An Appalachian storyteller's account: What the floods take

JoAnn and Alvin Davis, the author's parents, in a photo salvaged
from the 1957 flood, which they survived and about which he writes.

The disastrous flood in Eastern Kentucky has defied adequate description in a broad sense, but as residents tell their own stories in their own words the catastrophe is becoming clearer, and reaching us not just our heads, but in our hearts, and sometimes in our guts. One of the region's top storytellers, filmmaker-turned-grantsman Dee Davis of Whitesburg, holds forth in The Daily Yonder, published by the Center for Rural Strategies, which he runs.

The piece is mainly Dee's long, sad, heartfelt goodbye to the last identified victim of the flood, Dennis Stacy, a close friend in their youth. Those memories are worth your time, as an example of meaningful memory, but they largely set up the gut punches the end:

"Small wonder that more did not perish. First responders rescued 1,400; National Guard helicopters hoisted 650 on dropped cables. So many neighbors waded through swift water to pull less able people to safety. A guy at the city hall next to my office — I only know him as Red — saved 12 people. He can’t swim, but he got a life jacket, borrowed a kayak, and went house to house. He lifted old people and a mother and child up out of the water and into the kayak. . . . 

Dee Davis

"They say it is the 500-year flood. Let’s hope. My house on the hillside was spared, but so many people lost all they owned. Sopping wet couches, bent up appliances, and battered knickknack shelves are still piled on the sidewalks. The flood mud is so toxic with septic drainage and mine runoff now that you can’t dig a potato that was under the water or eat an apple from a tree that withstood it. And what’s true here is the same for 50 other communities downstream. The choice to build back seems harder now, but even if that horse goes off at 7 to 2, it is still the best bet on the tote board.

"Things get covered up in the flood. And if you see them again, they’ve changed. Maybe they are mud caked and putrid smelling, or maybe they are washed eight miles from where they are supposed to be, but they are different. Forever. And as witnesses we are changed too. We refocus as the water recedes. We see the before and the after. And we figure out what of it we take from here."