English accent.
We must have looked dazed, sitting there in the empty office. I was usually the talkative one, but neither of us knew what to say. Nicholas understood, smiled warmly and, after learning Christopher’s line of work, suggested he might need a new pair of workboots. He was right. Of course! Christopher’s were gone. He has large, wide, difficult feet; new boots were always hard to fit, and they’d be expensive. In the state we were in I doubt we’d have thought of such a thing ourselves. Our unfolding list of needs was so extensive we couldn’t begin to identify individual items.
Nicholas asked if we needed new eyeglasses—another brilliant idea. He quickly phoned the shoe shop and the optician in Nelson and provided us with Red Cross payment vouchers. I folded the vouchers and tucked them away in my purse with the ESS vouchers. Nicholas also offered to keep Christopher’s file open for longer-term assistance to replace essential tools. We shook hands, grateful, tearful and exhausted. I’d never imagined being on the receiving end of Red Cross aid. I blinked back tears. “I thought the Red Cross only operated in other countries, responding to war, famine, national emergencies and disasters.” Nicholas smiled and replied, “Oh we have work here too. Mostly house fires in this part of the world. And natural disasters can happen anywhere, as you’ve just discovered.”
Christopher and I thanked him again as we left. We urgently needed to go home for a nap. The rain had stopped and the sun burst through the clouds. The streets steamed, and we peeled off layers of clothing and tied them round our waists as we walked the three blocks back home. How bright everything suddenly looked, freshly washed by the storms.
Our yellow and green house was cheery in the sunshine. The screen door stood slightly ajar. Between the screen door and the front door someone had propped a foam orthopaedic pillow. A black backpack hung on the doorknob, and a pair of size nine women’s trainers, wrapped in a grocery bag, sat beside the step. There were no notes to say who’d left them. Inside, I sat on the stairs bemused, thinking of the Biblical adage: “Ask and you shall receive.” The trainers fit perfectly. A message on the answering machine informed me that Randy Morse, a neighbour nearby, had an Apple laptop ready for me to borrow.
This was great news. Christopher headed for the bedroom and passed out within a few seconds. I longed to join him, but I urgently wanted that computer. I put off my nap and hurried up the street to Randy and Janet’s house, five minutes’ walk away. Randy brought out a silver case, badly scuffed and worn, with an impressive ding crumpling its lid. He laughed as he explained, “This old laptop has history. I accidentally dropped it over a cliff in the Himalayas, but it still works, at least for basic stuff like email.”
Accepting Randy’s loaner laptop with gratitude, I wondered what my own white MacBook, “Macaroon” as I called it, looked like now. I felt a twinge of horror at the thought of it, every orifice impacted by mud. It was ridiculous to feel a kinship with such things, but Macaroon had been my trusty servant in all matters technological, the holder of my addresses, memoirs, manuscripts, favourite websites; it remembered all my usernames and passwords. I had no idea how I’d piece together my world without it.
Back home, with the stuttering thumping of helicopters overhead, I plugged in Randy’s laptop and composed my first post-landslide email message, intended for family and friends around the world.
Dear ones,
I am using a borrowed laptop. Cannot really think straight. I twice escaped with my life only by a miracle in the past 48 hours. Thursday morning an enormous landslide took out much of Johnson’s Landing. It crushed our house and killed our cat. If I had been in the house I would have died. I was in Kaslo with a neighbour, whose house was also destroyed. Four other neighbours are missing.
I returned by boat Friday morning. Another slide came down and I only just made it back to the boat. There is nothing left. We have lost everything. We are in shock. People are kind. We have our Kaslo house but so much of value is gone. I have not told my mother, as in her precarious mental state it is better not to worry her.
You can see what happened by googling “Johnson’s Landing Slide.” I am interviewed in one clip. Please pray for us. We are devastated.
Much love, Mandy
Nobody was going to believe me—I barely believed it myself. Searching my webmail I found only a few names to send the email to; I hadn’t bothered to upload my contacts and I couldn’t email many other important people until I tracked down their addresses. Randy’s computer felt wrong, unfamiliar and clunky under my fingers. It held none of my information. It quit Safari when I tried to search for news online. Writing one email had been like trying to walk with my legs hobbled.
I flipped the lid closed.
My mind was a closet, packed tight with a mental inventory of things we’d lost; it was a deep closet. As I moved through the house, tidying up, washing cups, feeling the newness of shoes that weren’t in shreds, but weren’t new either, periodically the closet door opened just a crack and I’d remember something. A knife-blade of grief leapt out and stabbed me in the heart. I suppose we define ourselves through the things we choose to share our lives with, though I hadn’t made the connection so obviously before. Our possessions must give us so much of our identity and status. Without the familiar objects, paintings, books—without my “things”—I didn’t know where to land or even settle.
A button had fallen off Christopher’s shirt that morning and I didn’t have a needle and thread to sew it back on. I remembered my delicately woven work basket, containing sewing, embroidery and darning equipment, sharp scissors, thimbles and a measuring tape. As for my knitting supplies and yarn, and the knitted jacket project I’d laid out on the couch to admire, so nearly complete… I inhaled sharply and slammed the memory closet shut again.
I found Christopher splayed out on the bed, deeply asleep. His careworn face, even in repose, was etched with lines of exhaustion and sadness. I joined him; what a relief to sink into oblivion and escape for just a few minutes—until the phone in the study rang and woke me up. The voice on the line was gentle and polite. Megan Cole from the Nelson Star newspaper asked if I’d be willing to give her an interview. I said yes.
Telling my story seemed to sink a deepening groove of belief into my brain. Victims of sudden trauma need to tell their stories over and over again, I knew this from my work with the hospice. By retelling their story, victims slowly convince themselves: “This really did happen. I am not making it up!” As Megan quietly probed with her questions, words flowed out of me. As when I was interviewed by Francis Silvaggio the previous day on the boat—I could hardly believe it had been only yesterday—I felt like I was at a distance, observing myself as I spoke: “You never imagine that today marks the end of so much you knew and held dear. When I closed our front door on Thursday morning, a chapter of my life also closed. And now, when I think back to the time before Thursday, it’s like looking through a window onto a past world that ended long, long ago.”
I told Megan how extremely fortunate we’d all been. Me, out of the house an hour and a half before it was destroyed. And yesterday, Friday, having just enough time to get back to the boat. If Deane had beached the boat sideways to the shore we couldn’t have launched in time. If I’d heard even the suggestion of Ozzie’s voice in the wreckage, I’d have hesitated, not left, and that would have been the end of me. If we’d arrived five minutes earlier, or if the second slide had come down five minutes later, I’d have been too far away from the boat. The temptation to climb up onto our deck was irresistible. If Christopher and Kurt hadn’t been at a safe distance in Eugene and Toronto, they’d have been climbing into the wreckage themselves, right then, trying to salvage things.
If. If. If.
When the interview was over, I rejoined Christopher, who was
