So I’ve been planning to restart this blog for a while now, and I was about to post this on Facebook as a status update when I realized just how long it was going to be. I figured this was a better place for it.

Fellow Nashvillians have been posting the story from the Tennessean about today being the anniversary of the 2010 flood, and I thought I’d share my own experience of that weekend. Hard to believe that was five years ago.

This is what I remember about the flood:

On Saturday, May 1, I attended a meeting of the Board if Directors for People’s Branch Theatre, the small company I was Artistic Director for, at which we voted to shut the doors on the company. We met at the offices of a board member on Nolensville Road between Antioch and Brentwood, and the rain has already begun to pour. As we wrapped up our meeting and headed out, reports were already coming in about washouts along I-24, the exact corridor I would need to use to get back home. I decided to take what I would later come to find out (after living in LA) are called surface roads, following Nolensville Road all the way back into town to the I-40/I-24 junction and Lebanon Road, which I then took to McGavock Pike and all the way into my neighborhood off of Pennington Bend. The rain never let up that entire day and most of the next.

Sunday morning, May 2, the rain finally abated, and Julee and I loaded our six-week-old son into his carseat and took a drive around our area to see what shape it was in. Keep in mind, we lived right off of the Cumberland, and we were aware that downtown was already getting dangerously high (in fact, downtown may have already suffered some of the flood damage; I can’t remember exactly). We drove down by the river behind us to the boat inlet, and at that point in time, while much higher than normal, the water level was still a good twenty feet below the surface line. Two Rivers Golf Course had been pretty much submerged, and we were in awe of what had happened. We returned home with little more thought about it, glad that the worst seemed to be over. However, we kept the news on all day as weather reports continued to come in.

As the day wore on, reporters continued to talk about rising water levels in downtown, and that there was still more to come. Julee began to ask whether or not we should consider packing a bag and heading out, but I honestly did not believe anything would happen. That evening, as it began to get dark, Julee received a phone call from another employee at the Nashville Children’s Theatre who happened to live in the subdivision next to us that they were being evacuated from their home due to rising water levels on the Cumberland. They had two small children of their own and had just moved to Nashville from Atlanta, so they had no family in town, and they wanted to know if they could possibly stay with us for the night if necessary. We said sure, expecting them to come over soon if the worst happened. I still believed we were safe in our house.

Within a few hours, police cruisers were circling thru out neighborhood advising residents to leave their homes, as the river had rested its banks and was continuing to rise. Our colleague’s neighborhood had already been evacuated, and her home was several feet under water.

Our son was six weeks old.

We quickly packed clothing and some essentials into both of our cars – computers, valuables, photo albums. I moved some other electronics upstairs into the upper bedrooms to minimize whatever damage I could, and we loaded our two dogs and our son into our cars and headed out of the neighborhood. Our next door neighbors had decided to stay, and he told me he would check in with me as the night wore on.

We lived in Donelson, and my mother lives in Hermitage off of Old Hickory Lake, so we tried our best to get to her home, but Lebanon Road was shut down due to flooding at Central Pike. We couldn’t get to her at all. I knew she was safe (thank god for cell phones), but we were suddenly stuck with no place to go. The only friend we could get in touch with lived in Madison, and he welcomed us to come for the night. The only problem: it meant driving over the Cumberland. With no choice, we headed in that direction. Thankfully, due to the large shipping traffic, the bridges over the Cumberland are very tall, so there was no chance of the bridge itself washing out. As we crossed, however, we were astounded (and rightly terrified) to see just how much the water had risen. It’s hard to describe, because it just seemed overwhelming. But you’ve seen the pictures on the news, and I have no doubt there will be stuff about it all day long. You remember it, too.

Anyway, we made it across the river and to our friend’s home without incident, and we slept poorly that night. The next morning, we went the back way along Old Hickory Blvd to my mother’s house, and we stayed there for the next several days. I was working on a project with Tennessee Repertory Theatre (now Nashville Rep – things change in five years), and since our neighborhood was on the way back to my mother’s house, I decided to stop and see what had happened. I still have the footage from that visit on my camera.

Our house was fine. Perfectly fine. It sits on a small knoll, and the ground behind us was purposely constructed as a large ditch for runoff in case of such an event, and the ground sloped away from us on the other side of the street. The water came up around our block on both sides, but the ditch and the knoll ensured that, even if the water had risen to that level, it would have run off on the other side, and the worst we would have suffered would have been flooding of our crawlspace. We got lucky. The people behind us had at least three to five feet of water in their homes. Our next door neighbor was also fine, and he was extremely good-humored about it all. From the upper bedroom window in our house, I shot footage of our backyard, only the very back corner of which had any water in it at all. Like I said, lucky.

But here’s what I remember most, and I have the footage to back it up: two men in a small fishing boat cruising up and down the streets of our neighborhood, trying to help anyone they could. Our neighborhood has a boat parking lot, and these two guys and other like them pulled their boats out and got to work. I heard they had pulled someone down from their roof and brought them out to dry land. It was incredible.

And, of course, this happened all over the city. Thousands of people got busy helping each other out, however they could – rescuing others from danger, tearing out ruined wallboard and insulation, trying to save whatever possessions they could. I helped a neighbor around the block whom I had never met do this to his house along with what seemed like every other person on the block. I loaned him my extension cords for the fans he used to try and dry out his crawlspace, and I learned later when he brought them back that he and his wife had moved into the neighborhood at the same time we did. They had, in fact, looked at our house, and since we had already beaten them to it, they had bought their current one, which had happened to be the only other home for sale in the neighborhood at that time. We had looked at that house ourselves. Had things turned out differently, he might have been helping me gut the soaked fiberglass from my floorboards. Again, lucky.

Across the city, people lived up to the idea of the Volunteer State. It was incredible. Julee went to the Red Cross emergency station set up in Donelson to see if she could help out, and she was told that, since so many people had already begun helping each other, there was very little for them to do. And of course, the T-shirts began to fly (I still have my We Are Nashville shirt), and it made me and everyone else very proud of my hometown. All of this, of course, was somehow overlooked by the national news services, a fact later made very clear about two days later by Anderson Cooper on his own show, but the one thing that was remarked upon the most by the time the story did air was that Nashville got to work and helped itself out.

I no longer live in Nashville, but it’s my hometown and always will be. I’m not particularly proud of a lot of the reason it HAS made national news in the last five years, but I am proud of the fact that everyone was impressed by the fortitude, good will, and volunteer spirit of its citizens. This was us at our best, and it’s something worth remembering.

It’s also important and relevant to this blog for another reason I’m proud to be from the South – we know how to do shit. We can get things done. There’s a large element of self-reliance that is very much a part of growing up in the South. Ironicallly, it’s something I resisted for a large part of my earlier life, but once I embraced it, I can’t believe I ever wanted to deny it. I’ve posted about this before, so I’m not gonna rehash, but I can do things with my hands, and I’m forever grateful for it. I can also use my mind, and I’m even more grateful for that. I can put the two together, and that’s the best. And it’s something I intend to pass on to my son.

Actually, to my sons.

Yeah, we’re having another baby later this year. Another boy, and it’s gonna be another thrilling adventure. But I fully intend to make sure that both of my boys know how to build things, how to fix things, how to make things. Whether it’s a table, a song, or a book, I want my boys to make things. I want them to be capable of doing things so that, if they’re ever in a situation like this, they can get to work. And even tho they’re growing up in California, they’ll always be a little bit from Tennessee.

Oh, and I also plan to keep writing this blog regularly again from this point on, so I hope you’re still with me.

http://www.tennessean.com/picture-gallery/news/local/2015/04/30/the-flood-of-2010/26518085/