Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [56]
Nobody knows how mad I was– Tommy Dorsey’s I Got a Note was out that year, 1936, just at the time the Flood mounted in Lowell–so I went around the shores of the roaring river in the joyous-no-school mornings that came with the flood’s peak, and sang “I got a nose, you got a nose —(half octave higher:)—I got a nose, you got a nose,” I thought that’s what the song was: it also occurred to me how strange the songwriter’s meaning must have been (if I thought of songwriters at all, it seemed to me people just got together and sang over the microphone)—It was a funny song, at the end it had that 1930’s lilt so hysterical Scott Fitzgerald, with writhely women squirmelying their we-a-ares in silk & brocade shiny New Year’s Eve nightclub dresses with thrown champagne and popples busting “Gluyr! the New Year Eve Parade!” (and there, huge and preponderant, sprung the earth’s river devouring to its monstrous sea).
In gray afternoon my mother and I (it was the first no-school afternoon) took a walk to see why there was no school, the reason was not given but everyone knew it was going to be a bad flood. There were a lot of people on the shore, at Riverside Street where it meets the White Bridge near the Falls–I had every measurement of the river keen-etched in my mind along the rock of the canal wall–there were a few flood-measurements written, in numbers showing feet, and the marks of old moss and old floods– Derby-hatted Lowell had been there a hundred years, was grimed like Liverpool in its Massachusetts river fog; the huge humus of mist that rose from the flooding river was enough to convince anybody a flood, a great flood, was coming. There was an improvised fence set up in the gloom near the bridge, where the lawn went too close to sidewalk and rail that once were summer dalliances, were now sprayed by the mist from the great surging brown watermass roaring right there. So people stood behind that fence. My mother held my hand. There was something very sad and thirtyish about this scene, the air was gray, there was disaster (copies of The Shadow Magazine were dusting in the gloom in the little hideaway junkstore across the street from St. Jean Baptiste, in the paved Apachean alley, copies of The Shadow in the dark gloom, the city’s in flood)—
It was like a newsreel of 1930’s to see us all huddled there in gloomy lines with minstrel-mouths shining white in the darkscreen, the incredible mud underfoot, the hopeless tangle of ropes, tackle, planks—(and seabags began pouring in that night). “Mon doux, Ti Jean, regarde la grosse flood qui va arrivez — “tut-thut-thut-” with her cluck tongue, (My goodness Ti Jean look at the big flood that’s going to happen)— “c’est mechant s gross rividre la quand qutja bien d’la neige qui fond dans VNord dans YPrintemps (It’s bad those big rivers when there’s a lot of snow that melts in the North in the Spring)”—
“Cosse qui va arrivez? (what’s gonna happen?)”
“Parsonne sai. (Nobody knows.)”
Officials in bleak windswept raincoats consulted ropes and boxes of City equipment—”No school! no school!” The little kids were singing as they danced over the White Bridge– In a matter of 24 hours people were afraid to even go on that bridge, it was concrete, white, it already had cracks in it … the Moody Street Bridge was all of iron and racks and stone, gaunt and skeletal in the other part of the Flood-
In the bright morning of the gray afternoon after school was called off, me and Dicky Hampshire sallied forth at 8 A.M. to the scenes of wrath and destruction that already we could hear roaring over our Wheaties. People were walking on Riverside Street below Sarah with strange preoccupied airs. Those headed towards Rosemont understandably! Rosemont was low and flat at the river’s basin, already half of Rosemont and its lovely Santa Barbara cottages were in six feet of brown water–Vinny Bergerac’s home