The Crest

Kay Whitfield had worked the floor of the distribution warehouse in the Sparks industrial park for nineteen years, long enough to know that the danger did not come from the river you could see. She was a shift lead now, fifty-four, and on the Sunday night the water came she was down at the loading docks in a borrowed rain slicker watching the parking lot fill from the wrong direction, not from the Truckee itself, which ran a half mile north, but up out of the storm drains and along a swollen irrigation ditch that in nineteen dry years she had never once thought about. The rain had been falling warm for three days, a Pacific rain the weather people were calling a river in the sky, and it had come down on a Sierra snowpack and turned it all to runoff, and now the runoff was in her parking lot rising an inch every quarter hour, and she and four men on the overnight were stacking sandbags across the dock doors by the light of the forklift.

She remembered the last big one. Nineteen ninety-seven, the New Year’s flood, when the Truckee had come up over its banks and put the whole of this east valley under water and shut the downtown casinos and floated cars down Rock Boulevard. She had been young then, new to the job, and she had stood about where she was standing now and watched five feet of muddy water walk in through these same doors and ruin everything on the bottom racks. That was the flood everybody measured against. The county people on the radio kept saying this one would not be that, that it would look more like the smaller flood of a decade back, that the reservoirs up on the Truckee had been drawn down to hold it and the crest would be manageable, and Kay believed them and did not believe them at the same time, because she had learned that a warehouse full of other people’s freight did not care what the forecast said.

The Truckee was the only water that ever left Lake Tahoe, forty miles up in the mountains, and it ran down out of the pass and turned and came east through Reno and then through Sparks, right through the middle of everything, on its way to the dead end of Pyramid Lake in the desert where it simply sank into the ground and went no farther. All the town’s history sat on that one river, the crossing and the depot and the divorce hotels and the casinos, and all of it upstream of her, so that everything the river gathered coming through Reno arrived at Sparks a few hours later and a few feet higher. The men called it the low end of town. It flooded because it was where the water finally slowed down enough to spread.

By midnight her phone was full of the town coming apart in small pieces. The downtown bridges were closed, Lake and Sierra and Arlington, the police out inspecting them by flashlight. Idlewild Park was under water and so was Wingfield, the little island park in the middle of the river where the whole city went in summer. Out in the south end they were knocking on doors in the dark and moving four hundred families out of the low streets below the freeway, and in Hidden Valley the deputies were walking people out of nineteen houses down by the creek. The governor had declared an emergency for the whole state on Saturday before a drop had fallen here. The schools would be closed in the morning, all of them, and the university had already called off its Monday. On the county’s page somebody had started marking every sandbag station in the valley with a little blue dot, and there were dots everywhere, a whole town out in the rain at once filling bags.

The oldest of her four men, a Samoan named Sefo who had been on the docks nearly as long as she had, came slogging back from the far corner of the lot with his boots full and reported that the ditch had jumped its bank on the north side and was running between the buildings now, and that the place next door, the one that made the countertops, had water in it already. Kay looked at the line of sandbags across her doors, three high and holding, and at the black water standing in her lot catching the yellow forklift light, and she made the call she was paid to make. She sent two of the men up to move the last of the low pallets to the top racks, the way you save what you can when you cannot save the building, and she kept Sefo and the youngest one with her at the doors, and she called the overnight manager at home and told him it was time to shut the power down at the main before the water reached the panel.

Then there was nothing to do but hold the line and wait for the crest. That was the strange thing about a flood, she thought, standing in the doorway with the rain coming sideways under the dock canopy. A fire you fought. A flood you only waited out. It came up as far as it was going to come up, on the river’s own schedule, indifferent to you, and the whole art of the night was guessing how high that would be and being ready at the doors when it got there. The men upstream in Reno had already had their crest, a little after midnight, the river topping its banks downtown by not quite a foot and then, they said, beginning to ease. That water was coming to her now. It would reach Sparks a few hours behind Reno and a few feet higher, sometime around the first gray of Monday morning, and either her three courses of sandbags would be enough or they would not.

At a quarter to seven the sky went from black to the color of dishwater and Kay was still in the doorway, soaked through, holding a paper cup of coffee gone cold, and Sefo came and stood beside her without saying anything, and they watched the water. It had stopped rising. She was almost sure of it. There was a mark she had scratched on the concrete post with a screwdriver an hour before and the water was still at the mark, or maybe a finger below it, and the rain had finally thinned to a drizzle, and out past the lot the Truckee was up over the whole low ground between the buildings, brown and quick and carrying the branches of trees from forty miles up the mountain, running east the way it had always run, toward the desert, toward the lake with no outlet, taking the storm out of the valley the only way the valley had ever had to be rid of it. Kay set the cold coffee down on the post beside her mark and told Sefo to send the men home dry if he could find them a dry way, and then she stayed where she was a while longer, watching the crest hold, not yet ready to trust that it was over, ready at the doors in case the river changed its mind.

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