A chapter in progress from Flood City, an investigative memoir

The nearly 40-minute walk home from my high school followed the river for most of the way. I know this because, although I rode the bus to school, getting home after track practice, band rehearsals, or evening play performances usually meant walking. My parents were less reliable than my feet.

After crossing the light near the school, I passed the Masonic Temple, the Surf ‘n’ Turf restaurant whose dining room I had only glimpsed through bay windows, and the old Burger Palace building, where my grandmother would buy me fries with gravy while she drank coffee and ate a fish sandwich. Then the sidewalk opened up to a long stretch of river.

The stretch along the river was my favorite part of what became a detested walk. A thick swath of grass buffered the river from the sidewalk and was just about the only green I’d see over the course of that mile-and-a-half, except for a beautifully manicured home’s garden right before I started uphill. There was a small cemetery near the end of that section, closer to the bridge, but I enjoyed the park-like feel of the greenspace before that, where I could deviate from the sidewalk to step in the grass and peek over into the river that was, by that point, so polluted by the steel mills that it couldn’t sustain anything but rocks.

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Our river was less a place one would associate with recreation and more of a technical feature of our town. 

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In 1943, The Army Corps of Engineers had come to town and erected 6,500 feet of cement wall along the riverbanks, after 2 consecutive floods—in 1889 and 1936—caused major losses of life and property. Giant sloped slabs of concrete lined the river and became an omnipresent mark of safety from overflowing waters rushing into our city’s streets. After the walls were erected, local officials branded the town “flood-free.” It wasn’t.  

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While the walls didn’t end up being the fail-safe the Army had promised, they did serve as a handy canvas for graffiti artists and local kids with cans of spray paint. A portion of the wall nearest our high school featured a giant Trojan head—our school mascot—in our pale blue and black school colors. Just at the end of my grassy stretch of walk home, in bold capitals, someone had written on the wall near the bridge: “THIS TOWN WON’T DIE.”

Just before I started kindergarten, in July of 1977, another flood pummeled our town. A stalled thunderstorm (or, 21 separate storms converging in 8 hours, depending on which meteorologists you believe) dropped a foot of rain over the region, causing 6 dams to overflow, releasing 128 million gallons of water into our streets, putting homes from the east to west ends of town under water, and killing at least 76 people. 

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I have only a few crisp memories of the days surrounding that flood. 

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I can see myself being lifted over my great grandmother’s wooden stair railing behind our house into my paternal grandfather’s aluminum boat, which my dad’s brother had floated through flooded alleys to rescue us. 

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I still sometimes try to imagine him navigating the same boat we’d fish off of during summer camping trips downstream, effectively, as he made his way from my grandparents’ house to our home beside the river. How much water had accumulated in the streets of the flattest part of town that he could have paddled a boat to the backyard of our riverside duplex? The neighborhood transformed into a sad Western Pennsylvanian Venice where one could row a boat up to a narrow wooden stairway next to a lake of a backyard to load up passengers.

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In the days after the flood, we stayed with my maternal grandfather while our rental home’s flooded basement was relieved of what I heard the grownups calling ‘sludge’. I wonder if I made up a memory of someone horrifyingly describing pulling an actual turd from a drain in the basement of that house during clean up. 

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During our stay with Pap, I took regular walks with him down to check on the dark, human-sized, hole at the bottom of the alley, which had filled with murky water and in which I very much wanted to swim. My want wouldn’t be satisfied. Pap said, “You don’t know how deep it is and you don’t know if there’s something sharp at the bottom that could hurt you.” 

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I also haven’t forgotten the sharp taste of carbonated water from Pepsi cans that had been provided to local residents whose drinking water had been contaminated. A case of pop cans filled with bitter water is just about the most disappointing thing to a kid at a time like that.   

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There are many more visuals of the floods in my mind, but only because, as elementary schoolers, we were herded more times than I care to remember through the exhibits at our town’s “Flood Museum.” Grim in retrospect—any given spring Thursday in practice. The museum’s photos of piled up tree trunks like so many matchsticks jamming up a bridge, a house on its side with an enormous tree poking through a second story window, and illustrations of a wall of water careening down our valley feel as familiar as yellowing holiday photos in my mother’s film covered albums. In the springtime, field trips would take us over the grassy rolling hills of the dams that had burst and caused the 1889 flood. 

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I don’t remember the sound of the thunder and the rain on the roof on that July night in 1977, but for years after, I’d become tense and anxious during storms, especially after dark. It was only in the past decade that I made the connection between my body’s response to rainstorms and a little girl sleeping across the street from an overflowing river.