At first it seemed like simply a good weekend to curl up with a novel, lulled by the kind of steady rain that makes errands unappealing and yard work impossible. Might as well pour a cup of tea, pull the lamp a little closer, and settle in. For book lovers, a rainy Saturday is nothing less than a vacation.

But by Sunday, when portable classrooms started bobbing down the river, and people started dying, and even police cruisers were overtaken by flood waters, we got it. Tennessee was being pummeled by rainfall of truly Biblical proportions—more than a foot in less than forty-eight hours—and this was no one's cozy escape.

While water still poured from the sky, the images were arresting: a couple of teenagers clinging to the luggage rack of an inundated Jeep, whole families wading through the sludge or crowded into rescue boats, a young man cradling an old woman while another young man walks alongside, bearing her oxygen tank—all colored sepia and gray, muted by the veil of unrelenting rain. But shocking as those photos were, they were nothing to the bigger-picture scenes that came later, after the front moved out and helicopters took to a suddenly benevolent sky, and we could see that all those close-focus pictures weren't isolated scenes of misery at all. Every particular image of loss and despair, every photo that captured the fear of one person, must surely be a microcosm of the grief and confusion being played out in neighborhood after neighborhood, home after home.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, and everyone in town has a camera in his pocket, then this flood has now been documented beyond anything Chapter 16, a website devoted to language, could possibly add to the discussion. But we wanted to try anyway.

We aren't trying to blunt the full impact of the disaster, to render it less overwhelming by boxing it into the artful shape of an essay. There will be time for someone in love with language to capture the sweep and majesty of this breathtaking natural event, and the sweep and majesty, too, of the way Tennesseans have responded to it. But with water still standing in people's kitchens and mud still caked in their hair, this is not that time.

Instead, we're offering a series of tiny vignettes, each telling one small part of the story of Tennessee's flood. In many ways, these are only the barest edges of the tapestry, for no one truly devastated this week had the time, or the heart, to write an essay. You won't read here—at least not yet—about what it feels like to lose every piece of furniture in your house, or to learn that someone you love didn't make it out in time. The real heart of the story of this flood is still to come.

Until then, look for Maria Browning's account of watching a hummingbird patiently waiting out the storm on her porch, for Wayne Christeson's tale of helping an artist carry her still-wet canvasses to higher-ground, for Paul Griffith's meditation on the meaning of a water-logged guitar and Anne Reeves's thoughts on crossing the angry Tennessee River on I-65, and Lyda Phillips's glimpse of a drowned woodchuck in Shelby Park. And because, as Auden noted, every human disaster "takes place/ While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along," don't miss Liz Garrigan's piece about playing with her children in the rain, and essays by Faye Jones and Susannah Felts on the eeriness of being untouched by an event so seemingly universal.

You won't catch any of these writers attempting to make sense of what happened in Tennessee this week. They're only trying to articulate it, to tell their own stories. And story is what we're all about at Chapter 16.
—Margaret Renkl

The Wisdom of the Hummingbird

Waiting, and hoping for the best

As rain invaded my basement on the second day of the deluge, I waded around, stumbling and pawing through a decade's worth of homeowner debris: Is this the weedeater that works? Why did I save this paint? I struggled to open a long-stuck garage door that would (maybe, I hoped) let some of the rising water escape and spent the next three hours pushing a big broom through the surf, trying to get the tide to flow out faster than it was flowing in, and rubbing my hands sore in the process. All of this labor was absolutely futile. The sky was still spewing water like a fire hose.

Meanwhile, my dog Kobi, a Chow mix with beautiful brown eyes and some serious impulse-control issues, was busy up on the back porch—whining, barking, drooling, tipping over the water bowl and pawing the floor of her doghouse. With every clap of thunder, she'd lunge at one of the other dogs in an anxiety-driven snit. Diligent animal that she is, she never took a break, though periodically she'd stop and stand in the doorway to the deck, getting soaked and staring out at the rain with a menacing look, as if canine intimidation might change the course of the storm.

It occurred to me, not for the first time, that my dysfunctional dog and I have a lot in common. Confronted with a calamity, we both feel the need to do something. Waiting it out is not an option. Action must be taken, however pointless. The difference between her and me is that I know it's all wasted effort, which makes my behavior even more absurd. (Did I mention impulse-control issues?)

Oh, to be more like Kobi's pack brother Nio, a giant black beast with a gift for patient acceptance of fate. Once the rain set in, he curled his hefty body into his Dogloo and stayed put for the duration. Occasionally he'd stick his head out to verify that, yes, it was still wet out there, and once he emerged to sing along with a police siren that drifted in from somewhere in distant Waterworld. Otherwise, he waited and hoped for the best. A lone hummingbird took the same approach, perching on my porch feeder in uncharacteristic repose for hours at a stretch.

When the clouds finally parted, I felt lucky and stupid. Nature, in her indifference, had spared us any serious damage and swamped the basement in spite of me. In addition to the sore hands, my frenzy of resistance had given me an aching shoulder and a crick in my neck. Kobi had lost her voice from all the barking, and it took the better part of two days for her to sleep off her exhaustion. Nio and the hummingbird were just fine.
—Maria Browning

Runoff

The water had a place to get to, and it was in a hurry

The rain began Friday, intensified Saturday. The dogs went to their bunkers. I went to the back door, looking out at the rain. It beat down on grass we should have cut before the rains came and now seemed to be visibly growing. Water ran down the yard, churning up the bare track the dogs created playing the fence game with the neighbors' dogs. The runoff was minutely held back from our foundation by the rather lame calico rock "patio" we built this spring. The two-by-fours that hold the rock in place turned the water slightly to the east, where it ran down the sidewalk next to the house, instead of pooling into a mud pit at our back door.

I went to the front door, observed water pouring like a waterfall all along the gutters we should have cleaned before the rains came. It rained harder. An ankle-high stream of water rushed down the front walk, then out into the street, and then down a steep hill—into the hole, as we call it. I wondered how deep the water was down in the hole, but the lightning was so incessant I was afraid to venture out. The water in the street rose steadily up the tires of our cars parked at the curb. I imagined the little Scion gently floating down a waterfall into the hole, bobbing off on new adventures.

Late Sunday, more than forty-eight hours of torrential rain finally became a drizzle. I dragged the dogs from their secret hiding places and went out to Shelby Park. The little stream that gently trickles through the golf course had become raging white water. I was afraid that ninety-five-pound Cid, who loves jumping in and out of the water but is scared if he can't touch bottom, would be swept away and sucked through the pipe that carried the flood into the lake, which had overflowed its banks. I called him back to me.

Other people emerged in ones and twos and threes, with dogs and without, all looking pale and both shell-shocked and excited. The river now covered the ball field. A dead woodchuck floated belly-up among the bobbing plastic bottles. Canada geese swam through the debris, unperturbed.

Walking back up the hill, everywhere water hurried down, in trickles through the grass, in rivulets down the sides of the road, in waterfalls and rapids down the channel of a normally nearly invisible stream. I crossed over and went to look at Cave Springs. The last time I'd visited, it was a damp and forbidding cave overgrown with weeds and suggesting snakes, dead and waterless. Now it rushed out from the rocks, clean and strong, scouring the cave clean. Sweating from the muggy heat, I shoved my arms into the cold spring and felt the water's urgent desire to hurry, hurry, down, down, to swell the rising river.
—Lyda Phillips

All Rooms River View

Watching the waters rise in Bellevue

By Sunday morning, the creek behind my Bellevue complex had overrun its banks, and water was lapping at the condo opposite mine. Out back, what was once our common area was nothing but brown rushing water. My neighbors and I met to assess our situation. We considered leaving, but we'd all seen images of cars floating in the river alongside the semi-trailer trucks and a portable classroom. Staring at the roaring, swirling water, we decided we had a better chance at home than on the road.

I spent the next hour pacing from one window to the next. I carried my books upstairs in armfuls. My mother called from out of town; our brief conversation did nothing to reassure either of us, but by the end of it, the rain had subsided a little. The water was still everywhere, but it was no longer lingering at my second step; it had settled on the first. An hour later, I could actually see a little grass. For whatever reason, we were spared.

My cable starting working again right about the time my phones went out, and I sat before the television for the rest of the day, not really believing what I was seeing.

The word "surreal" gets bandied around a lot during calamities, but it is truly the strangest thing to watch televised images of people carrying other folks out in boats and know it's happening only a few blocks away. I could hear the helicopter broadcasting the pictures I was seeing. Looking at the aerial shots of Bellevue, it was hard to believe anything was left of our little town. It felt wrong to be sitting there watching it, to be observing the wreckage of my neighbors' lives.

Three of my colleagues and the parents of another lost everything that day. That much I know. What I don't know is the condition of the strangers I see almost every day: the very tall man with the very tiny white dog, the friendliest grocery-store clerk in the world, the retiree on his front stoop in River Plantation who always waves as I walk past. I hope they all came through unscathed. Looking at the damage, I think that may be too much to ask.
—Faye Jones

Wet Paint

The canvasses weren't even dry when the waters began to rise

During the months before the storm, our Leiper's Fork neighbor Rachael McCampbell, an artist, was working in her home studio on a commission for the Parthenon in Nashville: a dozen or more large canvasses depicting the lives of women in Greek mythology. It was going to be an impressive show.

Rachael bought her house/studio just last summer. It's an old building, built around 1910, which sits about 200 feet from the edge of the little creek which gives Leiper's Fork its name. The creek floods a few times every year, but Rachael's neighbor, who has lived there for ninety-two years, said the house itself had never been touched.

This year, the house did flood, in water higher than Leiper's Fork has ever seen.

When the waters started to rise, Rachael called me in alarm. I wasn't worried—I was sure the house wouldn't flood—but I headed over anyway. I discovered right away that our own road was blocked by a couple of feet of fast water, so I took a circuitous route to get to Rachael's house and arrived just as the water was lapping at the foundation.

Inside, Rachael was in a panic, trying to get her paintings upstairs. The canvasses are quite large, and the staircase was very narrow, so it was difficult work. Many of the paintings were not yet thoroughly dry, making the process all the more delicate. We got them upstairs to safety and then tried to figure out if there was anything else that could be saved. By then, the water was in the door and over the floor and rising rapidly, so Rachael grabbed her telephone and computer, and we retreated to a neighbor's house on higher ground.

When the flood waters finally retreated two days later, Rachael's house was in ruins, her studio devastated, but the paintings were safe. Everyone has pitched in this week with cleaning, repairs, and the search for lost valuables, and finally we located a neighboring barn where Rachael can live temporarily and continue her painting for the Parthenon. The show, after all, must go on.
—Wayne Christeson

Little House in the Rainy Woods

When the power goes out, the real fun begins

All I could think last weekend as the rain came unceasingly down, trapping us in our house in the woods without power or a safe route to civilization, was, "Dear God, how did the frontier women do it?" While their men were out hunting or doing whatever it was frontier men did, the women were inside their austere cabins taking care of babies. There were no baby wipes or Tylenol, no animal crackers or Huggies, no tricycles or board books, no hot water with the turn of a handle. It was all hunger, filth, misery, and poop. I pray those women and children are in heaven now, and that they are awash in spas, pedicures, hot dogs, juice boxes, and Popsicles.

Contemplating my ill-starred forebears helped keep my own weekend trial in perspective. We had food, water, and candles. We were dry and not in danger of losing our home. So what if I had to explain roughly four dozen times that it wasn't possible to watch Cars? (Toddlers, it seems, don't understand the concept of electricity.) When they had reached their saturation point with storybooks, my boys gazed longingly out the window, clearly wishing they were outdoors throwing rocks, looking at lizards, poking frogs.

"Outside, Mommy!" the three-year-old said.

"Honey, it's storming. We can't go outside."

"Mommy!" he insisted. "Outside!"

My husband was off helping to coordinate city relief efforts. I was on my own, and it was too early to cope by uncorking a bottle, even by the permissive standards of our household. The sky was dark except for frequent flashes of lightning, but we had to get the hell out of the house.

So we did. They splashed, the one-year-old ate a little dirt, they threw rocks into the woods, we ran up and down the gravel drive, took a wagon ride. It wasn't long before there wasn't a dry patch on any of us. After the boys had had their fill, we trudged back home, dripping puddles and pulling off soggy clothes. When they were down to their diapers—and me my underwear—we went upstairs to towel off.

With late afternoon setting in, I dressed us all in clean duds, got the camp lantern from the closet, and threw pillows all over the floor. I let the cell-phone battery die, instead of running out to the car to charge it, and we made a fort out of sheets and pretended we were camping. We rolled around and roughhoused, and gave each other hugs and kisses. It was the first day off I'd had in weeks and the most fun I can ever remember having with my children.

There was no way to know, then, how many others were suffering.
—Liz Garrigan

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Sometimes a drama queen is worse than the storm

While the rain kept falling in Columbia, where I live, I was in Birmingham, elbow-deep in soil. I was helping a friend with her flower garden, and all weekend, the threat of a downpour proved to be just that: gray skies slumped lazily over my head, and nothing more. The humidity forced me to drink a lot of fruit-flavored beer, and the devastation taking place in my home state seemed far away.

I called my mother who lives near Centerville on a bluff with a glorious view of hills, farmland, and the Duck River. In late winter, eagles come to nest along the sycamore-lined banks. "Is it raining?" I asked. She laughed, but there was anxiety in her voice. It's dark on the bluff at night, and when the rain falls and wind blows it can be lonesome. My mother's recovery from recent heart surgery had been slow, and her isolation, once longed for, now unsettled her. "It's raining," she said.

I spent all weekend shoveling, planting, and hauling bags of topsoil. I was exhausted when I left for home in early afternoon. Twenty-five miles outside of Huntsville, I hit the rain and crossed over a white-capped Tennessee River. I found myself struggling to remember all the verses to "Ode to Billie Joe," the Bobbie Gentry song about a boy who jumps off the Tallahatchie bridge. I couldn't stop thinking about that image of flowers in the muddy water.

Thirteen miles from my exit, the bottom fell out of the sky. The road seemed to disappear; drainage pipes spewed like muddy geysers. My sister called my cell phone in a panic, unable to reach our mother. "What about her cell phone?" I asked. "She's forgotten how to use it," she snapped. "I'm heading over."

My sister studied acting in school. Clearly, her drama days are not over. Our mother has weathered thunderstorms, wind that sent trees falling across the roof of her house, and one memorable ice storm that left her without water and power for three weeks. What was a little rain? Minutes later, my sister called again, choking back tears. Emergency-team volunteers—including a soaking wet, toothless woman in an orange vest—had motioned her to turn back on Highway 50.

I was safely home before my sister called again, planning to make her way to Hickman County through Hohenwald. Mother would be fine, I told her again. She has her dog, a flashlight, and our father's ashes on the bedside table. The ashes brought my sister around. Nothing bad would happen with our dad's vigilance, even in his newest incarnation.

They arrived on my doorstop Monday morning: my sister, our mother, her dog, and a tote bag holding Dad's ashes. From the bluff, the swollen sound of the Duck River was unnerving, they both said, but strangely exhilarating. My friend in Birmingham called to say that I had outdone myself. Her patio had never looked so beautiful.
—Anne Delana Reeves

Guitar Town

Facing what it means to lose the instrument of your dreams

As the waters rose in Nashville I was out of town. I'm a drummer, and my neighbor, a bass player, urged me to get home quick. "Our backyards look like lakes," he said, and I worried for my gear, much of which was below ground level. I was lucky. Everything was still dry, and with a little shifting around it would stay that way.

Others haven't been so fortunate. As I talk to fellow musicians, the stories of lost instruments have broken my heart. At Soundcheck Nashville, a rehearsal and instrument-storage facility, the cost in lost guitars alone is expected to run in the millions. Many of them belong to well-known performers and session musicians. Still underwater are pre-war Gibson mandolins, ancient Martin guitars, one-of-a-kind pedal steels, and priceless electrics, like Waylon Jennings's tooled-leather Fender Telecaster, which was stored in the locker of one famous country star.

But it's not just the stars who have suffered. Workaday pickers and songwriters, too, have lost the one thing that, in many cases, most defines them. A guitar is often the only effective interface between a dedicated player and the outside world. Whether it's a sixty-dollar pawnshop mutt or a purebred collectible, for musicians, a guitar is like a pet. They chose it. It's theirs. It fits their lap; it fits their life. They keep it because it comforts them, and—as much as is possible for an inanimate object—they love it.

Essentially, guitars are nothing but piles of wood and wire, but in Nashville they're iconic. Compared to the loss of life, guitars are just stuff, but here they're also the stuff of dreams. In days to come, the true impact of this flood will be revealed: more bodies will be uncovered, flooded homes will be leveled, and people already suffering in a miserable economy will face financial ruin. And when the waters finally recede, some beloved guitars will also be uncovered. Warped, delaminated, mildewed and rusted, they will be irreplaceable.
—Paul V. Griffith

Survivor's Guilt

What if the worst natural disaster of your lifetime strikes, and you don't even get a good story out of it?

I dress my toddler in her swimsuit, thinking, Why not. She likes it. It's fitting. But we keep one eye on the basement and the other on the local news. In the basement, a thin layer of water slowly spreads across the middle of the concrete floor, nothing a shop vac can't make short work of.

The television tells a different story. Places that never flood are submerged, the reporter explains. Cut to footage of an inundated I-24, a portable classroom broken loose and crushed to bits by rushing water. The tornado sirens come and go. Slowly, inexorably, Nashville is swallowed by muddy water.

Video camera in hand, I watch my daughter run through the yard, the bright floral pattern of her swimsuit and green frog boots flashing against the steady gray screen of rain. Her grandparents would love this. I consider posting the video to Facebook, and then think: No way. Earlier I'd seen a status update that read, I just saw my house on TV. … Well, the top half of it, anyway.

"Puddle!" my toddler shouts in delight, stomping her feet, her wet hair clinging to her head.

We wake to those terrible, impossible scenes of downtown. The brown water deceptively placid, as if a child has carefully taken a brown crayon to the wrong areas of a coloring book. Flood waters are uniquely infuriating in their silent and stubborn lingering, the way they seem allied with the calm blue sky to mock their victims, anxious to rebuild.

In East Nashville, just a couple of miles from this ruination, the sun is shining on my green lawn, the flowers are perking, and I have a damp swimsuit to pick up from the floor. We stroll down to the coffee shop, where the barista asks me how I'm doing. "Oh, fine," I say. Then it occurs to me that she's not just being polite. There's real concern in her question, as in, Have you spent the day dragging waterlogged trash from your home?

Fortunate. Lucky. How many times have I said these words in the last week? How many times have I felt them as I clicked through photos of the devastation, feeling like a rubbernecker on the highway?

But the guilt can make you text those numbers to the Red Cross, buy cans of beans and rolls of paper towels and get them where they need to go. You see the people of your city helping each other, and you want to join them. You bake cookies for a sale supporting relief efforts; you donate money at the grocery store; you skip your shower to conserve clean water. In these tiny, necessary acts, you feel the small warmth of doing your part, any part. You try not to think about the silently selfish impulses behind them. We want to lay claim to the stories of the flood—to have something to take away, even if nothing was taken from us.

A guy at the coffee shop is describing a flooded softball field. He uses his hands to show how high the water got. "The wrath of God," he jokes. We all traffic in these stories now, whether we come by them first- or second-hand. They're a lousy trade, but we're stuck with them, and share them we will.
—Susannah Felts

Published Friday, 7 May 2010