Rumble

People don’t realize that swamps are found all over the United States.

Note: Below is a fictionalized account of my disaster work. It is a part of The Writer’s Journey Power Up Prompt.

People don’t realize that swamps are found all over the United States. We just have different names for them. When I lived in Louisiana, we called them bayous, but where I’m from, they’re called wetlands. Did you know that the Seattle area experiences hundreds of small earthquakes a day? They’re just so small that we can’t feel them, but our seismic activity is always rumbling, whether it be by the Pacific Ocean, the maze of fault lines running underneath us, or the range of active volcanoes known as the Cascades.

I took a call one night down in Olympia near the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, one of Washington’s most pristine National Wildlife Refuges. The client had called about a sinkhole erupting in front of their home, making it impossible for them to leave. Having lived in New Orleans, I had seen my fair share of sink holes and more than my fair share of potholes, and I assumed that people in Washington couldn’t tell the difference. What looks like a sinkhole to a Washingtonian is just a run-of-the-mill pothole to a New Orleanian.

But I took the call anyway. The family lived just on the outskirts of the nature reserve. I had been there a few times before, but it was nighttime and eerily quiet, except for the calls of loons casting an eerie ambiance onto the place. I felt for the small gris-gris bag in my vest pocket as I drove nearer to the home. The bag was a present gifted to me by a Voodoo priestess— something for protection that I always kept with me. It was, perhaps, one of the only precious items that I owned.

There were no streetlamps, and I almost drove right into it: a sinkhole the size of the street. The clients weren’t lying. I hadn’t seen something like this since New Orleans. I grabbed my casework bag and edged my way around the sinkhole to the door of the house.

Sinkholes are particularly dangerous because they can turn into quicksand. One is never sure how deep they are. They can swallow cars and buildings whole. The earth opens up and… poof! Gone.

I knocked on the door, and the clients opened their door slowly, cautiously, as if any movement might trigger the sinkhole to expand. The Johnson Family, I learned, Tim & Karen, and Jeremy and Kayla. Tim and Karen had been married for 20 years and were an adventurous, athletic couple, according to the photographs around the house. Their children, Jeremy, 17, and Kayla, 15, seemed to both participate in sports of one kind or another. The family had been stuck inside for over a week, too afraid to leave. I began my interview with them. There was no structural damage to their home. “Unfortunately,” I thought, in the back of my head, “I cannot help you.” I was wary to deliver the bad news when, all of a sudden, I felt a low rumble of shaking.

“Oh no, not this again,” said Karen. I opened the door to see the sinkhole growing deeper, and taking my car with it.

“Oh shit,” I thought to myself. “That is going to be a hard business expense to explain.”

“Look, everyone,” I said, “We need to get out of the house and we need to get out quick. That sinkhole is going to bring us all down with it.”

“Where will we go?” Kayla asked, scared.

“Onto the nature reserve,” Tim said, as if he were beginning to formulate a plan in his mind. Only, I didn’t like his plan. I knew enough about living below sea level and liquefaction to know that wetlands are not the place to be during earthquakes. It was the family’s choice. I had no car to get them out of there, and their cars had long since been returned to the Earth. I held the gris-gris bag in my pocket.

We crept onto the maze of bridges built overtop of the wetlands as the ground continued to rumble. Something was happening underneath us. Sinkholes were opening up everywhere. My altruism was being tested as my fight-or-flight kicked in. Just because I know about disasters doesn’t mean I enjoy disasters. I kept expecting to get a phone call about earthquakes in the area, but my phone was dead silent. I tried to make an outgoing call only to discover that I had no service. I tried to connect to my backup WiFi, and even that was down. We moved further into the park as the sinkholes seemingly started to chase us.

I kept rubbing the gris-gris bag in my pocket. It felt hot to the touch. I could feel the power of Papa Legba beside me. I suddenly knew what had to be done. As sinkholes continued to erupt from every which way, one grew, more massive than the rest. We held on to the railings of the bridges as the earth shook violently. It was the power of magic that would save us. I took my gris-gris bag out of my pocket and threw it into the large sinkhole that was threatening to swallow us all whole. A shot of pink light beamed up from the bottom of the hole and into the sky. The holes began to close, one by one. The ground abruptly stopped shaking.

My precious gris-gris bag was gone. The sinkhole outside of the Johnson home had also disappeared, and my car was parked back on the street where I had found it. When I was making the exhausting drive home, a tune suddenly came on the radio: Louis Armstrong’s “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?”

Photo by Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash