The Killer Storm

On August 20, 1969, Cindy and I awoke at 2 a.m. to a roar­ing, pound­ing din on the tin roof of our house in White Hall, Vir­ginia. We jumped out of bed and ran to the window.

Light­ning streaked across the sky. Thun­der crashed. Through a sil­ver sheet of water, we could bare­ly see the big oak beside the house, its thick branch­es bowed down­ward, a lake swirling around the base of its trunk.

“Hard­est rain I’ve ever seen,” Cindy said.

“Must be that hur­ri­cane they were talk­ing about on the news,” I said.

“You think we’ll be okay?”

“We’ll be fine. It’s just a big storm. It’ll pass.”

I was right about the storm where we lived. Hur­ri­cane Camille blew through Albe­mar­le Coun­ty with­out caus­ing much dam­age, but if we had lived in neigh­bor­ing Nel­son Coun­ty, my con­fi­dence might have cost us our lives.

At 2 a.m. when Cindy and I were star­ing out our bed­room win­dow at the storm, John Fitzger­ald rolled over in his sleep in Tyro, Vir­ginia, just 30 miles south of us, and dropped his hand off the edge of his bed into cold water. Jarred awake, he bolt­ed upright and peered into the dark­ness at the sur­re­al scene of three feet of stand­ing water in his bedroom.

His first thought was fear for the life of his infant son. When John and his wife, Frances, went to bed that night, they left their two-month-old baby in a bassinet in an adjoin­ing room. John jumped up, sloshed into the oth­er room, and switched on the light. In the midst of float­ing fur­ni­ture, the bassinet bobbed gen­tly like a lit­tle canoe on a rip­pling pond with the baby sleep­ing peace­ful­ly in its hull.

Frances splashed into the room. “Where’s the baby?” she screamed. John picked him up and hand­ed him to her just as the elec­tric­i­ty died and the light went out.

“Let’s get out of here,” Frances yelled.

John looked out the win­dow. The Tye Riv­er, nor­mal­ly a hun­dred yards from their porch, had over­flowed its banks and engulfed their home. Mud, rocks, and uproot­ed trees sped by the house on the back of rag­ing flood­wa­ters. “We can’t go out there,” he shouted.

Out­side, the riv­er would kill them. Inside the house, the water rose steadi­ly. The attic was their only hope, John thought, but there was no access to it.

He wad­ed back into the bed­room, retrieved a penknife from his pants pock­et, climbed on top of a wardrobe, and cut a hole in the sheetrock ceil­ing. He helped Frances up into the attic, hand­ed her the baby, and climbed up behind them. For the rest of the night, the Fitzger­alds rode out the flood astride the attic’s wood­en rafters.

At dawn, the storm moved on and the riv­er reced­ed. John and Frances climbed down and went out­side to find a land­scape of death and destruc­tion Camille had left in its wake. One cor­ner of their house had been smashed away. A neighbor’s car had float­ed onto their porch and was wedged against the front door. The dead bod­ies of two women lay along the river­bank. A man’s cadav­er was hung up in a fence below the house. A lit­tle girl’s hand reached sky­ward from a thick lay­er of mud cak­ing the slope down to the Tye, the rest of her body buried beneath it.

Like John, most of Camille’s Nel­son Coun­ty vic­tims were caught unaware of its approach. Back then, there was no sophis­ti­cat­ed storm-alert ser­vice to warn them about the storm’s mag­ni­tude or when it would arrive. It struck in the mid­dle of the night while they slept, and with Nel­son County’s steep moun­tain­sides, nar­row hol­lows, and deep ravines form­ing a per­fect catch basin for the tor­ren­tial rain, flood­wa­ters swept many homes off their foun­da­tions before their res­i­dents could escape.

Camille’s dead­liest aspect was the sheer vol­ume of its rain­fall, in some loca­tions as much as 25 inch­es in 5 hours, which mete­o­rol­o­gists com­put­ed to be the max­i­mum amount of water the atmos­phere could hold. Birds sit­ting in trees drowned. Creeks flash-flood­ed in mere min­utes. Two thou­sand years of ero­sion took place in a sin­gle night, sweep­ing away miles of roads, 100 bridges, and 900 build­ings. Prop­er­ty dam­age topped $100,000,000.

The toll in human lives was hor­rif­ic. Camille killed 126 peo­ple in Nel­son Coun­ty; 184 statewide. Entire fam­i­lies per­ished. In Huff­man Hol­low, the flood wiped out whole branch­es of the Huff­man fam­i­ly tree, killing 18 fam­i­ly mem­bers, rang­ing in age from 1 to 60.

I didn’t know any­one who died in the flood, but I had friends who lived through it, and they told me sto­ries I’ll nev­er forget.

One of my friends lived in a farm­house perched on a hill over­look­ing a val­ley and a riv­er. His fam­i­ly awoke that night to screams and ran out on their front porch. Through a gray tor­rent they saw the dim out­line of hous­es float­ing on a churn­ing lake that hadn’t been there when they went to bed.

Peo­ple shout­ed from rooftops. “Help! Please help us!”

My friend ran down to the water’s edge. It was rain­ing so hard he could bare­ly see, and he had to cov­er his face to breathe. There was no way he could reach the peo­ple strand­ed on the water. He returned to the porch and stood there help­less­ly while his neigh­bors cried out to him.

There was an explo­sion. The lake whooshed away. A last burst of screams. Then silence.

Before the storm, a rail­road over­pass bridged the val­ley.  The flood car­ried debris down­stream that got hung up on the overpass’s struts, damming up the riv­er and cre­at­ing a huge reser­voir. Upstream, the water rose so fast people’s hous­es were unmoored and afloat before they woke up. Cling­ing to rooftops, bro­ken boards, and tree trunks, they rode the flood into the new­ly formed reser­voir. It rose steadi­ly until its weight broke the dam and tore down the over­pass, crush­ing or drown­ing every­one trapped in the flush of water.

Camille hit Nel­son Coun­ty 56 years ago. My mem­o­ries of it lay dor­mant until last fall when my broth­er-in-law made sev­er­al trips from Char­lottesville to Durham, North Car­oli­na, to watch my grand­daugh­ter (his great niece) play soc­cer for Duke. He sent me a text mes­sage. “I dri­ve by this sign a lot recent­ly.” He attached a pho­to­graph of a Vir­ginia his­tor­i­cal road mark­er that com­mem­o­rates Camille’s ram­page through Nel­son County.

That mark­er brought back my mem­o­ries of the storm, but it wasn’t the Fitzger­ald family’s ordeal, Huff­man Hol­low, or the col­lapsed rail­road bridge that first came to mind. It was a tan­gen­tial per­son­al connection.

In 1965, when I was 18, my high school class went on a school trip to Wash­ing­ton, D.C. A class­mate, Chris Schur, asked me to have lunch with him that day. I don’t know why he picked me. I bare­ly knew him, and when we sat down at the lunch counter, he didn’t say much despite my attempts to draw him out.

A few min­utes into lunch, anoth­er class­mate joined us, and he and I struck up a live­ly con­ver­sa­tion. We tried to include Chris, but painful­ly shy, he could bare­ly talk. His face red­dened, and beads of sweat popped out on his fore­head. After lunch, he wan­dered off by himself.

As far as I can recall, that was my last con­tact with Chris.

Four years lat­er, a friend and I talked about the Nel­son Coun­ty flood. “You remem­ber Chris Schur?” he said.

“Yeah. From high school.”

“His wife was killed in the flood.”

I didn’t know Chris’s wife and my only con­nec­tion to him was that awk­ward lunch, but the news of his wife’s death hit me hard.

I searched for her obit­u­ary and found a brief entry in The Dai­ly Progress. Mary Cather­ine Mar­tin Schur died on August 20, 1969, of “mul­ti­ple injuries and drown­ing.” She was a sec­re­tary for Vep­co and a mem­ber of the Holy Com­forter Church. Chris was an appren­tice at a machine shop. They lived in Faber, Vir­ginia. They’d been mar­ried eigh­teen months. Mary was 25 when she died. Chris was 24.

It took me a while to fig­ure out why Mary’s death affect­ed me so deeply. I remem­bered the intro­vert­ed young man at the lunch counter, strug­gling to make con­ver­sa­tion. I saw his tense face and those beads of sweat. Some­how, he had bro­ken out of his shell and found some­one to love, only to have her tak­en away from him. So trag­ic. So unfair.

I felt the need to reach out to Chris, but giv­en that we bare­ly knew each oth­er, I could think of noth­ing that seemed appro­pri­ate. In the end, all I did was send flow­ers to the chapel hold­ing Mary’s memo­r­i­al ser­vice. “I am so sor­ry for your loss,” my note said. Hol­low words from some­one Chris prob­a­bly didn’t remember.

Time passed. My con­cern for Chris fad­ed away. Occa­sion­al­ly over the years, some­thing would remind me of his loss, and the vague sense that I should have done more would nag at me, but for only a few moments.

Then came the Vir­ginia road mark­er fifty-six years after the flood.

For rea­sons I don’t under­stand, this time thoughts about Chris wouldn’t go away. Won­der­ing if he’d man­aged to put his life back togeth­er after Mary’s death, I searched for infor­ma­tion on the inter­net. I couldn’t find much. Born in 1946, in Queens Coun­ty, New York, Chris was a year old­er than my high school class­mates, and he didn’t grad­u­ate with us. On my high school alum­ni web­site, he’s list­ed as a mem­ber of the class of 1966, so appar­ent­ly, he was held back a year. An ances­try site indi­cates he nev­er remar­ried after Mary’s death and he died in Palm Beach, Flori­da, in 2010 at age 64. That’s all I know.

If any of my high school friends know any­thing more about Chris, I’d be inter­est­ed in what­ev­er you could tell me.

I’ve accu­mu­lat­ed a few regrets over my long life. Most of them involve big screw-ups, but strange­ly, some of the small stuff that didn’t seem impor­tant when it went down still caus­es me minor dis­com­fort, like lit­tle splin­ters under the skin of my thumb. They don’t hurt until I think about them, and even then, they don’t hurt much.

This lit­tle splin­ter won’t go away. I regret not reach­ing out to Chris. I wish I’d gone to his wife’s memo­r­i­al ser­vice and spo­ken to him. I wish I’d been smart enough in 1969 to know that an expres­sion of sym­pa­thy is nev­er inap­pro­pri­ate in the face of over­whelm­ing grief. I prob­a­bly couldn’t have done any­thing for Chris, but I wish I’d tried. I just hope those close to him helped him find a path for­ward and his life turned out well.

 

Post Script:

In Patrick Ryan’s nov­el, Buck­eye, speak­ing about his state of mind in old age, Cal Jenk­ins says, “(Old peo­ple) aren’t liv­ing in the past; the past is liv­ing in us. And it’s talk­ing. We get old to recal­i­brate every­thing we thought was going to be impor­tant. We get old just to hear it. It says, the days, the days, the days.”

Ste­fan Bechtel’s Roar of the Heav­ens tells Camille’s many trag­ic sto­ries. John Grisham, who now lives in Char­lottesville, called the book riv­et­ing. I agree.