Who Invited You Agnes

 

Dear Agnes

A local volunteer, stood in our kitchen scraping and scrubbing a porcelain cookie jar. It was the first sunny day in weeks. The house smelled of river dirt with an undertone of sweat and dank air. The water from the the storm had retreated back to where it came. The volunteers were a special breed. The woman continued cleaning the porcelain with a new found urgency as our mother walked into the room. She broke out in a heartfelt laugh somewhat breaking the underlying tension in the room. Our mother laughed infrequently, but when she did, she did it for a reason.

“That stain you are working on is part of the design. That is the woman face. It is some lady from a pancake commercial. The woman set the cookie jar aside and went to the next soiled item In the kitchen. Mom handed her a Pepsi.

June 22, 1972 It had rained in Birdsboro for days on end. There was a certain dread in the air. I sat in bed the night before and listened to the insistent rain on the roof tops. The wind wasn’t that of epic proportion, rather a constant battering slow dull ache in the psyche. Who knows what goes through your mind when you are a twelve year old. However that night, I remember being aware and afraid.

To this day, I can’t even believe I lived in town called Birdsboro. It was a small town in southwest Pennsylvania with a trickle of a stream running through it. Hay creek flowed into the Schuylkill river about a mile from town.  My brother and I used to fish on this stream for hours on end. We waded in our bare feet. The water was clear and tranquil.

The morning of June 22, my Mom and stepdad went to work as usual and they dropped my little brother Rob at our Aunt’s house . For them it was any other day. They went to work to put food on the table. We were a little bit excited as we planned to head to Fenwick Island for the following weekend. As a family we enjoyed these trips. It started like any other day albeit with Hurricane Agnes sitting right on top of the Eastern seaboard. And she wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.

My brother Steve and I were home alone and it was obvious we were not going to fill our day doing our usual routine of playing baseball, riding our bikes or going fishing. We were in for the day. Our only real contact with the outside world was radio station WRAW and it was crackly at best. I do not remember any dire weather warnings or anything out of the ordinary. I do remember hearing Don Mclean’s American Pie as well as Neil Young’s Heart of Gold playing on the radio. If there was any unusual activity on the street, I do not recall.

My brother and I settled into an intense game of skittle pool. It was his favorite as I prefered the bowling version. Mid morning, we received a phone call from one of our parents asking us to take things to higher ground. We did know exactly what that meant so my brother and I took items on the floor and stacked them on tables, counters and the top of kitchen appliances. In retrospect we did a pretty half assed job as we wanted to get back to our game of skittle pool.

I guess things started happening fast and we really did not see it coming. We glanced out the front window and the rain was coming down steady or maybe this was the new steady. We also noted the streets were filled with water and people in authority were walking the streets. It certainly was not the standard thoroughfare. Minutes later water started seeping in under the front door. It was a cold, angry, uninvited, dirty water.  The water was up to our front door and rising steadily.

I looked out the front window and saw my mom and step dad wading toward the house in waist deep water. They held my little brother in their arms. Things must be serious if they left work early.

When they entered the house, the water was now ankle deep and the air smelled of river mud, electricity and distant fire. We quickly unplugged as many electrical outlets as we could. The water on the living room floor felt electric. Who knows how real that was?

We soon retreated to the second floor with our beagle Fred and our cat Mathew. We moved to the front bedroom and stared out the window with amazement. The water was now up to the second floor as boats with people floated outside the bedroom window.  We watched an older lady across the street board a boat from a bedroom window. I have a lasting vision of her accidently dropping her bird cage into the raging waters as she entered the boat.

Another boat meandered up to our bed room and notified us it was mandatory to evacuate. We were told to leave our pets there and get in the boat as quickly as possible. That sinking feeling of leaving our pets behind sticks to me to this day,  The five of us  adeptly entered the boat with awkward precision as we were to be guided toward higher ground.  I remember a man who tried to swim away from the danger. He clung to a 12 foot cyclone fence as the water feverishly rushed by.  We would later see him in the fire hall down the street wrapped in blankets, very much alive.

It was a four block boat ride to higher ground. We could smell the smoke from a furniture store that caught fire that day. The smell of river mud singed our noses as our house faded into the past.

I do not remember actually ever being afraid. The only time I was ever really had a moment of terror was sitting in bed the previous night listening to the building of the wind and rain. The day of the actual flood was actually calm in comparison. Agnes had planted her seed that previous night.

We got out of the boat five blocks from our house where the Main Street of Birdsboro gradually snaked up hill. We slowly walked toward a fire hall and were given blankets to combat the cold. I do not remember being even vaguely cold. I do not remember feeling much of anything other than for the lady who lost her bird and our pets back at the house with the waters still rising.

I believe we ate a bowl of soup and had a few glasses of root beer as we listened to the town being devoured by Agnes.  I wanted to see our next door neighbors but they were not there at the firehouse. Most of all I wanted it to stop raining.  It eventually did. Fred and Matthew were found sitting on the bed a day or two later. They were fine.

This was forty seven years ago. There is a moral to this story but I am not going to tell it to you until I figure it out.

As a 12 year old we had no concept of global warming, but we knew something was amiss.