AUTHOR
Dean Allen

OCCUPATION
Industrialist

LOCATION
Bagnols ^s/Cèze, France

CONTACT
From here or

After the Floods · 9 September 2002

It rained like hell last night; in ropes as the friendlies like to say. Lots of thunder and lightning which, for one who previously beheld it only once every couple years, is really something to behold.

This morning it was still pouring, and the power was out, and the formidable daughter’s school bus was cancelled, and the power was, I remind you, out. The school of the little red-haired kid, however, was open. This much rain though, there was a chance of flooding, down here at the bottom of the valley.

Monday morning after the weekend: no milk, bread, nothing in the house, emergency or otherwise. The plan was to run the boy to school in the village (standing high and dry and all powered up), blast over to the supermarket in the next town, snap up some provisions, and buzz back before any nasty flooding could take place and we could feel safe, fluffy and well-fed no matter what.

This worked out fine, except that during the 20 minutes I was gone, the flash flood came.

This is me, coming around the corner, over the bridge, up to the drive. Let’s clock my brainwork in real time:

1. Gosh that’s a lot of water.
2. Wow, it’s up to the mailbox!
3. The mailbox is the same height as the car window.
4. [blank stare]
5. If you continue, the water will reach the car window.
6. [blank stare]
7. Oh, probably not a good idea to keep driving then.

The Mirabel Centre, a small group of buildings up the hill, used to be an asylum for the insane; it now offers managed, long-term care for those in need of assistance in the brain department. So I headed there (actually it seemed a logical place to put the car; higher ground and all). Safely parked, I couldn’t make out whether the house, about a kilometre away, was entirely surrounded by water, or still approachable from the other side. Driving through the vineyards was not an option; grabbing the two bags of groceries, I set off on foot.

What follows is not a tale of bravery, of what men can do when faced with the awesome force of nature. This is the story of a very stupid man who, having always lived in cities or suburbs, has not the slightest fucking clue what the awesome forces of nature are, never mind how to address them with the any wit or grace.

Here’s what you would have seen if, let us say, you happened to be watching from a house on the hill, through the pouring rain, as I later learned the landlords were: a gormless, pasty Canadian in t-shirt, shorts, and runners, cursing a great deal. Fogged glasses. Two grocery bags. Galumphing across the waterlogged clay loam of a kilometre of vineyards, each step sinking in deeper than the last, runners making splortch and spleatch noises, until he is within about ten metres of his house. It’s there, just so close; but he is now standing in a lot of rapidly-moving water, the rising river coursing over his back yard the most notable obstacle.

I should at this point indicate that the house was beckoning not as a place in which loved ones awaited me and my two bags of provisions (well, there was the issue of the loved ones watching the flood come, and, having heard nothing, remaining unaware if I was alive or dead), or even so much as the safe shore of Home, it was first and foremost a place where the coffee and cigarettes were. On this morning, I had as yet had neither. Thus, and for reasons no more heroic than that, up to my testicles in dissolved pesticide and fertilizer, I moved to head across before it got any worse. I took two steps, and a third and fourth (where the fuck is that ditch), then a fifth which found nowhere to land and just sort of kept on going. I lost balance, just managing to grab a branch before falling. And then I was laughing like an idiot; groceries still in hand, me and my branch. A bottle of milk floated away.

My uncle told a story once about doing a little electrical work in his house; later, in the middle of the night, he snapped awake, realizing he’d never turned off the power mains. It only occurred to me several hours later that had I not been able to grab the tree I would have been carried by the rushing water out into an open river, down toward the road, past the mailbox at car-window level, under the bridge at the end of the drive – where at the start of this adventure I had seen beige water surging and frothing with remarkable conviction – past which I would have been tossed and turned until eventually ending up, probably in several pieces, at the dam three kilometres away.

But I did. The water was still rising as I turned to get back to higher ground, eventually crossing the same vineyards (splortch, sklunk) until, back at the car, the concept of making a telephone call somehow loomed on the dim, precaffeinated horizon.

I entered the Mirabel Centre – at which both the phone and the power were not working – where I spent the next two hours, wearing someone else’s shirt, the rain pounding outside, in gentle conversation with the Director.

—It’s funny ending up here, this being an asylum
—We don’t call it that any more; it’s an Institute for…
—Yes I know, but the word, I mean
—How so? It’s a pejorative term in French
—In English too, I just mean the word…
—You mean the old definition?
—Right, yes, ‘safe place’ or whatever…
—We no longer use that word.
—Right.

And then the rain stopped. And I drove soggily home.

—God! Where have you been?
—Fuck, have you seen the garage?

And then, much later, the power came back, which brings us to the here and now.

UPDATE: Herself provides some .

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