I knew it was over when the carpet started to float.
Any delusion about staying in or returning to our home, dashed. Gone. Swept away in a torrent of fear, desperation, and outright shock. How could this be? There were no evacuation orders. The hurricane was supposed to turn out to sea. It didn’t. It slowly inched its way up the coast, soaking the ground, then saturating it to overload. Creeks became rivers...raging, violent currents of icy, dark water filled with God knows what.
Our house sat on over an acre in the middle of the woods, bordered by a lovely little winding creek. Honeysuckle-scented summers were spent with my little boy, exploring those woods, playing in the shallow water, and fishing. We picked wild blueberries from bushes flourishing along the banks and listened in the evenings to the beautiful, haunting call of the barred owls we so loved. In winter, the slopes of those woods became our personal sledding and snowboarding trails. It was peaceful, tranquil, and perfect. A snow-white paradise of crystal magnificence, with ice shimmering along the edges of that serene little creek.
The creek had risen before, to the edge of the yard. Heavy rain did that, but the water never once crept onto the lawn. We had lived eleven years beside it without a worry. It was, after all, on a five hundred-year floodplain. And since Hurricane Floyd had struck in 1999, causing catastrophic floods only six years before we bought the place, we were confident the creek wouldn’t be an issue. We had five hundred years.
We were wrong. Dead wrong.
I’d had a bad feeling from the moment the disturbance had shown up on radar, just off Africa. Although I never worried about storms, this one became a near obsession. I watched it for weeks as it grew and changed, morphing from a depression into a tropical storm, to a deadly Hurricane Matthew, barreling straight towards the US. Still, we weren’t prepared for what it did next.
As Matthew approached, it defied all forecasts. It zigged when it should have zagged. It wandered around like a drunkard, finally hitting us here in North Carolina at a mere Category 1. That’s all it took to change our lives forever. To turn our sweet, serene creek into a raging river with no banks or boundaries. Day became night. I swear on my life that hurricanes love the night. By the time we looked outside by the light of a flashlight, we were trapped. Our three hundred-foot driveway through thick woods was invisible, hidden under feet of rushing water. To add insult to injury, our ten by ten shed had been ripped from its foundation and tossed in the middle of our only way in or out. As the water rose to touch the low hanging birch branches lining the gravel drive, the view from the street became nothing but woods. Rescuers had no idea we existed.
Calling for help, we received the same response over and over, for hours. “They’re on the way. Be patient. Boats are in your area and they’re coming for you.”
No one came.
We threw up as calm a façade as we possibly could for our ten-year-old son. In private, I fell apart holding one of my six beloved rescue dogs after the other. How could I leave them? Some had been abandoned by the people they trusted. How could I do the same?
For hours, we watched the water rise. We prayed it would stop. It didn’t. We prayed anyway. We held onto the hope that the house would hold, and the water would stay out. And then the carpet began to float. The dogs – who had not been allowed on the furniture – were encouraged onto the couch. One refused, instead going to her safe place…a wire crate on the floor. She lay down on her blankets, an inch of freezing water surrounding her. She wouldn’t budge. The cold, harsh reality struck. This was the end of our lives as we had known them. There was no coming back from this.
The water continued to rise.
At 5:00 am, a full nine hours after we placed our first call to 911, we were finally, blessedly rescued. My husband stood at an open window blowing his coaches whistle and waving his flashlight to guide our rescuers through the blackness and the thick trees. We were tossed into a Zodiac in the pouring rain, clutching the few belongings we had been instructed to pack. Our dogs could not come. For close to an hour, we navigated branches, struggling our way against the current, floating over parked cars, fences, and mailboxes in the freezing rain. We rescued several more people before being dropped on higher ground where an ambulance and a bus waited to first warm up and evaluate victims before shuttling us to a Red Cross shelter.
The nightmare was over. Thinking of our dogs, it was just beginning.
Sitting in that shelter, cold and lost, all I could think of was them. Those sweet, damaged, trusting souls watching us float away in the night as the water rose. I knew they had high places they could jump onto. It didn’t make me feel any better. I had briefly thought of staying with them and sending my family ahead, but knew my child would have been terrified, wondering if his mother was dying, trapped inside a flooded house.
I have never in my life been so utterly lost as I was that morning, shaking on a cot, wrapped in a Red Cross blanket. How do you plan a future when your past is being washed into the woods? How do you start over with nothing? And how do you do it with six huge, untrained dogs with no manners? I prayed incessantly sitting on that cot, surrounded by scores of families in exactly the same shape. Then my phone rang. And God showed up. Every prayer answered in three short sentences. “It’s Coach Edwards from the Spot. I have an apartment for you guys and the dogs for as long as you need it. My wife is with the Humane Society, in a boat, and they have your dogs.”
That night, we began our new lives in the neighboring town in which we had spent so many years coaching football and watching our son play for the Spot youth center. People had asked over and over why we drove thirty minutes for sports when we could have just had our son play in our hometown. We never had an answer. We didn’t know. For seven years, we had driven twenty-five miles to soccer, basketball, and football.
As I see the destruction from Dorian, I’m reminded of how lost and afraid those people are, and I pray that they find the love, compassion, and hope we did. There’s a lot of bad in this world. A lot of hate and anger and dishonesty. But let me tell you, friends, there’s even more good. People who won’t hesitate to help, to go out of their way to be the heroes they never planned to become. To live selflessly. We are living proof.
