Not our Alamo

His face says "worried" but the lights say "we're ready to party."

At 11:30 p.m., I was watching Rick and Morty and drinking a glass of cheap wine in a pair of horrendous shorts on the couch with my husband. By 8 the next morning, my husband was slowly working his way through the roof of our attic with a dull Sawzall.

It was a pretty atypical weekend, is what I’m getting at.

I’d been through a flood before – Allison pummeled my little La Porte subdivision for hours and we – my sister, brother, parents and I – walked away with about three feet of water in our house by the time the rain stopped. If you’ve been through it, you know that for a while, rainstorms make you nervous. Water collecting in the streets is an unwelcome site and watching weather forecasts – almost compulsively – becomes a way of life. But people move on. We’re resilient. Complacency sets in as the memory of those disasters fade. But if you ever find yourself in another flood, those flashes of unwelcome familiarity rise to the top of your memory very quickly as soon as you see the trickle of water slithering under your walls.

First, the water came in slowly. We tried to stop it. It didn’t go great.

“Help me with this shop vac,” my husband said as he frantically filled the body of the vacuum and just as frantically tried to lug it to the front door to toss the water outside.

When the flooring started floating, it became fairly evident that we were going to need a much larger shop vac.

Then we bargained.

“Ok,” I said, “this room is probably done. But we can save the things in the other rooms. Let’s just get stuff up.”

Clothes are ripped from the closet and tossed on the bed. I placed my husband’s paintings on higher ground. We removed file cabinet drawers and took them to the attic. We waited for the water to recede.

Except it didn’t.

This is probably fine.

“Well. Let’s get the stuff that’s really important upstairs,” my husband said.

We packed two bags with whatever our hands landed on – which I realized the   next day left me with five bras and zero shoes, a shirt that didn’t fit and a tank top being held together by safety pins that I promised to retire six years ago but never got around to it. I grabbed my grandmother’s earrings. I grabbed two necklaces my mom gave me. I grabbed a pair of sunglasses my brother left at my house, a purse, our wallets and a cup my sister got me that has a dinosaur on it. And the wine. You better believe I rescued that wine.

Water is now pouring out of our electrical outlets. Roaches are scrambling around because our garage doors are open and we can’t shut them. We get the animals we think will be in danger, two useless dogs and a demanding cat, upstairs. My husband moves a couple pet rats to higher ground on a shelf. We are certain our savannah monitor and ball python will be fine.

"Savannah monitors can swim right? What's that? They can't? Oh..."

 The water is hip high; I’m absent mindedly crushing fire ants as they bite my leg.  I grab my ukulele. My husband is carrying my makeup and my purse as he retrieves some leftover tacos from dinner when things were normal. We trudge upstairs together. I realize that I will be wearing my horrendous shorts for a while.

"I don't know. I don't think we should have paid that decorator for this."

In two hours, we went from sitting on the couch to trying to get away from hip-high water.

Then we sat in our very small attic room with our two dogs and we waited. And waited. I start counting the number of steps visible above the advancing water line. We had nine.

Our refrigerator upends. My Sriracha floats by. The wheat thins I bought specifically for the hurricane float by. This is the biggest slap in the face so far – the things that make you angry in the middle of a crisis are odd.

GODDAMMIT!

From upstairs in our attic room, we hear heavy oak desks, our kitchen island, a piano – all come off their legs. We see those things floating in our living room. I didn’t know refrigerators could float.

We have eight steps.

“I left my guitar,” I said. “And I don’t think the Reptilicus will make it.”

My husband goes back downstairs in now waist-deep water to retrieve our snake - Squeezer Augustus, and Reptilicus – our savannah monitor. He gets the pet rats as well. Because he’s thoughtful, he gets my guitar and my diplomas.

While he’s down there he sees a snake we did not intentionally put into our house swimming around. I didn’t think it was going great earlier, but it’s really not going great now.

We have seven steps. The rain doesn’t show any sign of stopping.

The water in the garage is now up to my husband’s neck. He knows this because he’s gone to try and retrieve one of his saws so that we can get out of the roof if we need to. Most of his good tools are already underwater. He comes back with a sawzall with a dull blade and an ax. That’s all he has left. He goes back down one more time for my paddle board, just in case.

The seventh step is slowly fading from view.

At this point, we have to decide whether we want to swim through the house and out of the garage to wait for a rescue that might not be coming or go out through the roof.

My husband made the mistake of telling me about the unintentional snake. Between that, my dog and the thought of wading in an ever-rising current in the dark until help got to us or the water receded, I chose roof-exit.

“That’s our Alamo,” my husband says. He actually says it a couple times – like saying it more than once will make it seem real. It doesn’t seem real.

“The Alamo didn’t go great,” I tell him. “Don’t say ‘This is our Alamo,’ anymore.”

At 7:30 my sister Facetimes me to tell me that authorities are asking people to not hide in attics. She asks me to have my husband please cut a hole so we don’t die in an attic. She’s trying not to cry, and so am I. My husband obliges and my sister requires video confirmation that it’s done. She’s bossy.

This is fine...

 At 8:00 my husband has created a roof-top escape hatch. It’s pretty small, but he gets through and sits on the roof. I stick my head through to make sure I can do it. Thank god I had weight loss surgery in December or I’d still be stuck in that roof, just waiting out the weight loss. 

Everyone has seen Winnie the Pooh, right?

There are people on their rooftops all around us as Coast Guard helicopters hang in the sky. Crew members are pulling people, one by one, from the baskets into their arms to safety.

I go back down into the attic to let my family know we’re ok, but before I leave, I make my husband promise not to go back into the water. He does not listen. Almost immediately, he sees a neighbor down the street screaming for help, pleading to my husband that he can’t swim. He’s clinging to the kayak that has floated out of our garage. My husband goes down to save him, so when I come back to the roof to check on him I’m beside myself. The water is almost up to the eaves of our house and my car is certainly not where I left it. I scream for him and he confirms he’s alive.

I had been willing to wait longer, but my husband is clearly getting antsy and I need him to get on a boat so that he doesn’t accidentally kill himself. I say this to him in a not-so-nice way.

The helicopters are constant, but they don’t take pets. The reptiles can make it on their own for a little while, I’m pretty sure, but the dogs? Not so much. So my husband waits on the roof to flag down one of the neighbors who have started their own rescues with their own boats. I was not prepared for him to find help so fast.

“We have to go now baby,” he screams down to me, “get the dogs and hand me our bags! They’re going to leave!”

I know my husband.

“I’m not going if you’re not going,” I said through angry, stubborn tears.

“I’m just going to hang back and get things in order; I’ll be right behind you,” he said.

I dug in.

“That is EXACTLY how people die in literally every movie you’ve ever seen. I am not getting on that boat without you,” I said.

“OK fine but we have to go now,” he said, “they’re leaving now!”

In that moment, it felt like the last possible way out. Of course, it wasn’t, but that’s what it felt like. I hadn’t felt true panic before then, which is odd because the water level hadn’t changed significantly in more than an hour, but I panicked. I shoved my dogs through the hole in the roof. I grabbed some of our things. I left the bag we packed with our wallets and important papers, his breathing machine, my grandmother’s earrings, because at a certain point, your brain stops working and everything in your body is telling you to just get out. I shimmied my way through our neat, newly-installed escape hatch and log-rolled down the roof – this is an impressive talent, probably.  

The water was so high, I sat on the roof and stepped down to the rescue boat. Two people in my neighborhood, one of them who had just moved there, who were suffering equal devastation, equal loss, equal stress, and this is what they were doing. Driving from house to house in the last clothes they had pulling people off rooftops, giving them peace of mind and ferrying them to safety.

“We can take you to the end of the neighborhood right at 45, but that’s as far as we can go,” one of them said. I might have been experiencing something like shock, I guess. I didn’t even get his name.

"Oh hey! You can just put your boat in at the entrance to our neighborhood!"

And that’s were our family found us: on the feeder of 45, with two bags that didn’t have anything in them that we needed, trying to calm down two useless dogs, helping other people with their things as the boat neighbors brought them to safety.

And I was still wearing my horrendous shorts.