by Chadwick McMurray
Hurricane Helene approached God’s thumbprint in the mountains known as Taylor Valley during the last week of September. The storm saturated Washington County, Virginia with around seven inches of rain that week. The finale arrived on Friday. Nearly twelve inches drowned the mountains in about as many hours. The thin mountain soil could hold its burden of trees no longer. Scores of trees, already precariously leaning toward the slits of sunshine over creeks and roads, toppled into the galloping currents. One by one, railroad trestles, retrofitted to serve as bridges for cyclists and walkers on the Virginia Creeper Trail, splintered before the aquatic battering ram. But in Taylor Valley a modern bridge of concrete and steel forced a detour. Debris clotted the bridge, so the Whitetop Laurel Creek went around it and found a new target.
My parents, Carl and Linda McMurray, lived in a house close to that bridge. If a motorist came across the bridge and didn’t follow the ninety degree turn in the road he would have driven right up to my parents’ front porch. Mother’s grandfather built the house in 1895. Mother’s mother was born in the house in 1916. Mother was born in the house in 1941. Except for four years in college and several years with Father in Florida, she lived in that house all her life. The house was built of wood, and it sat on wood piers. It was something like Noah’s ark. And like Noah’s ark, the floodwater lifted it and pushed it away.
Father was concerned about the rising water and he had already parked their vehicles on higher ground. When the water came over the bank he warned Mother they should leave. She declined. When the water reached the level of the front porch Father again warned they should leave. She declined. And by that time Mother, with her replaced knee, knew she didn’t have the strength and balance to wade out. The water kept rising. Father shifted from escape thoughts to survival thoughts. From the garage he fetched two life vests. They both donned the safety devices. After the water smashed into the downstairs windows they went upstairs. With some imagination Father suggested crawling out the bathroom window onto the garage roof, then jumping the short distance to the cellar roof, then stepping off that roof onto the high ground behind. Mother knew that even simple acrobatics were beyond her ability. They tried to prepare for what might happen next, but they could have never imagined what they were about to experience.
It was the middle of the afternoon, about 1:30, September 27th. They felt the house left. It didn’t collapse, or flop over, it just bobbed. Through the windows they viewed their familiar scenery passing by. They drifted across the yard and passed the old store building. Nearly a half mile from its original site it bottomed out on some high ground. Now stuck, the house was no longer a passenger on the current. Instead the current became its adversary, tearing at it and pounding it with debris. The old house lost the battle. My parents were standing at the head of the stairs, the spine between the front and rear halves, when the house framed separated. Father fell into the water and Mother fell backward into her sewing room, the space that separated the bathroom from the spare room, which used to be my bedroom.
In the water, even though supported by his life vest, Father was dunked numerous times, and struck hard several times by debris. He remembers one time in particular that he was hit so hard and was under so long that he thought for sure he would drown, but he came up again. About a hundred yards downstream from the wreckage Father caught hold of a bush along a row of ornamental trees in the neighbor’s yard, the last private property before the marauding creek fled into the asylum of the National Forest.
The new path of the creek forked around the row of trees, forming a slim island. The tail of the island was eroding quickly in the churning water, so Father made his way up the line to a larger tree. After a while he watched the bush he was formerly clinging to disappear. He saw the neighbor walking along the hillside. He shouted and waved, but she couldn’t hear him over the roar of the torrent. She went away but soon returned and popped open a pink umbrella in his direction, a sign that she had seen him. Then she left again to summon help. Feeling himself weakening and starting to shiver, he realized that hypothermia was as real a threat as the flood. He loosened the strap on his life vest and buckled himself to the tree. Occasionally he yanked himself up and down to keep his circulation up. Just before dark, nearly six hours after the house dislocated, a Black Hawk helicopter appeared. The helicopter was challenged by wind and trees to maneuver into position, but was persistent. A rescuer was winched down on a cable. Part of my parents’ front porch deck had lodged in the row of trees and served as a staging platform to prepare Father’s harness. He was raised up to safety. Father told the chopper crew about his missing wife. They made several passes up and down the flood zone, searching with a strong spotlight, but they did not find her. Safe, but sad and discouraged, he was flown to Johnson Memorial Hospital in Abingdon.
It was 11:00 that night when I heard about what happened. My wife, Rebecca, and I were in a motel room in Florence, Kentucky while attending the Conservative Mennonite Teachers Institute. Almost asleep but not quite, I was jerked into alertness by a phone call. My brother’s unusually serious voice said, “Chad, you’ve got to come now! The house is gone, Dad’s in the hospital, and Mom is missing!” We decided to leave right away. Another exchange with Erick let us know that Father was released from the hospital, uninjured, but certainly battered and bruised. Erick was going to take him to his own house in Bristol, Tennessee. Rebecca did most of the driving while I numbly rode along. Whether I looked out the window into the blackness or closed my eyes, I could only see the image of an eighty-three-year-old woman’s body writhing in cold, uncaring muddy water.
We arrived at Erick’s house at 5:45 AM. It was Saturday, September 28th, Erick’s birthday. Father woke a couple hours later. We had a sorrowful greeting. He could barely speak between sobs. “I should have… If only… I shouldn’t have…” But then sunshine blasted past all the clouds when at 9:30 AM Erick received a call from a cousin who had heard from someone who had heard that Mother was alive. And rescued.
When the house separated Mother fell backward into her sewing room, where she kept her sewing machine with a small work chair, her rocking chair, and a daybed with some pillows and afghans. A wall of shelves held some books and tubs of craft supplies. The first floor must have been dismembered as the house was shoved along, and the second floor came to rest with the water turning all around it. The half that Mother was in, the rear half, moved another hundred feet or so away from the front half. The frame was severely wracked; neither the bathroom nor spare room door would open. She was trapped. Now there was nothing to do but wait for the end to come, what she felt surely would. And maybe that would be just as well, since she had seen Father disappear.
Hours later she heard the sound of a helicopter, but she couldn’t see it. Maybe it was looking for her. But underneath the roof she was invisible. The late afternoon light gave way to dusk. Hearing the helicopter fade away brought about a gloom deeper than the dark that overtook the dusk. Darkness took away her sight but left her with the more terrifying sense of sound. Wind. Water whooshing and swishing all around her. And the bumps. Floating debris continually collided with the house remnant. Each time she thought, “This is it.” But the dreaded end never came.
Mother wrapped herself in afghans and settled into her rocking chair. Like Noah sending out the dove, all that night Mother sent out doves from her ark of safety. The Lord’s Prayer. Psalm 23. Abide With Me. When Peace Like a River. Over and over, rocking, rocking. Finally the night gave way to dawn. A new day for a new window, she thought. How could it be otherwise?
By the return of daylight Mother could see that the creek had calmed down overnight, had lost much of its anger. Through the missing wall Mother saw the neighbor, and the neighbor saw Mother. She scurried away and called for help. Four men from the community, neighbors who had grown restless and then frustrated with the trained rescue team’s inaction, sawed a path through the pileup of debris on the bridge and waded through knee-deep water the half mile to the house. They each took hold of a corner of Mother’s chair and carry the chair with Mother on it back up to the bridge. Carefully they kept the rocker balance as they maneuvered through the tangle of tree trunks, branches, and bridge timbers. An officer from the sheriff’s department drove her to Erick’s house.
When Father and Mother were reunited, their tears of joy drowned out their former tears of grief. Thanks be to God for His mercy.
Chadwick “Chad” McMurray is local to us here and would like to suggest Mennonite Disaster Service as an organization to support disaster relief in neighboring areas. https://mds.org/ | To give by check, mail your donation to MDS, 583 Airport Rd., Lititz, PA 17543
| To give by phone, call 1-800-241-8111
