Where Lilacs Still Bloom (37 page)

I
n the foothills of Mount St. Helen’s, the snow was still many feet deep in May of 1948. Our Lilac Days had brought any number of new people to my garden, and I’d enlisted the grandkids and nieces and nephews and others to help out, serving lemonade and giving tours. The blooms were magnificent, perhaps the best I’d ever seen. There was a fair amount of attention paid to my double creamy white with twelve petals, and I worked on getting that same number in other varieties too. That’s what I told folks. “There’s always more to do.”

Several people celebrated Mother’s Day by bringing the family to the gardens. Now that the war was over, Vanport, that city between Portland and Vancouver, housed veterans going back to school on the GI Bill. That was a good thing the government did, helping people further their education.
We’d be lost in this world without minds staying bright and new ideas getting acted upon by those who study. The flowers offered a rest for others, even though it was a crazy busy day for all of us.

Not long after Lilac Days, it warmed up still more. It reached eighty degrees, which was unheard of in Woodland for that time of year. I knew it meant that all that snow would melt and melt fast. I was grateful we had the dikes, as it wouldn’t be long before the rivers rose with snowmelt.

On May 25 I had Fritz drive me up on the bluff, and we could see how that river was roiling and rising its way south. The radio announcer said the Willamette River flowing north through Oregon was rising too. If both of those rivers crested at the same time, Portland or portions of it would be flooded, giving our Lewis nowhere to flow. If the Columbia kept coming up beside Woodland, it would put pressure on the dikes. So far, it appeared that they’d hold.

But on May 30, a railroad dike near Vanport broke, letting floodwaters pour through that city in minutes. We heard about it on the radio.

“I wonder if we should think about moving lilacs,” I told Fritz. “Our dikes could break too.”

“Tragic as it is, the breach at Vanport might keep the water from backing up and pressuring our levees.”

I’d never known Fritz to be a wishful thinker, and I could see for myself that the dikes were leaking. The Lewis ran full
and had nowhere to rage with the Columbia bloated with melt.

I thought maybe I’d move my starts in the sun porch up to my bedroom, just to be safe, and maybe pull lilacs and put them on the rafts and secure them to the trees. Fritz agreed, but before we could get started, the siren blew, and we got a call. “Tomorrow they’ll try a forced breach, hoping to keep the floodwaters out of town, but the dikes are going to go,” we were told. “Get to high ground.”

I grabbed a few cultivars, my purse. Fritz grabbed plants too, and we pushed the cats into a pillowcase where they wouldn’t see what might be fearsome, and we could haul them with us. Fritz pushed the chickens into the haymow in the barn, put Bobby and the cats in the car. I looked around. Too late to move things upstairs. These were only “things.” It was the outside that I’d take with me if I could, all the tight plantings of lilies and peonies and lilacs and roses and rhododendrons and magnolias and poppies and on and on.

I stepped outside to Fritz’s calls and gave a nod to them all. Maybe we’d survive another flood; maybe the planned break would save us from a deluge. Maybe not.

We stood on Goose Hill looking west toward Woodland on May 31 when the river took the dikes. There’d been talk about blowing the dike with dynamite in an effort to “control” the
damage, but the dike burst before they could decide. Hubris, I thought to myself. I’d thought the sound would be louder. But it was muffled by the screams and gasps of those watching as the wall of water surged in like ocean waves, rolling barns and houses like small tops, bobbing people’s lives and livelihoods beneath the muddy water. We couldn’t see our home, but there was no need to. Everything we could see was flooded. No dikes nor land formation rise between the Lewis River and the Columbia to stop the water now. My garden bloomed between those rivers, and I knew it would be gone.

Lives were lost in Vanport, but not in Woodland. As expected, my garden was submerged beneath the dirty river water for six weeks. Lizzie and Roy’s home wrestled with water in the basement, but the mild weather meant they didn’t need their furnace on and could wait until the water went down. Fritz and I stayed with them, which was good. Fritz didn’t look so well. Seemed to have a hard time breathing, but he walked across the street to see Roland’s new baby, his great-nephew. Roland had married that pretty Betty Carlson a while back, a former princess of Planter’s Day fame. Just the effort of crossing the street tired Fritz.

“You’d better go see Doc Hoffman.” He looked pale, too.

“I’m fine, Ma. I don’t like doctors any more than you do. Besides, he’ll be busy with flood victims needing tending.”

“Ach,” I said, annoyed at him. My children could be so stubborn. I didn’t know where they got that from.

People talked for weeks about whether they should have blown the dike, and if they’d gotten that decision made sooner whether it might have helped, but it was senseless talk. Looking back to visit blame and accusation is wasted time, even if you could win the lawsuit. Such time spent finding fault was better spent pressing the goal: learn how to manage living between two rivers that flood every now and then, even with man-made dams and levees and dikes.

They began letting a few people at a time step into rowboats to visit their houses—if they still stood—and get essential things out they thought they needed. Or maybe to give relief to those who’d taken us flood victims in. Even herds of cows were turned out into growing fields because there was nowhere for them to graze, the Bottoms just water now.

Fritz didn’t feel well enough to row me out there, but I wanted to go, so Roy and my grandson took me, Bobby panting in the bow.

It was a moving lake we rowed upon, worse than the flood of ’33. Debris, branches, leaves, parts of other people’s buildings jammed up against the barn, the woodshed, the house. A whole passel of logs washed from the mill yard floated, and Roy said, “We’ll have to get a bunch of guys to push those back, or they’ll jam against the house and move it from the foundation.”

We rowed right over the tops of my lilacs, the leaves and branches whispering along the bottom of the boat. Petals floated in the water, silent tears, drifting. I looked for places where I knew shrubs were supposed to be, where my oldest lilacs were planted, and couldn’t see anything as we rowed over those areas. Cranes called beyond the railroad dike still seeping water. The smells of rot rose up in what had once been a palace of sweet aromas. Roy rowed up to the porch, and from the boat he pulled open the door to the house. Water stood in the hall and partway up the steps to the bedrooms. Since we’d raised the house three feet and three feet stood in the hall, overall we had over six feet of water everywhere the eye could see.

“I think this is as far as you should go, Grandma,” Roland said. “Just looking is enough, isn’t it?”

“I’m not going to piddle around with all your effort and not go up there,” I told them. I wiggled my way out of the boat, and Roy helped me steady my foot on the step covered with water. The cool of it washed against my rubber boots. I walked up out of it to the second floor. I’d taken a few starts up there before Fritz said we had to go, but mostly, it being May and everything being planted for Lilac Days, there were no lilac starts. I looked around that room, sat on the bed surrounded by musty smells and damp clamming up from downstairs. Bobby bounded up the steps behind me.

“Leave me here for a bit,” I yelled down to Roy. “Check
out the barn and the chickens.” We’d brought along corn for them.

I heard him slosh away and just sat on the bed. The water would eventually recede. There’d be mud to clean up, and I hoped the house hadn’t been pushed off kilter by the water. We’d have a roof over our heads, which was more than many had. Twenty-thousand lost their homes in Vanport; sixteen lost their lives there.

But what of the garden? Did I have the strength to once again renew it? And with what? The lilac bushes were underwater—many plantings would have been washed away by the impact of the river, ripped up by waves or the logs that jammed and clustered. Only the tallest, oldest trees looked like they’d made it. I had three hundred plants chucked into my garden design for Lilac Days. There wasn’t a one that would survive standing in water for weeks. I looked out the window where my Magical Three Lemoine should have been. “Oh Frank,” I said. That’s when the tears began.

It was after the Fourth of July before the water receded and the mud dried enough that we could walk around the house, see what we could see.

Not a plant in sight. Not a one. Every cultivar of lilac, gone. Even the few we’d pulled and laid on rafts tied to the tree were gone along with the rafts. The monkey puzzle tree
made it, a couple of magnolias that were big and sturdy. The ginkgo tree. But otherwise, the land was barren as Abraham’s wife before her miracle birth. It would take a miracle to redo this garden, and I did not have it in me. Inside the house, in the sun porch, my cultivars and all the seed packets were washed away too.

But Fritz, bless his heart, he said we should at least try to clean up the area, maybe plant a few petunias, get dahlia and tulip bulbs. “Write to Nelia. She might … have bulbs to spare,” he said. My boy’s breath was labored. He couldn’t do the work, and while I could do some, I was old. Those were the facts that worked against our reclaiming this garden. Fritz had seen the doctor, but he told me it was just “aging” and not for me to worry, not that I’d stop. A mother hovers. I didn’t want to outlive yet another child.

“I can do all things through Him who strengthens me,” I told Lizzie, quoting Scripture. “But let’s just clean the house.”

And so we began with volunteers not committed to critical rebuilding of the dikes and shoveling mud elsewhere. Nelia’s dad, the Reeds, my grandkids and their friends, Roy and Lizzie, my nieces and nephews still in the area. We cleaned the house out, and the work was hard. I couldn’t see how Fritz could continue. There was no way I could replant now. “There’s a time to begin and a time to quit,” I told him. “That may not be a proverb, but it ought to be. I can live in the house, and that’s good enough. Forget the garden.”

“You’ll die without your garden, Mama,” he told me.

And then on July 28, Fritz did.

His heart failed, Dr. Hoffman said. The man had retired the previous year, but he came when I called him to tend to my son. Like Martha and Delia, Fritz went in his sleep. I wondered what it meant that I outlived all but one of my children. Had I drawn all their strength, sapped them all and Frank’s too?

We buried Fritz in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows cemetery where everyone in Woodland ended up. Lizzie invited me to stay with her and Roy permanently. “Let the garden be now. It’s too much,” she said. We sat in her living room—that’s what they called the parlor now.