Introduction

June 1972 started out like most. Me and the neighbor kids playing ball. Most of the days were full of sunshine and skinned knees. A few of us had built a go-kart (Frankenstein) from spare parts, scraps of wood leftover from a project my Dad had completed, wheels from a broken lawnmower. The brothers down the street built another. We had races down Morrowfield Ave which had a small hill halfway to the river (maybe there’s twenty-or-thirty-feet of difference between the bottom of the slope and the top which crested gently four houses from ours).

In truth, I don’t remember much about the first three weeks of that June. We had school. I managed to avoid going to the hospital which was an all-too-frequent routine of mine when the weather started getting nice and I started running around outdoors. Trees, flowers, grass . . . I was allergic. Ironically, I wasn’t allergic to the river which was always moving quietly, swiftly, at the end of Morrowfield. I do remember the rain. The gray sky. As if the air itself was nothing but water from the ground up. All around us, it’s all you could see. Grayness and raindrops falling. Falling. The sky wouldn’t stop coming down. As if all the blue that had once been up there turned into water, into rain, and it all came down, every last drop.

We moved the summer of 1973. I went from being one of the guys to being the new kid. My friends, who had known me my entire life, never judged me for spending the nicest days in bed sick. When I ran to the woods during baseball practice to throw up from all the grass, all the running and breathing, they never looked at me as if something was wrong. It was just me being the way my body made me. A few years ago, an old teammate reminded me how I used to get sick during baseball or football. At the new school, in my new life, no one knew how to be around me because of how I was. So they pushed me away. Kept me at a distance the rest of my childhood. Bullied, misunderstood. At times, I doubted if I was enough the way I was. Eventually, I overcame. In ways, it may have made me stronger. But I had always attributed the move to being the defining moment in my life. The one that made me who I am today. The boy who would could withstand knuckles and names. The one who showed kindness and light. It wasn’t until I was 50 years old that I realized, the single-most significant event in my entire life was not the move. It was The Flood. Because all that rain is what inspired my parents to find a serious hill. One that goes up and up and up. To pick the house second from the very top. The rain changed everything. Sky opening up, swallowing the me I had always been.

Just down the road a bit in Corning, lives were lost. Taken really. Swept away on a relentless current. I saw houses go by on the river. Trees became rafts (in my mind, they were), until I learned they took out that steel see-through bridge we used so often. Mangled it, pieces ending up downstream. As did so many lives. So many dreams.

Those four days, I realized decades later, changed everything. Forever. For always. That’s why the river is with me still. Flowing in the back of my mind. In my veins. Where it always will.

— Lafayette Wattles

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