The Johnstown Girls

Chapter 9. Ellen: August 26, 1950

219 T H E J O H N S T O W N G I R L S Ellen August 26, 1950 ■ The Buick had stalled once, then caught. She thought, “Well, what else to do on a Saturday?” Before she had gone far, she pulled over at a bakery first for a raisin cookie, one of her favorite things, a little like a Fig Newton but full of raisins instead and a good fifteen times the size. On the street strangers greeted her with a hello. Inside the bakery, the clerk knew her by name because she’d gone to the high school. This was the thing, the small town thing, that she had come to value. Friendliness caught on and spread like a cold. The legacy of worker poverty was probably partly responsible. Parents and grandparents of immigrants had once packed many people into tiny homes with tiny bedrooms where they must have felt every breath, every heartbeat of the others. And the closeness stuck. That was her theory. Ellen had determined to teach a segment on the floods in her classroom this coming year. It didn’t immediately fit into a high school English class, but these kids needed to know about it. She would make them write something or other, an imagined tale of a survivor. Hopefully she would get them interested enough to ask why the dam failed and she’d tell them objectively that there had been warnings. Because wasn’t there a lesson in the idea of ignoring warning? Believing all would be well simply because you wanted it to be? 220 K AT H L E E N G E O R G E Next, brushing off those cookie crumbs, she drove downtown and managed to park at the end of Main Street. There she looked at the foot of the hill that rose up to be the Westmont section. This is where the water had hit and begun the backlash, the back-flood. This is where the mattress her sister rode must have changed direction. Was it here? And then . . . where did it go? Everyone’s answer was the stone bridge where acres of debris piled up and burned for days. Because nothing was found, ever. She should have made the boy save her sister first. Bill told her it was normal to let herself be rescued, but she was the stronger one physically. She would have held on. Bill had studied the maps when she asked to see the old dam site, the place it all started. And then they made their way down into the valley, the fourteen miles it took for the wall of water to get to town. The water met various points of resistance, but it kept descending, getting larger all the while. Bill made a rolling motion with his hands. “The bottom water was digging at the river beds or the surrounding earth, getting friction from the mud, the top water cascaded over the bottom water until it rolled. It was like a waterfall circling back on itself and becoming a big ball, then bigger and bigger.” Yes, that made sense; even in drawings there was a rolling motion to the water. A woman passing with her little daughter called out to Ellen as they walked past her. “Beautiful day to be out.” The woman turned back and smiled, then continued to walk briskly, holding her daughter’s hand, both carrying bags from various stores, perhaps school clothes, yes, that smell was in the air. It made people want to buy new shoes, new dresses and shirts and pants. Ellen was normally a dry-eyed, logical person, but something happened , she got dizzy and couldn’t do the trip that Saturday. Soon she was taking herself home instead. Tomorrow, tomorrow, she would drive up the hill to where the flood started and once more wind her way down from Lake Road. And she did. The next day she made it to the top where a coal town had sprung up after the flood. Now there were smaller, unostentatious houses for working people in the vicinity—the houses wouldn’t have been here then. She started her drive down the hill, formulating what she wanted to 221 T H E J O H N S T O W N G I R L S tell her students. She passed Mineral Point where the telegraph...