Local history
A chapter from a novel-in-progress
So they drifted apart, maybe pushed by currents beyond Leah’s control, but really, Leah had chosen it. Just as she had stopped making an effort to see or talk to Cynthia, she had also stopped shadowing Smith and Robert and trying to solve Maylin’s mystery.
But she had not been idle. She’d spoken to Meg on the phone several times more, and, quite uncharacteristically, had spent time in Ithaca doing things besides going to AA meetings as work at the winery slowed with the season.
The trauma of the flood and its aftermath faded along with anxiety about the weather and even the jolting memory of Phil crawling out of the blackness. And she wondered if Cynthia was still having visions of Maylin.
It felt good to be engaged with the world. She’d thought about moving back to Ithaca. She couldn’t afford it but she now felt quite sentimental about the funky apartments she’d lived in years ago, even the big old apartment house she had shared with Jacob and Smith. Driving in downtown Ithaca was like watching B-roll from a documentary. The voice-over recited, I lived there, the gray house, I worked in this building, right here. There was still an empty lot where Jacob’s shitty apartment used to be, where they kissed.
This afternoon she stopped in the county history museum. Her knee hurt, so she planned to rest in the little library and look at old stuff. The librarian greeted her and asked what she was interested in.
“Floods.”
The word dropped like a stone from Leah’s mouth. So, not gone, just dormant. Waiting.
“We have a collection of photos and accounts of local flooding. Newspaper articles, reports, personal accounts. If you take a seat, I can bring you some materials,” the woman said. Her face was kind and smooth under a bowl of white hair. Her eyes were sharp. “You might be interested in the historic flood of 1935.”
“Oh, yes, please,” Leah said and sat in a chair at one of the two long wooden library tables.
In the center of the photo, two women stood under an umbrella, not to protect themselves from rain — although it had rained and rained the night before — but to shade their faces from the sun on this hot, historic summer day, June 8, 1935.
While she waited, she looked around. The history center occupied a repurposed classic bank building on the Commons, all stone and glass. The space was clean and orderly, with map files and bookcases taking up the front of the long room, two library tables and chairs in the center, and two computer workstations and office machines for library staff at the far end. There were three other visitors, about Leah’s age. Across the table, a woman with long dark hair and bad teeth wrote in a small notebook. She wore a woolen poncho covered with pet hair. At the other table, there was a tall, well-groomed man wearing glasses as round as his shiny bald head, his back as straight as a fence post. He made a quiet grunt of surprise, then another, as he turned the pages of a large book.
Leah didn’t want to look too closely at the third person sitting farthest from her. These two were enough to tell her she was an odd duck among odd ducks.
The librarian returned with five gray archival file folders and set them on the table. “FLOOD” was penciled on the tabs along with accession numbers. The top two folders held photocopies of newspaper articles, maps, and typed survey reports from the Army Corps of Engineers and Bureau of Land Management. One of these was a report detailing the flooding on June 7–8, 1935, from “cloudbursts” and thunderstorms over the southern tier of New York, the northern tier of Pennsylvania, and as far north as the Finger Lakes. Forty-seven people drowned in the floods.
Leah’s heart beat faster. Her eyes skimmed graphs, tables, and text in the report. On June 8, a farmer in Burdett recorded 12.5 inches in a 24-hour period, 9 inches in just two hours before daybreak. The cloudbursts overwhelmed creeks and gorges and swept buildings, livestock, roads, and railroad trestles away down the hillsides. A transcript of a 1985 news story on the 50th anniversary of the flood said the Lodi Point summer camps at the end of Leah’s road were completely washed away, along with the people in them.
So it had happened before, but worse. According to the accounts, the ground was already saturated by earlier rainfall, as with the flood this past August. But in 1935 the people were unprepared and there were no warnings. Chaotic and unpredictable as her own life seemed to Leah, it was much safer in 2018 compared to 1935.
She opened another folder. Inside were grainy black and white photocopies of original photos from the library archives. Captions described the devastation in places like Binghamton, Ithaca, and Hornell, but many were undescribed — and nearly indescribable. In every photo, whether the scene was rural or urban, there were huge piles of debris, trees, rocks, and gravel.
She flipped the sheets of paper and stopped to look at one that was uncannily familiar, as though it came straight out of her mind. The setting could have been one of many spots she knew well. A hundred-year-old clapboard house sat close to an intersection of two grid roads surrounding the old military tracts. Where the east-west road led down a steep hillside and crossed the railroad tracks, the lake glowed through a tunnel in the leafy trees. That’s where the water wanted to go.
In the center of the photo, two women stood under an umbrella, not to protect themselves from rain — although it had rained and rained the night before — but to shade their faces from the sun on this hot, historic summer day, June 8, 1935. Small within the landscape of the lens, the women perched on a section of tracks surrounded by piled debris left there by the flood. Along with the tangled limbs and boards, shoals of loose gravel were stranded like sandbars. It looked like a demolition site or a war zone.
Three men picking among the piles of debris gave the impression of moving ever so slowly, careful of their footing on the busted tarmac, wires, metal, and wood. Tall trees still standing were a dark contrast to the wreck of ones pulled down. One man dressed in overalls tugged with a bare hand at the mass of tree limbs dammed against the grill of a motor car, its owl-eyed headlamps staring beneath a titled telephone pole. Another man in a necktie, white shirt, and straw boater hat strolled toward the two women as though he was on a Sunday walk in the park.
The two women faced one another, each with a hand on the umbrella’s center pole. Their gingham dresses were as straight as matched portico columns, stopping just above booted ankles. Under the striped umbrella, their figures were perfectly framed against the bright, distant lake, which Leah made out in the tree-tunnel behind them. She could not make out their features, but there was an expression in their shapes and the shape they made together silhouetted under the umbrella’s eaves, of having dressed for the occasion, pinned their hair and straightened the hems of their dresses in the sunlight.
The woman on the right was tall and dark, her face in a shadow, her arms resting against her belly in that space under her breasts which seems made for it. It looked to Leah like an intimate, unconscious posture — holding something in, or holding herself away from the other woman’s body that was so close under the circle of shade. The woman on the left was almost looking at the camera fifty feet away along the broken tracks. Leah imagined the old camera balanced on a wooden tripod and saw what the photographer had seen, except he saw it upside-down, stooped under a curtain, set up in the perfect spot to capture the scene — the flood’s path, the tracks half-buried under gravel, the jumbled wash-out, the well-dressed man walking slowly, and the women posed under their umbrella.
She imagined the women deliberately smiling in the face of it, because what else could you do? Forever locked onto the lesson of the trees, trees both broken and still standing, knowing that nothing may be possessed, not even that hot, damp, buzzing moment on the ruins of the flood, their hands almost touching on the umbrella pole pointed like a lightning rod at the white, cloudless sky.
Leah almost missed it, but the low, wide creek was there, still running over the lip of the shattered tracks, slipping under the wreckage. She heard the water trilling and murmuring and the buzz of biting black flies. Felt the damp, humid air, and sun’s heat cooking the compost strewn all around. She could smell it.
She wondered about the two women — what were they to each other — kin, neighbors, or friends? Did they ride out the night together, terrified by the unseen flood and pounding rain, comforting each other like an arm tight against a tense belly? Did they stand close to continue that reassurance in the broad day? Had they heard the names of the dead yet? Leah imagined them awed by the hundred-year flood, the only one of its kind in their lifetimes; by the knowledge that everything is borrowed — time, trees, buildings, automobiles, and the people you love — borrowed from the weather, from the future, and from one another. She imagined the women deliberately smiling in the face of it, because what else could you do? Forever locked onto the lesson of the trees, trees both broken and still standing, knowing that nothing may be possessed, not even that hot, damp, buzzing moment on the ruins of the flood, their hands almost touching on the umbrella pole pointed like a lightning rod at the white, cloudless sky.
Leah’s absorption was broken by a recorded voice from the display room next door to the library. She sat back to listen. The words were unclear but the tone rose and fell much like airport warnings about smoking and unattended bags.
It was quiet in the library. In a metal mesh container at the edge of the librarian’s desk pencils splayed like kindling, colored in the usual yellow but also tan and light blue and eyeing the ceiling. Some were topped with colorful erasers shaped like Thai temple spires, the kind you bought in packs from office supply stores because the erasers pencils came with always seemed to harden and dry long before they were used up. Leah thought it was generous of the library to provide the fresh erasers, considering that pens were not allowed in here and people always made mistakes.
Along the walls, bookcases were loosely filled with local family histories, geography, genealogy, and class yearbooks. It seemed a little ridiculous, preserving all of this at one time important but really forgettable stuff. Farms, buildings, and roads. Fires and floods. People. So many people. But she wanted to remember this photo and carried the photocopy over to the librarian’s desk.
“Can you make a copy of this for me?”
The librarian smiled. “Yes, or you can just take a picture with your phone. Lots of people do that.”
“Oh, of course. Good idea.”
Leah felt a little stupid, and old. You didn’t need to write anything down, anymore, or remember to put fresh batteries in the flashlights, or even to have flashlights. No one needed to keep things, either, not even memories. Libraries and museums kept them for you, for anyone. You didn’t have to keep a copy because your phone was a computer and a flashlight. You only had to tap, click, and point at the wonderful and terrible things that passed before your eyes and they would exist forever, and yet never, somewhere in the cloud, untouchable but right there in your pocket, rendered in tiny pixels of light. It was OK. OK to let go.
