Cascadia's Fault - Jerry Thompson [20]
They found Carrie standing in her crib, staring wide eyed but silently at the gush coming up through a trap door in the floor. Allen estimated the flood had risen another foot within minutes. “I got a drawer out,” he said with a shrug. “I figured I’d float the child around. And Jill—she can’t swim, so I don’t know what I’d have to do with her. But ...” He let the story fade.
Jill was still remembering the look on little Carrie’s face. “She was just sort of standing up looking—you know? With big eyes. And we just picked her up,” said Jill, “but she was really very calm—calmer than we were.”
Yvonne Forbes, a neighbor down the street, recalled that her father, who worked at the mill, grabbed a ringing phone that woke everyone in the house. “Somebody called him from the mill and said there was a tidal wave, but he didn’t really believe it,” she said. “I mean, from an earthquake in Alaska?” She mugged a look of disbelief. “It just sounded like a fairy tale, really. You know? And nobody knew anything, really.” Heads around the room nodded in agreement. Then she continued her father’s story. “It was in the middle of the night, pitch black, no power. So he opened the back door—I don’t know why—and then he could hardly get it shut. And the water just was coming in.”
When Yvette Gaetz started telling her story, every mouth in the room fell open. “Well, I was nine months pregnant,” she said, matter-of-factly. “My baby was due that night.” She and her husband, Simon, also had three other children under the age of three asleep in the back bedroom.
“My uncle worked at the plywood [mill] and he lived next door. And when the plywood sent him home, he just phoned and he said, ‘Yvette, there’s a tidal wave!’ And I could see water coming under the kitchen door. So, as I was talking to him, I say, ‘I gotta go, uncle. The water is comin’in!’”
When Simon spotted the dark, muddy scum spreading across the kitchen floor, he rushed to the front of the house and flung open the door, only to face a larger, blacker torrent. He and Yvette’s brother Ray, visiting from Saskatchewan, threw their combined weight against the incoming flood.
“We had a hell of a time closing the door,” said Simon. “We got it closed and that’s when we started putting everybody up in the attic.” It seemed like the only way out was going to be up, so they grabbed a chrome highchair and planted it under the trap door to the attic. Yvette lifted the youngest child from a crib while Simon and Ray gathered up the other two children.
“I’m left in there with the baby, and I gotta get my baby out. Now, I don’t know how I did it, but I crawled on top of that highchair—being nine months pregnant and holding a thirteen-month-old in my arms,” she paused for a breath, rolled her eyes and went on. “But then I see the fridge. It was floating in front of me—with the plug still in the wall!” There was a sudden intake of breath as everyone in the room got the picture. “And I thought, ‘Now where do I go?’” Yvette laughed and the room laughed with her, nervously.
Simon and Ray put the three-year-old child on the couch and almost immediately it lifted off the living room floor and began to drift. They put Marcel, the two-year-old, on a mattress and the mattress started floating as well. “Marcel was fine as long as he didn’t move—but he was two!” said Yvette, her voice an octave higher.
Then, because there was no ladder in the house, Ray stood on a chair and crawled up into the attic first. With Ray pulling and Simon pushing, Yvette managed to climb up and squeeze through the small square hole leading to the attic. When she got herself turned around and stable, Simon started passing the other children up to her. By now she was drenched and freezing cold, so the last thing Simon did before climbing up himself was to grab a handful of clothing.
“So the kids were dry, but