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I wasn’t more than a few yards from the police cars on the end of the Walnut Street Bridge, and those police cars were wheel-deep in the river. How could the water come so high? It wasn’t possible.
In the back of my mind, a merry little riverboat was tootling down Market Street in an antique photograph. So it was possible, yes. I knew it had happened before. But that’s what the TVA was for. That’s what the dams were for.
Where were they now?
If the rain had let up for five seconds I would’ve praised God. But it didn’t, and my hair was hopeless in a way that isn’t vanity but pragmatism. I couldn’t see through it and I couldn’t get it out of my face even by tying it back. Nothing short of a razor would have kept it off me by that point. Everything was impossible. It would be easier, I thought, if I went into the water. It would be easier to swim or wade for the nearest pillar and climb up onto the high, arching bridge on the other side of the police barricade.
I reached for the sharp brick edge of a corner building and caught it, fumbling. I held it and pulled myself around it, pressed to it by the current. I had no choice. I hadn’t thought of the current. Even in its slow, pooling rise, the Tennessee had a lot of pull. There was no way I could swim against it.
Off to my left in the street, people were starting to scream with a different timbre, and I turned to look even as I tried to brace my feet and half crawl, half swim backwards up the side of the building. It was the cars—that’s what they were screaming about. The cars were filling up and being tugged, pulled, or pushed. The water was in the street, flooding Frasier up to a thigh’s height, or to the waist of a smaller person.
Now they fled in earnest, trying their best to push their way up the hills, but the hills were blocke
d and crowded by those who were still crushing forward because they didn’t know or understand what was going on down below.
It became easier to approach the river as the other people fled. The river was approaching me, after all. I did it a foot or two at a time. I did it by reaching and pulling myself, and by using my height to stretch myself out in the water—until I was in up to my chest and bracing against anything I could find.
When my hands finally groped the blue-painted rail of the bridge’s edge, I tightened my fingers around it and locked them fast. Like climbing the monkey bars on a school playground, I heaved myself along until I was high enough to sling my legs up over the edge and stand on drier stuff.
I hung there for a moment and caught my breath. The boards of the bridge’s deck were slippery and my legs were shaking, so I had a hard time standing at first. But once I did, the bridge curved high enough that there wasn’t any water up around my feet. The police cars were door-deep then, and I didn’t see the officers who had once driven them, not at first. Then I spied them down on the street, herding those who could be herded—skimming them from the water as best they could and pulling them out, pushing them up stairs and up onto roofs where the water height allowed it.
Of course, I wasn’t alone on the bridge. Maybe a hundred others had made it up there too. It was busy but not crowded. I didn’t have to fight my way through anybody to pass; I just wandered between them. The pedestrians were clinging, clustering together in groups or running for the middle, where the peak was highest. The river was far enough below that we were sure it couldn’t get that high, because if it did then we’d need a fucking ark and there was no hope for any of us.
It’s about two-thirds of a mile across the Walnut Street Bridge, so it takes some time to traverse. It’s a nice jaunt if you’re on a bike or on roller skates, or if you’ve got a skateboard. But when the water is coming at you from above and below, the thunder won’t stop, and people are crying from every direction, it isn’t pleasant.
I made my way as fast as I could.
It got slower towards the end, towards the south side of the bridge. The water was coming up there too, same as on the north side. It wasn’t quite as bad, but it was bad enough. Up to my left there was the Hunter Museum of Art, perched above the river on a cliff and probably safer than the aquarium, which was down to my right. The banks are sharper on the south side than the north side, but they’re both pretty high. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a brief, paralyzing sort of fear for the animals inside. It was stupid of me. There were people too, maybe lots of people drowning and dying, but I still breathed a little prayer for all the swimming things in their glass cages.
When I got to the end of the bridge, I was pretty sure that prayers weren’t going to do Christ any good. No one could have made it in or out of the undersides without a scuba tank. If he was still down there, there was nothing anyone could do for him.
The water had eaten the riverfront boardwalk and absolutely filled the little amphitheater beneath my feet. Crowding on the south side—the downtown side—of the river wasn’t as bad as the north side—which was mostly residential—had been. People inside the city had other places to go—they had farther to retreat, and so they spread out farther than the folks who were backed up to the mountains. But it was still bad. Cops and other officials in yellow-lettered blue jackets made valiant efforts to direct traffic and people, but nothing much was changing. Just getting off the bridge was an adventure in its own right; the police wanted me to stay where I was, but I had no intention of listening.
It eventually registered that these crowds were also drier, not waterlogged like the people on the other end of the bridges. Like me.
There were also more sirens there downtown; more ambulances and fire trucks and police, too. I heard a helicopter overhead and looked up to see it swoop past me, towards the hospital. That meant that the hospital wasn’t perfectly cut off, which was something, at least.
On this side of the river, too, there were the news vans. There are always the news vans, aren’t there? I wondered how they’d gotten there; I knew Channel 3 had its headquarters on the north side, but maybe they had roving reporters.
I was seized with a sudden urge to find Nick, but there were too many other urges pulling me in too many other directions. Harry and Malachi were out there somewhere, and Jamie, though I knew he must’ve written me off by then.
So where should I go first? I had to find some shelter, even if it was temporary. I needed to dig out my phone and see if I could reach anyone, now that I’d more or less arrived at the place where I’d meant to go. My best prospect seemed to be Greyfriar’s, my standby coffeehouse and the meeting place of everyone in my approximate age and social group. If not there, where? And it was only a couple of blocks away, all of that downhill.
Downhill. The thought worried me. I could recover from the disappointment of the sinking of the North Shore Apartments—I wanted to live there, but they weren’t mine yet. And although I enjoyed shopping on Frasier, I never rode the carousel and I wouldn’t miss the park.
But what if Greyfriar’s went under?
I backtracked, because I had to, going out of my way to avoid the worst thronging and the tightest knots of people. Only a couple of blocks. I could do that in a mad dash.
I did, though I was panting and on the verge of tears by the time I reached Broad Street. I was also wading again. The water was sloshing up high over my boot laces, but I hardly felt it. The rest of me was soaked to the bone already. I only noted the added damp because of the sound of my feet slapping and snagging in the muck.
When I reached the intersection at Fourth Street, I saw the horses. They were being led up out of their stables from the place where they usually waited to draw tourist buggies. They stamped and snorted in the water while one of the bigger Clydesdales held steady and still, letting himself be hitched up to the rigging.
I wondered for a moment why they were binding the horse into his harness and cranking up the buggy’s roof. Then I saw the ambulance mired in the road, one wheel dropped into an open manhole that was gushing brown froth. There was a patient in the back of the ambulance, a paramedic covering him with a tarp so they could move him.
Any port in a storm. The water was knee-high in some spots, and if it kept on rising like this, a horse and a sturdy wagon would get farther than a low-built van, emergency lights or no.
I went to the right, squeezing between the tight bumpers of cars that were either abandoned or on the verge of being abandoned. I kept on going, because if I didn’t get to Greyfriar’s, I didn’t know where else I’d go.
