Flooding in Williamson County
Oh sure, let’s add flooding to all this, too.
On Sunday morning, Nashville awoke to news of people needing to be rescued from trees, cars under water, homes destroyed. At least four people were killed during the weekend's flooding. There was untold damage.
For those of you who weren’t here in 2010, here is the most important thing I can tell you: If you are flooding now, you will flood again. Prepare and make your future plans based on this. With the devastating 2010 Middle Tennessee flood, we heard a lot of stuff about how that was a 500-year flood or a 1,000-year flood. We heard developers talking about how they weren’t worried about building on properties we all saw were flooded because it wasn’t going to happen again for another 500 years.
For those of you who had to climb into your attics this weekend, trying not to drown, you may be wondering what desecration of physics crammed 500 years into a decade.
This is the explanation an engineer from the state gave me, and it is the explanation I’m giving you. Think of this as a Nashville-based game of Dungeons and Dragons. The Dungeon Master tells you that there is a flooding event happening. You need to roll your dice to see how bad the flooding is going to be. You have to pull out the flood dice. There are a lot of them. One has 10 sides. One has 50 sides. One has 100 sides. One has 500 sides. One has 1,000. One side on each of those dice is marked “Congratulations, you’re going to get a terrible flood.”
It is very unlikely that you’re going to roll a 1,000-year flood. It’s much more likely that you’re going to roll a 10-year flood. But the important thing to realize is that all the dice are always rolling. Just because we rolled a 1,000-year flood in 2010 doesn’t mean we couldn’t roll a 1,000-year flood tomorrow. It’s unlikely, but it’s not impossible. All the dice roll every time there’s a flood event.
And even if you didn’t roll the devastation of a 1,000-year flood this time, a once-in-a-century flood — just 11 years after a once-in-a-millennium flood — is a lot.
Frankly, it’s all a lot. We had a tornado. We had a derecho. We had the pandemic. There was a bombing. Now we’re having a flood. Were there other citywide disasters this year? Forgive me if I can’t quickly call them to mind. In the past year, my dog died, my aunt died, my grandma died, and I grew a golf-ball sized lump on my throat that made it impossible for me to breathe if I bent over. I had to have surgery to have it removed, and no one can yet tell me why that happened or if it will happen again. Oh, did the government ask you to wear a mask, and it was so uncomfortable? Well, sweet cheeks, I had to get multiple neck shots, the kind that make your arms and legs jerk uncontrollably when they happen. So clearly, I weep for you.
OK, this is the thing. I’m feeling it. I’m sure many of you are, too. I want to be a kind and generous person. I want to live in those Nashville Strong moments where we all come together and pitch in and clean up and do what we can for each other. And I think I would have been able to be that person, still, even with everything that has happened over the past year, if my fellow Tennesseans and the tourists who flocked here had extended me the kindness of wearing their damn masks.
But the Nashville ethos of us pitching in and helping each other is really hard to believe in when we’ve spent the past year seeing just how many people are cavalierly deciding they don’t need to help.
When it feels like everyone knows the importance of watching out for one another, it’s an honor to be among the people who can help. I move tornado debris for you today. You put an arm around someone I love when her house floods. We take care of each other.
But when there’s such a stark dividing line between the people who help and the people who won't do something as simple as wear a mask? Frankly, it makes the helpers feel like chumps. I want to acknowledge that. I want to tell you that I too am burnt out, and I don’t know how to call upon those feelings of caring for people I don’t know when so many people I don’t know wouldn’t do a very basic thing I needed in order to be cared for.
I watched my grandmother’s funeral over Facebook Live, which is just a sentence that epitomizes our current hellscape. In general, it was a barely adequate substitute for being there. But there was the moment when my dad just started reading through the same old scripture that he reads at every funeral. And it was soothing. Just the ritual of it. Even with all the ways the situation sucked, here were the old words we all know, and you just listen to them and say them and you let your emotions do what they’re going to do, while you cling to the ritual to get you through.
This is, I think, the way forward through yet another tragedy. Do the ritual. Even if we’re burned out and pissed, and even if we feel betrayed by a lot of our neighbors, even if we feel like chumps for helping, help anyway. Help not because you’re feeling it, but because this is what we do in times like this. Help because one of the most important things about Nashville is that we help, and even with everything else that’s changed in the city, we don’t have to be changed into the kinds of people who don’t help.
We can preserve what’s good about Nashville by being good, even when we’re not feeling it.
