On Flooded Roads

I have this memory of being stopped at an intersection. My father was driving and the road ahead was flooded when a car in front of us took its chances on driving through only to lose purchase on the road and set to floating.

Memory’s a funny thing. Because I’m not so sure I saw this now. I don’t remember us turning around, or how we found our way home. I wonder if I saw this image of the floating car on the news instead—it makes more sense in a way, because my parents tended not to drive in severe weather.

In either case, I remember my father’s advice—simple and self-apparent as it was in the moment—not to ever try and drive through standing water.

I remember junior prom, too. A part of my mind conflates the occasions—suggests it was earlier in the same day as the prom that I saw the floating car, and maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t life experience and an abundance of caution, but getting spooked by the day’s events that made my father suggest I might not be able to make it to prom and that even if I did, he wasn’t sure it was such a good idea that we pick up my date as planned.

It’s not that I liked the idea of my mom and driving the two of us to prom anyway, but I wouldn’t get my first job until that summer, so it’s not like I had the money to pay for a limo, and though my father had started teaching me to drive, even I—who thought I was a better driver than I realistically was—wouldn’t have suggested I should have taken the car myself then to drive in a rainy night amidst flooded roads (let alone while I was still only on a learner’s permit, and thus not street legal to drive on my own). I was crushed, but also somewhat accustomed to the brutality of Upstate New York winters and the cancellation of plans due to weather—events themselves shut down, or my parents unwilling to risk driving in the ice and snow.

I called my date to let her know my dad wouldn’t be able to pick her up and it wasn’t certain I’d be able to go, and my dad got mad that I’d said such a thing, lest he look like a deadbeat to her family for leaving her stranded. He made me call back right away to say I’d gotten it all wrong and we were still on.

And then I remember the weekend of my wedding.

I remember this more clearly, from adult eyes just a few years ago, not two decades.

Roads flooded.

My wife and I chose Wilmington as a compromise. A beach town, but not one that would require 3/4 of the wedding guests to fly across the country to a California location we’d have preferred. More affordable, too. And in early October, we were, theoretically, outside any serious threat of hurricane season.

Hurricane Matthew said differently.

After a tumultuous few days of back and forth, considering postponement or changing locations, we went ahead with as much of our original plans as we could under the advisement of the last forecasts before we had to make a decision and consideration to the costs we’d have to eat and the stress of imagining planning another wedding.

We proceeded.

A number of guests backed out, understandably, not least of all one of my groomsmen. When I talked to my father—who’d planned to drive down to Wilmington, NC from the same Upstate New York neighborhood as that groomsmen—I was ready for him to say he wasn’t coming either, and ready to forgive it.

But he said he was coming.

We made arrangements for me to pick up his tuxedo from the rental place for him, because he wouldn’t make it to town before they closed for the storm. He gave me the number for the hotel where he was staying because, in the year 2016, he still didn’t have a cell phone.

The next I heard from my father, he’d made it to the hotel. He had totaled his car on the way, though, after driving through standing water a little ways outside Wilmington, the under carriage of the car smashing against something unseen before the tires steadied on the road again, the car shaking and rattling that last stretch of the drive.

But he made it. I didn’t have to tell him he was foolish to try driving through a flood. He was all too eager to shake his head at himself.

I’d pick him up to drive him to the wedding myself and he’d rent a car to drive back up to New York the day after. Like many guests, he came across roads closed to flooding—the damage and rerouting much worse two days after the storm than it had been during it. But like everyone else who came for the wedding, he made it home. The next day, he bought another used car from the lot down the road from his house. The next day life went on.

I don’t altogether know what to make of these memories of flooded roads, cars, and my father. Though I do recall a late night, driving too fast on a rain-slick highway on my way back to the Baltimore apartment where I rested my head those days, about half of those years in between high school and when I got married.

The car hydroplaned. I focused. I remembered lessons I’d heard for a case like this, maybe from my father, maybe a friend, maybe TV, maybe the kind of general wisdom you hear from enough sources to internalize for when the moment comes. I took my foot off the gas, but didn’t go for the brakes. I coasted, mindful of where cars and curbs and open space was. I steered toward open road until I was on solid ground and could steer and brake safely. I made it through.

I made it home.