And I saw the rats. They live down by the river, a pestilence on tiny clawed feet. By the hundreds they were fleeing the river. Rats, for God’s sake. Even the rats had better sense than the people did.
Than I did.
But I was in too deep now. I’d missed my date with Jamie, but I was as stuck as everybody else and I wasn’t leaving Christ to drown beneath the city. And I wasn’t answering my phone either, though I could feel it throbbing on vibrate against my ribcage, through the sides of the leather purse.
I wasn’t going back. I’d gotten this far.
But Frasier Avenue fought me. It was mobbed and packed, and there was no moving. Glass was breaking everywhere and at first I didn’t know why or what was causing it; and then I saw people throwing things into the store windows—and people being pushed and crowded into the stores, through the windows, through the doors.
From street level I couldn’t see the river, and it was a blessing. I didn’t want to see it. From the top of the hill with the church, I’d looked down and seen it creeping up and out, saturating Coolidge Park and working its way up to enfold the carousel. The river was only yards away and rising fast, and people were still fighting to get to the bridges.
I wasn’t the only one with the idea of hitting the pedestrian bridge, either. Police had blocked it off with their cars, but people were climbing around them, on them, and over them. Someone had a Taser out, and I imagined that it was probably a bad idea to fire one off in the middle of a flood, so I did my best to stay clear.
Up came the water.
Behind me, I heard a dog barking and I saw the poor thing, chained to a parking meter and apparently abandoned. I shoved my way back to him, and I clung to the meter like it could anchor me in the sea of people.
He wasn’t a big fellow, twenty pounds of a little boxer mutt-mix. He was shaking, and cold, and I didn’t know what to do for him except let him off his chain. I reached down and unclasped it, my hands slipping all over it because I was shaking too.
The dog strained against my hand and against his collar and against the meter pole. Between the pair of us, he got loose. He head-butted me like a cat and barked frantically, and I didn’t know what to do, or what to tell him.
“Go on!” I said.
With a yap and a kick, he took a dive into the forest of legs and wove through them with a speed I envied.
That done, I tried to go back across the street. Somebody was still sitting in a car and trying to honk his way through. He was pinned by people on all sides, and on the verge of gassing it anyway. Before he could do this, I climbed up on his hood, slipping and sliding, but getting high enough to see—for a few seconds before I fell—how close we all were to real trouble.
The Walnut Street Bridge is a metal frame stacked on old stone pillars that have risen out of the water for over a century. I’d never seen those pillars look so short.
Over the park grounds where thirty years ago there’d been an armory, the water slipped up and swallowed the fountains with their lions and elephant statues that squirted water at tourists. The water was gray and rougher than I’d ever seen it, even as it pooled up in that insidious way.
It was eating at the bridge’s ground supports, too. The water bases were stone, but over land the bridge was supported by huge blue metal supports with rivets the size of soda cans.
Already people were in the water, swimming in one direction or another—hanging on to whatever unmoving things they could grasp. I didn’t know if they’d been caught midstream in the rising current or they’d been dumb enough to jump for it.
The man driving the car I was standing on hit the brakes and the gas at nearly the same time. I fell, but not hard. I caught myself on someone else, who pushed me away, causing me to fall again, into another person who treated me similarly.
But in that glance from the car, seeing folks grasp at the underpinnings of the bridge had given me an idea. It wasn’t a great idea, but it was the only one I had.
I slam-danced my way through to the far curb, closest to the river. Police were starting to back up on the bridges, forced that way by the crowd and the water. As people pressed forward and the river gushed higher, there was no other way to get up and out.
I almost didn’t notice when the water first reached my ankles, I was so wet anyway. Everything was wet and horrible and I could hardly see for my hair hanging in my face. I wiped it back and wiped my eyes and looked down; and what gathered to hold my legs was not rainwater. Rain doesn’t usually bring driftwood and dead rats. It doesn’t often bring the floating carcasses of fish.
By then it was less crowded, but only by a bit. As the water climbed and crawled its slow, unstoppable way up from the riverbed, people were getting the hint—for all the good it did them. Retreat was almost as hard as a forward march. The panic each caused was a different kind, but no less urgent and no less difficult to navigate.
Here it comes.
I tried to hold my ground and failed. Forward, backward, or in circles—yes. But there was no holding still.
Someone hit me in the eye with a sharp body part—an elbow, maybe. It hurt, and I yelped, but no one heard me. Everything was getting hit anyway, so I couldn’t stay still. The water was coming up hard and I was wondering about all these people behind me and around me.
The hills that line the river, they’re technically part of the river valley gorge, I think. They’re high hills and they would surely offer safety, even in the rain, and even from the water. It could only rise so high, so fast.
But these people around me, the ones trying to retreat—would they make it? This was no tsunami, but the basin was filling and the good citizens of Chattanooga were too disorganized and terrified to make practical preparations—they weren’t even heading for higher ground in any significant numbers.
It was getting hard to run. The water on the street was up to my knees and it was thick and filled with detritus. The rain would not relent and everything was slippery. Everything was hard to grab and hold, so it was with great difficulty that I hauled myself up onto a street lamp stand and tried to find something else to reach for, something to climb for and crawl for.
I wasn’t more than a few yards from the police cars on the end of the Walnut Street Bridge, and those police cars were wheel-deep in the river. How could the water come so high? It wasn’t possible.
In the back of my mind, a merry little riverboat was tootling down Market Street in an antique photograph. So it was possible, yes. I knew it had happened before. But that’s what the TVA was for. That’s what the dams were for.
Where were they now?
If the rain had let up for five seconds I would’ve praised God. But it didn’t, and my hair was hopeless in a way that isn’t vanity but pragmatism. I couldn’t see through it and I couldn’t get it out of my face even by tying it back. Nothing short of a razor would have kept it off me by that point. Everything was impossible. It would be easier, I thought, if I went into the water. It would be easier to swim or wade for the nearest pillar and climb up onto the high, arching bridge on the other side of the police barricade.
I reached for the sharp brick edge of a corner building and caught it, fumbling. I held it and pulled myself around it, pressed to it by the current. I had no choice. I hadn’t thought of the current. Even in its slow, pooling rise, the Tennessee had a lot of pull. There was no way I could swim against it.
Off to my left in the street, people were starting to scream with a different timbre, and I turned to look even as I tried to brace my feet and half crawl, half swim backwards up the side of the building. It was the cars—that’s what they were screaming about. The cars were filling up and being tugged, pulled, or pushed. The water was in the street, flooding Frasier up to a thigh’s height, or to the waist of a smaller person.
Now they fled in earnest, trying their best to push their way up the hills, but the hills were blocked and crowded by those who were still crushing forward because they didn’t know or understand what was going on down below.
It became easier to approach the river as the other people fled. The river was approaching me, after all. I did it a foot or two at a time. I did it by reaching and pulling myself, and by using my height to stretch myself out in the water—until I was in up to my chest and bracing against anything I could find.
When my hands finally groped the blue-painted rail of the bridge’s edge, I tightened my fingers around it and locked them fast. Like climbing the monkey bars on a school playground, I heaved myself along until I was high enough to sling my legs up over the edge and stand on drier stuff.
I hung there for a moment and caught my breath. The boards of the bridge’s deck were slippery and my legs were shaking, so I had a hard time standing at first. But once I did, the bridge curved high enough that there wasn’t any water up around my feet. The police cars were door-deep then, and I didn’t see the officers who had once driven them, not at first. Then I spied them down on the street, herding those who could be herded—skimming them from the water as best they could and pulling them out, pushing them up stairs and up onto roofs where the water height allowed it.
Of course, I wasn’t alone on the bridge. Maybe a hundred others had made it up there too. It was busy but not crowded. I didn’t have to fight my way through anybody to pass; I just wandered between them. The pedestrians were clinging, clustering together in groups or running for the middle, where the peak was highest. The river was far enough below that we were sure it couldn’t get that high, because if it did then we’d need a fucking ark and there was no hope for any of us.
It’s about two-thirds of a mile across the Walnut Street Bridge, so it takes some time to traverse. It’s a nice jaunt if you’re on a bike or on roller skates, or if you’ve got a skateboard. But when the water is coming at you from above and below, the thunder won’t stop, and people are crying from every direction, it isn’t pleasant.
I made my way as fast as I could.
It got slower towards the end, towards the south side of the bridge. The water was coming up there too, same as on the north side. It wasn’t quite as bad, but it was bad enough. Up to my left there was the Hunter Museum of Art, perched above the river on a cliff and probably safer than the aquarium, which was down to my right. The banks are sharper on the south side than the north side, but they’re both pretty high. Still, I couldn’t help feeling a brief, paralyzing sort of fear for the animals inside. It was stupid of me. There were people too, maybe lots of people drowning and dying, but I still breathed a little prayer for all the swimming things in their glass cages.
