Diary of the Flood
Excerpts from the journal of Addison Godel
October the Fourth, 2002
The flood began while I was in the comic store. Nothing more specific than that can yet be gleaned; time goes by vaguely in a comic store, and once the waters started rising it was impossible to find anybody who had more accurately recorded the beginnings of the disaster. For my part, I like to imagine that it started to pour right after I stepped inside. This is slightly (only slightly) easier for me to accept than the possibility that it all happened in the instant before I left - the idea that, seconds before we reached the threshold, the entire world went to hell, and there was no turning back, not after I was outside, looking down the stairs to the street, hearing the click of the door lock behind me, my life changed in an instant. It just works better if I imagine that my life changed over the course of a half hour while I wasn't paying attention.
But change they have. I'm writing all this for my own amusement, really; I do have some vague notion that things will get themselves back together at some point, and that my wet, scribbley ruminations will become a "document of the crisis period." But in general I'm a person who likes to record the present - so that when it becomes the past, it can be better remembered. You know that about me by now, right? I keep quite a photo album with exactly this in mind. Or kept, I guess - I don't know if it's been washed away. I may find out tomorrow, once I get my bearings and can sail in the direction of campus again.
Anyway. I was at the comic shop (Vorticon Stuff, not the mall comic shop I mentioned a few pages back) for about a half an hour, the last stop on an increasingly tedious prawl through downtown in search of lost treasures in cardboard boxes. The record store had been fruitless; ditto the used book store. The bins of stained, wrinkled, and torn comic book anthologies were my last hope. And it's always pleasant to be in the comic store; being upstairs from the record store and reachable only by an outside staircase, it's somehow removed from the normal stream of loud idiots downtown. This phenomenon thankfully extends to the proprietor, a heavy-set fellow with substantially long hair and a matching beard, who is content to let one rummage for hours without buying anything. But I really wasn't in the mood for the long haul at this point, and nothing great was turning up, so I decided it was time to make my exit. I could tell it was raining outside as I opened the door, but it wasn't until I stepped outside onto the fire-escape brand staircase that
10 – 05 – 2002
I'm
really not used to the way this boat bobs up and down. Hopefully it won't get
to the point where I do get used to it. Anyway, I lost my pen, but I've got a
new one now. As I was saying, the door closed behind me and I remember noticing
in the back of my mind that the comic book guy had moved forward to lock it
before withdrawing into the dark depths of the store, but none of that was
really on the top of my mind at that point. The
sight that greeted my eyes All I could
put my mind towards was
... after some effort, I've decided that there really aren't any words for what that moment felt like. Just picture this: you go into a store on a slightly overcast Fall day; you walk out thirty minutes later and it looks like you're in the Straits of Magellan. The street is just gone - it's a mass of dirty, churning water rushing south, following the curve of the land, crashing into buildings hard where they interfere with that curve, carrying a few lighter cars along with it, but rushing over and through other ones - the big delivery trucks are like sandbars or piers - and all of it's being added to by the worst downpour imaginable, every seething inch of the surface of this mass of water being disrupted by countless heavy drops of water crashing down into it from the sky - the sky itself being a distant blur, suggested by glimpses through the mass of rain as being a wretched black - not the black of night, but the heavier black of clouds from somewhere lodged in our nightmares.
I really must disabuse myself of these run-on sentences, especially if my "document of the crisis period" is to be lauded as well for having "a skill and elegance that renders its tale not only interesting historically but readable and exciting from a literary perspective as well."
Anyway, picture all that and you'll understand the sight that greeted my eyes when I left the comic store.
I can’t remember what I did first. You can see already the importance of keeping a journal. I think I sat under the awning for a while, getting splashed by sideways-blown rain and feeling miserable. I guess I was waiting for it to stop raining. Ah, if only I were still so young and innocent! If anything it kept raining harder, and I eventually gave up and tried to figure out what there was for me to do. I didn’t see any people anywhere in my (admittedly limited) field of vision, and there was no way I could attempt to cross the street, which by this point was now a good seven feet underwater – raging, filthy, object-strewn water at that. But it did seem there was some hope I’d be able to leave my pitiful perch. I should have mentioned, the comic store happens to be on the corner – so I was able to see both the north-south streets (south being downhill, or at this point downstream) and the east-west streets. The latter were being hammered by the floodwaters as they whirled south, but since it was naturally easier for most of the water to just continue straight towards Campus Valley, these east-west connectors were spared at least some of the brutal force of the water. If I was going to get anywhere, it’d be through them – and at this point I had the same kind of idle exploratory curiousity that I do when I’m climbing rocks at the beach. Just checking out this bizarre new world was good enough, I didn’t really need any kind of direction. I’ll grant that a lot of this had to do with the numbness brought on by both the cold rain and the utter shockingness of this sudden and terrible destruction. I can’t emphasize enough how weird it was to not see any people around.
Oh, right; at one point I tried to get back into the comic store, but the guy just wasn’t coming to the door.
Is there really any point to writing this? I’m feeling sort of glum and moody now. I guess I should mention that I’m in my dorm room, which thankfully remains untouched although the waters are up to the third story (I’m on the fourth) (the waters go higher on buildings here than in downtown because campus is lower topographically) – anyway, the whole thing’s a mess and I still haven’t seen anybody so I’m getting a little lonely.
Oct 6, 2002
I feel better having gotten a decent night’s sleep; the other night in the boat was just awful and left me with a terrible back ache that’s still bugging me right now. I also think I may have seen a sign of life – there’s some noise and maybe some light (could just be lightning?) coming from a long distance to the south, maybe outside of campus. I’m going to check it out, but first I really need to get this thing caught up, it’s been two days since everything got flooded and I still haven’t really given a sense of what’s going on.
…I don’t really know what’s going on. This huge flood came out of nowhere and at about the same time, seemingly every one of the forty thousand plus people in this town apparently vanished. No corpses bobbing in the water, although their cars and bikes are still all over the place (aluminum bikes sometimes float to the top of the water, still anchored by their chains – it’s weird). The rain’s slacked off but it’s still drizzling and it’ll probably start pouring again in a few minutes, but anyway the flood waters don’t seem to drain anywhere – it’s as if the whole world suddenly became a gurgling and eerie lake, with only things above a certain height poking up out of the waters. It’s still pretty dangerous to go out (I have a boat, a kayak really, that I found on display at a SportSmart downtown), because the water’s still settling, finding channels and drains and sewers I guess, and the currents are unpredictable. You’ll find weird things, too, like where a bunch of cars were swept along by the current and all piled up against one outcropping of a building, a reef. If the waters never go down (which seems somehow quite plausible in the humid still of the air, when the night becomes silent except for the ever-present background sounds of water), I can picture it becoming a nice nook and cranny for a school of fish to find a home in.
But I guess there wouldn’t really be fish.
But I’m back in my dorm room munching on graham crackers (left over from my cache of S’mores supplies) and reading comics. I wish there was electricity so I could listen to some records. At this point it feels like that would about complete my life, which is really strange considering that every friend I had in the world has been seemingly eliminated from existence. I guess the suddenness of it leaves me unable to really feel grieved or even particularly lonesome. I’m not Robinson Crusoe here, or the Swiss Family Robinson – although I could see myself getting domestic and creative and building some sort of bizarre above-water house, but for now my little dorm room offers most of what I need.
I should go check out that stuff down south before the rain really picks up again.
Later that
day: It wasn’t anybody; there was a building down there that had gotten too
waterlogged and collapsed. So I assume the noise was the building settling into
the water, bricks bouncing slowly under the surface, etc. Don’t know about the
light, if there was actually light. Maybe some sort of electrical thing
busting? I don’t know. I don’t know a lot of things. Maybe the earth is
spiralling into the sun and I’m the last human being clinging to it as all the
water is pulled to one side by gravity. Fgrav = (Mmg) / r2 …
Is there a point to any of this, now? There’s nobody else out there and
nobody’s coming back; I miss Janice and Chris and Alex, and I miss going to the
dining hall, and I miss being dry, and I miss having some sort of general sense
that the world is doing what it’s supposed to.
Oct 7, 2002
Feeling numb again, I paddled out this morning in a straight line – no particular straight line, just a straight one, heading out, like Truman but without as direct a response from the Creator. I reached the end of what used to be the vertically developed area – beyond which all construction had been cute little houses and garish strip malls, their mortgages now worth even less than the soggy paper they’re printed on. They’re deep beneath the bobbing surface, and so this corridor of short-sighted development is now nothing but an endless murky greenness, terminated by the gray horizon. I’m now looking out at this graveyard of the world and sitting back in the kayak, letting my arms relax and letting the current gently carry my tiny vessel out over the highway.
I didn’t
cry just now, but I did shake, and in fact I nearly overturned the kayak with my
wretched, self-pitying shakes. I don’t think it’s possible to imagine that any
person has ever felt as lonely as I do, out here on the open ocean of the
once-civilized world, the great grey-green greasy Planet Earth River. What am I
doing? Why am I here? What happened to the world? Why was I spared? Why
don’t I just strap myself to the kayak, punch a hole in it, and let this whole
thing end? Or maybe just pitch the paddle out, beyond my reach, and just let
the boat drift until it carries me to heaven? Or maybe I could ju
Forget this. I’ll write more later – I’m paddling home.
October 18, 2001
I
guess it’s been almost two weeks now since this all started. Sorry I haven’t
been writing – things got very hectic when I realized my dorm also was not built
to survive being half-sunk in slowly flowing and heavily particulated water...I
began gathering everything that I could conceivably move from my room and took
it, in trips, to the hideous Journalism building, which being a gigantic mass of
reinforced concrete has a better chance of survival. I thought about raiding
other rooms on my hall for distractions and amusements, but I settled with just
collecting any nonperishable foods. Somehow, stealing people’s books and board
games seemed wrong too weird.
The rain’s stopped and anyway I got a permanent fire going in a sheltered pavilion of the Journalism building. It’s a pastoral life in a way – sail out, rummage for some abandoned canned food or well-sealed rice, come back, cook it up, eat, read comics. It’s not really so different from how things went on beforehand. On my quiet and less moody days, which are growing more frequent, I think fondly of the idea of living on in this way forever.
I may not write again for another long while. Obviously at this point it seems unlikely that anybody’s going to show up looking for a record of my day-to-day activities in the weeks following the arrival of the flood. So there’s not really much point. Reading over the last entry before this, I’m surprised by my own confusion and despair when this all began. I can understand it – I mean, my life was turned completely inside out in an instant, and the reality of this was pounded into my head for days – but it’s foreign to me now, alien – I just can’t bring myself to feel that isolated and disturbed. Sure, my life got wrecked, obliterated, drowned – but already I’ve got a new one together. Within weeks I’ll probably build a treehouse, a water-pump, and a crude chimney for my fire. Who knows? But somehow or other I’m going to make a life on this new planet.
I will survive the flood.
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