FIND A WAY
I almost didn’t make it home last night.
This photos in this post are from a wonderful weekend spent hiking with my dad in Western NC. The leaves were just starting to turn and the weather was perfect. Cool and crisp in the morning, 72 and sunny in the afternoon. It was lovely.
The words, however, will be about my drive home.
It was a nightmare.
I have slogged out some hellish drives in the past. Dubuque to CR in a whiteout, driving in the center of the two lanes so as not to end up in a ditch, like everyone else. Omaha to CR in negative nineteen (-19) degrees in a car without heat, pulling over to gas stations every 20-30 minutes to thaw out my feet. New York to CR in one shot, with someone who was mad at me in the backseat. And the worst, of course, driving through a double-derecho coming back from Milwaukee in the summer of 2014, a weather event that toppled silos and headlined the national news that evening. Flying debris cracked my windshield and battered my car, forever shaking everyone inside.
Last night was up there with them all, and I could make a case, which I might just do right now, that it was the worst.
First off, there is no good way to get from Myrtle Beach to the greater Charlotte area. There are four or five different options, and they all suck. Even on sunny day with nowhere to be in a hurry, it’s still a pain in the ass. The best route takes the longest, and the shortest route has you in somebody’s neighborhood at one point. Take one wrong turn and you’re sure to see some deep country poverty and confederate flags. It’s all a mess.
Now take into account the ‘nor’easter’ that just pounded the coast all day yesterday, which I did not, as I took off for this impromptu weekend trip. I knew the rain was supposed to clear up later into the night on Sunday, so I wasn’t in a rush to get home that afternoon.
I hadn’t considered the ‘flash flooding’ factor.
In fact, I look back on my life and realize I’ve never really considered it a factor. Sure I’ve been through historic floods, we all remember them, but that was from continuous rain over long periods of time - we had days to prepare. The ‘flash’ part never hit me personally. I can’t ever recall having to decide to drive through water or not in my whole life.
Until last night of course.
I’ll set the scene real quickly - the drive is about five hours if it goes well, one stop included. I hate driving in the dark, I don’t drive a truck like nearly everyone else in the south, and my windshield wipers kind of suck. I have half the trip left when it starts to get dark and rain simultaneously, the one-two punch I was hoping to avoid. So I’m white knuckling it - ‘locked in’ as the kids would say, which tenses up your whole body, something you usually don’t realize until the next day (I’m sore as shit today). I just keep telling myself to hang in there, you’ll be home in [enter GPS ETA here]. The bright-ass LED lights on the monster trucks surrounding me are killing me, I have to pee and my phone is buzzing and turning a violent red color, screaming the words FLASH FLOOD ALERT.
As I entered something called Chadbourn, NC I was 48 minutes from home, according to the GPS.
I walked in my front door three hours later.
There’s probably nothing scarier on the road than black ice. I’ve totaled a car as a result of it, and it was horrifying. Traumatizing. You can’t see it and you don’t know it’s there until it’s too late. But let me tell you - not far behind is flood water at night.
As I drove through main street in Chadbourn I saw a cop ahead with his lights on - not in the road but in a parking lot off to the side. As I’m pulling past a Hardees [Editor’s note: the pride and joy of Chadbourn, I assume] I see the Jeep in front of me go head first into water, right in the middle road, splashing uproariously on both sides like a waterpark ride.
Holy shit. I turned as fast as I could into the most fucked up parking lot I’ve ever seen. It was nearly all flooded too, and I had to manuever my car into a U-turn without taking a dive into one of these craters. It’s pouring like the movie Hard Rain. This sucks.
Why isn’t that cop stopping people from driving through that river? The Jeep seemed to be up to its windows in water. No way am I making it through, nor would I try under any circumstances. I’m going to have to find another route. I pull out the GPS and check other options. It wants me to go through town and gives very little else to work with.
I take off the way I came, then turn onto the dark country roads, into the night.
The first sight of it is horrifying - because you can’t see it. The only way to know that there’s flash flood water on a pitch-black-ass country road is if the reflecting lights in the middle of the road disappear. It’s a sight that will make your stomach turn. So IF you see it in time, you come to a screeching halt, make an Austin Powers 42-point turn, the GPS chirps at you, and you try again, miles down the highway. More floodwater. You try again, and again. You’re way out from town now. No signs of life. It hasn’t stopped raining. The GPS says 1:20 to Myrtle Beach. I try to retrace my steps - but there’s water. Was this here before?
“Most people who die in the woods, die of shame.”
I got turned around. Panic knocks at the front door. Don’t let it in, I tell myself. You just got turned around. Sure you have GPS, but right now it’s not worth a damn because it doesn’t know where the flood water is. I turn off the route to Myrtle but leave the map on. My hands are starting to cramp and lock up in a way that I had never felt before. It must be a combination of the stress and holding the wheel like its going to shoot through the roof of the car if I let it go.
I see some street names that look familiar, but more water. In the distance approaches a Ford the size of a small house - a local, surely. As he begins to plow through, I get out of my car just short of the water, preparing a joke and a plea for ideas. He blows past me and off into the night. Damn.
I drive around looking for any road that can get me out of the boonies and back to an interstate. The GPS is on, but I might as well be using the stars at this point. I need a fucking interstate.
After 30 minutes, which feels like 10 hours if you’re lost in the North Carolina countryside in the dark, I find 74 and get off somewhere that looks promising - but wait - too familiar. I look out the window to the right.
Town of Chadbourn, it read.
Holy shit. I’m right back where I started. Apparently I went north, then west, then south, then - you guessed it. FUCK.
So this time I pull into the Hardees. I take a series of deep breaths, get out in the rain and touch my toes. I watch the next car go through the water. The cop is still sitting there. Still no signs, traffic cones, nothing.
It was a car similar to mine. And he made it through. Is that my ticket? Make a break for it? If I was going to drive through flood water anywhere, it’d be right here next to this cop, in town. My brain said no, my gut said yes.
I went for it. It was deep. My whole body was fully clenched. A human vice.
I made it through. I was on something called Joe Brown Highway, heading in the right direction. How many more of those would there be?
I called my dad. He could hear I was rattled. I was supposed to be home by now. I told him I had found a highway and that I was going to try to ride it to 501 and come into Myrtle from the west. I didn’t really know if that was a thing but it sounded good. I got off the phone to focus, and I knew I left him worried. I hated that, but what could I do? I’m in a bad spot.
Seven bad spots, it turned out. I had to go through water seven more times on Joe Brown, each time as nerve racking as the last. The GPS rerouted me to Highway 9 - finally something I recognized - only to tell me I needed to detour.
I dinked and dunked all the way home, never finding a highway again until 9 at the very end. It was, of course, raining the hardest in Myrtle Beach.
I pulled into my place around 10pm after leaving WNC around 3. An extra three hours on the road, three hours that felt like a fever dream. The cop lights in the rain, the disappearing reflectors in the road, the blackness of the unpolluted night sky when you’re lost. I was instantly haunted.
I got on the phone and called my Dad and told him all about it. I would have melted down at previous times of my life, I told him. I was so proud for hanging in there. For staying positive, for not letting the stress crumble anything but the bone structure of my hands.
Was it worse than the tornado? He asked, referring to the 2014 derecho. Man, I said. I’m trying to decide.
I’m so sorry that happened to you, he said. Never again.
Oh no, Dad. I said. I would do it all again to hang out with you man.
Love you pops.
