomed everybody, and the four visitors and I hurried indoors out of the rain, depositing a sodden pile of boots, shoes and dripping jackets in the entranceway. We searched out extra chairs so everyone could sit around the dining room table. I sat between Michelle and Zak. The doorbell rang. Colleen O’Brien’s father, Patrick, had seen the entourage arrive and asked if he might join us, on behalf of his daughter and son-in-law, as he had a few questions.
Christopher and I were hungry for news. Linda told us briefly about Thursday. She’d been stationed at the community hall on the south side of the Landing in the afternoon, assisting residents who wanted to evacuate. There was no power, and the hall had no phone; it was hot and uncomfortable, and it took several hours to come up with an evacuation plan. She’d driven back on Friday with Maggie, this time using Gail Spitler and Lynne Cannon’s home north of the landslide area, as it was a much more comfortable place to base their reception centre.
Linda, clearly exhausted, had dark lines under her eyes. She explained she’d been called on to lead the ESS response because the chief emergency coordinator was away. What irony! After years preparing for an emergency, when a natural disaster of unprecedented proportions hits the West Kootenay, the lead person misses it. The rest of the team looked as if they’d been thrown in the deep end.
Linda and Maggie took their time filling out the ESS forms (in triplicate), worrying whether they’d completed them correctly. We made sympathetic noises; the ladies seemed a little overwhelmed by their task and in need of encouragement. Maggie slid the paperwork over to me. I tried to concentrate on the intimidating sheaf of forms and instructions, then gave up and let the conversation wash over me, hoping Christopher was taking in the information. I wished there were a simpler way: perhaps a credit card topped up with a designated amount of cash we could use where and when we needed.
I looked blankly at the vouchers. We’d picked Walmart—it had the most complete stock of clothing in Nelson—($150 each); a second Walmart voucher ($50 each) for incidentals like toiletries, medications and pet food (how I wished we still had pet food requirements). A third voucher ($315) would get us groceries from the largest Kaslo grocery store; and the last would provide a tank of gas for the car, from the Mohawk gas station. All of the vouchers would expire in three days’ time. I noted various instructions underlined in bold type, admonishing us that “This is not a wardrobe replacement,” and “Tobacco products and alcohol are not included.” Pity about that. A small glass of whisky would have been a fine thing.
Overcome by another coughing fit, I wondered how on earth we’d cope with all these tasks. A mix of confusion and gratitude washed over me as I tried to take everything in. I was behaving like a zombie, but certainly had no wish to seem unappreciative. It was wonderful that the government offered this kind of immediate assistance. Disaster victims in so many other countries could only dream of receiving help like this.
Patrick O’Brien asked about the prospects of extracting their truck and camper, which were stuck in the Landing on the south side of the slide. All the belongings they’d brought from their home in Mission, BC, were in the camper. They wanted it in Kaslo, so they could stay close to Colleen, Patrick and baby Maël. Was there any plan for getting vehicles out? Linda and Maggie didn’t know.
The meeting broke up. After Linda and Maggie left I asked Patrick where the family was staying. “We’re just five doors away from you, in a rental house for one week. The Red Cross managed to find us a place, but it’s difficult at the height of tourist season. Kaslo’s full, and now there’s all the media needing accommodations too.” He went on, “The baby’s not feeding well; he’s still losing weight and Colleen’s worried. No one’s getting enough sleep.”
I said I’d come by sometime soon. Colleen and her husband, Patrick, our newest neighbours in the Landing, were young farmers just beginning to establish their farm on the stony mountainside, and their heritage seed business, Stellar Seeds. Now they also grappled with parenthood and all the worries of a first baby, still so tiny. I knew they were a resilient pair, endowed with the boundless energy and optimism of youth, but even so, what a blow it must have been to be wrenched from their home.
Zak and Michelle were the last to leave. Zak took me aside and asked about my cough. I told him the truth. “It’s been getting worse, and I’m finding it hard to breathe when I can’t stop coughing.” Zak told me he was a nurse practitioner and asked if he might thump my back. I readily agreed and he conducted a brief examination beside the dining room table. His diagnosis was that I possibly had pneumonia, adding “If you like, I’ll write you a prescription for antibiotics that you can pick up from the Kaslo pharmacy.” I’d never had pneumonia in my life. And I was amazed by the kind assistance, right in my home, tailor-made, when I needed it. I nodded, thanked Zak profusely and bent over a chair, wracked by another coughing fit.
After Zak and Michelle left, Christopher and I decided it was time we had our talk with the Red Cross and wandered over to the seniors’ hall. Al called out a greeting and introduced us to one of his volunteers, Nicholas Albright, who led us to a quiet room next door in the government building for our interview. Nicholas was like his name: bright, cheerful and positive. He spoke slowly and clearly, perhaps aware that traumatized people have short-term memory problems, and struggle to absorb information. He was originally from Birmingham; I was comforted by his English accent.
We must have looked dazed, sitting there in the empty office. I was usually the talkative one, but neither of us knew what to say. Nicholas understood, smiled warmly and, after learning Christopher’s line of work, suggested he might need a new pair of workboots. He was right. Of course! Christopher’s were gone. He has large, wide, difficult feet; new boots were always hard to fit, and they’d be expensive. In the state we were in I doubt we’d have thought of such a thing ourselves. Our unfolding list of needs was so extensive we couldn’t begin to identify individual items.
Nicholas asked if we needed new eyeglasses—another brilliant idea. He quickly phoned the shoe shop and the optician in Nelson and provided us with Red Cross payment vouchers. I folded the vouchers and tucked them away in my purse with the ESS vouchers. Nicholas also offered to keep Christopher’s file open for longer-term assistance to replace essential tools. We shook hands, grateful, tearful and exhausted. I’d never imagined being on the receiving end of Red Cross aid. I blinked back tears. “I thought the Red Cross only operated in other countries, responding to war, famine, national emergencies and disasters.” Nicholas smiled and replied, “Oh we have work here too. Mostly house fires in this part of the world. And natural disasters can happen anywhere, as you’ve just discovered.”
Christopher and I thanked him again as we left. We urgently needed to go home for a nap. The rain had stopped and the sun burst through the clouds. The streets steamed, and we peeled off layers of clothing and tied them round our waists as we walked the three blocks back home. How bright everything suddenly looked, freshly washed by the storms.
Our yellow and green house was cheery in the sunshine. The screen door stood slightly ajar. Between the screen door and the front door someone had propped a foam orthopaedic pillow. A black backpack hung on the doorknob, and a pair of size nine women’s trainers, wrapped in a grocery bag, sat beside the step. There were no notes to say who’d left them. Inside, I sat on the stairs bemused, thinking of the Biblical adage: “Ask and you shall receive.” The trainers fit perfectly. A message on the answering machine informed me that Randy Morse, a neighbour nearby, had an Apple laptop ready for me to borrow.
This was great news. Christopher headed for the bedroom and passed out within a few seconds. I longed to join him, but I urgently wanted that computer. I put off my nap and hurried up the street to Randy and Janet’s house, five minutes’ walk away. Randy brought out a silver case, badly scuffed and worn, with an impressive ding crumpling its lid. He laughed as he explained, “This old laptop has history. I accidentally dropped it over a cliff in the Himalayas, but it still works, at least for basic stuff like email.”
Accepting Randy’s loaner laptop with gratitude, I wondered what my own white MacBook, “Macaroon” as I called it, looked like now. I felt a twinge of horror at the thought of it, every orifice impacted by mud. It was ridiculous to feel a kinship with such things, but Macaroon had been my trusty servant in all matters technological, the holder of my addresses, memoirs, manuscripts, favourite websites; it remembered all my usernames and passwords. I had no idea how I’d piece together my world without it.
Back home, with the stuttering thumping of helicopters overhead, I plugged in Randy’s laptop and composed my first post-landslide email message, intended for family and friends around the world.
Dear ones,
I am using a borrowed laptop. Cannot really think straight. I twice escaped with my life only by a miracle in the past 48 hours. Thursday morning an enormous landslide took out much of Johnson’s Landing. It crushed our house and killed our cat. If I had been in the house I would have died. I was in Kaslo with a neighbour, whose house was also destroyed. Four other neighbours are missing.
I returned by boat Friday morning. Another slide came down and I only just made it back to the boat. There is nothing left. We have lost everything. We are in shock. People are kind. We have our Kaslo house but so much of value is gone. I have not told my mother, as in her precarious mental state it is better not to worry her.
You can see what happened by googling “Johnson’s Landing Slide.” I am interviewed in one clip. Please pray for us. We are devastated.
Much love, Mandy
Nobody was going to believe me—I barely believed it myself. Searching my webmail I found only a few names to send the email to; I hadn’t bothered to upload my contacts and I couldn’t email many other important people until I tracked down their addresses. Randy’s computer felt wrong, unfamiliar and clunky under my fingers. It held none of my information. It quit Safari when I tried to search for news online. Writing one email had been like trying to walk with my legs hobbled.
I flipped the lid closed.
My mind was a closet, packed tight with a mental inventory of things we’d lost; it was a deep closet. As I moved through the house, tidying up, washing cups, feeling the newness of shoes that weren’t in shreds, but weren’t new either, periodically the closet door opened just a crack and I’d remember something. A knife-blade of grief leapt out and stabbed me in the heart. I suppose we define ourselves through the things we choose to share our lives with, though I hadn’t made the connection so obviously before. Our possessions must give us so much of our identity and status. Without the familiar objects, paintings, books—without my “things”—I didn’t know where to land or even settle.
A button had fallen off Christopher’s shirt that morning and I didn’t have a needle and thread to sew it back on. I remembered my delicately woven work basket, containing sewing, embroidery and darning equipment, sharp scissors, thimbles and a measuring tape. As for my knitting supplies and yarn, and the knitted jacket project I’d laid out on the couch to admire, so nearly complete… I inhaled sharply and slammed the memory closet shut again.
I found Christopher splayed out on the bed, deeply asleep. His careworn face, even in repose, was etched with lines of exhaustion and sadness. I joined him; what a relief to sink into oblivion and escape for just a few minutes—until the phone in the study rang and woke me up. The voice on the line was gentle and polite. Megan Cole from the Nelson Star newspaper asked if I’d be willing to give her an interview. I said yes.
Telling my story seemed to sink a deepening groove of belief into my brain. Victims of sudden trauma need to tell their stories over and over again, I knew this from my work with the hospice. By retelling their story, victims slowly convince themselves: “This really did happen. I am not making it up!” As Megan quietly probed with her questions, words flowed out of me. As when I was interviewed by Francis Silvaggio the previous day on the boat—I could hardly believe it had been only yesterday—I felt like I was at a distance, observing myself as I spoke: “You never imagine that today marks the end of so much you knew and held dear. When I closed our front door on Thursday morning, a chapter of my life also closed. And now, when I think back to the time before Thursday, it’s like looking through a window onto a past world that ended long, long ago.”
I told Megan how extremely fortunate we’d all been. Me, out of the house an hour and a half before it was destroyed. And yesterday, Friday, having just enough time to get back to the boat. If Deane had beached the boat sideways to the shore we couldn’t have launched in time. If I’d heard even the suggestion of Ozzie’s voice in the wreckage, I’d have hesitated, not left, and that would have been the end of me. If we’d arrived five minutes earlier, or if the second slide had come down five minutes later, I’d have been too far away from the boat. The temptation to climb up onto our deck was irresistible. If Christopher and Kurt hadn’t been at a safe distance in Eugene and Toronto, they’d have been climbing into the wreckage themselves, right then, trying to salvage things.
If. If. If.
When the interview was over, I rejoined Christopher, who was just opening his eyes, and snuggled down next to him. “What did you find out on the phone this morning? Who did you talk to?”
“Gail. She and Lynne are in the thick of it there on Rogers Road. Every journalist who lands in a helicopter sees their house and knocks on the door for an interview.” I was glad that our friends Gail and Lynne were handling the media. I couldn’t think of better people to put out the story. They would stay calm and be meticulously accurate.
“And the RCMP has it all wrong. They keep saying Petra was in the Webbers’ house having breakfast with Val and the girls on Thursday.”
“Well, we know that’s impossible.” Petra and Val had a romantic relationship; everyone in the Landing knew about it, and we also knew that Val’s daughters weren’t too happy about the situation, and weren’t on friendly terms with Petra. It was ridiculous to suppose they’d have invited her over for breakfast.
“What else did you hear?”
“Apparently there’s over a hundred people out there digging.” I glanced at him. Christopher had the look of a man who wished he could be out there digging too.
The phone rang again, but I let it go to the answering machine. A hundred rescue and recovery people. Three times the population of the Landing: what an invasion!
Christopher rolled onto his side. “What do you miss most, at the moment? Apart from Ozzie, of course.”
I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, stroking his hand. “I miss the silence. I miss the deep green shade from the tall firs that made the house so comfortable in the summer. I miss swimming naked in the lake. I miss the sparkling light reflecting off the water mid-afternoon, that danced across the ceiling.”
We sighed deeply, lost in the vision. The yearning was a physical ache.
Osa came over after tea and the three of us stood together in the front yard, now bathed in late afternoon sunshine. It helped to have members of our Johnson’s Landing “family” so close by, especially Osa and Paul, after everything we’d been through together; they understood our loss.
“Our place feels like Grand Central Station; the phone ringing, people stopping by,” she said. She was inundated with food, and was driving all over town delivering food parcels to evacuees. Rachel Rozzoni, now in Shutty Bench with her three children, was missing her garden. “She was ecstatic when I brought fresh organic vegetables.” We nodded. Johnson’s Landing always had bountiful gardens.
Osa turned to leave, then added, “Oh. There’s a plan to float the trapped vehicles across the lake on a barge.” She went on to explain. Derek and Camille Baker had a barge, and Derek was primed to make the first crossing the next morning. Christopher perked up at this news: “I’m in.” Renata’s car was one of the vehicles stranded at the parking area by the beach.
I sat down on the front doorstep, my heart racing. The mere idea of going to the Landing had me clammy-fisted with fear. “I’d love to help too,” I added—the Landing, to me, had become a life-threatening place, an ogre that might eat you up—“but I can’t go.”
Christopher told Osa he’d contact Renata and they’d drive out to the Landing in the morning.
