the house off paces ferry road

People in the South tend to like to stay in the South. Not that you’d know who’s from the South anyway, cause so many of them cover up their accents once you cross west into Mountain Time Zone. At least that’s what my mom did. All my family went to University of Georgia and Georgia Tech. Different branches of the family spread from Stockbridge to Paces Ferry, but nowhere beyond that. My mom was the one to change that. Moved out when she graduated high school, went to Tennessee for college, met a man in New York and ran off with him to California. That’s where I was raised, just outside San Francisco, where the fog hangs out all year long.  Every summer after I was born, though, the family would spend back at my grandparents’ house in Atlanta, just off Paces Ferry Road.

It was a big grey house from the 70’s with a curved blue roof and skylights in half the rooms. It was my grandma’s dream house so my granddad built it. A long driveway stretched through trees and overgrown ivy from the back of the kitchen to the mailbox on Cochise Drive. From the sliding glass doors in the living room, a straight narrow patch of grass lined by tall hedges extended to the river. They had about a fifty-foot long rock wall along the Chattahoochee River where we’d fish sometimes, but never catch anything. The water was forceful and reddish-brown in color because of its clay banks that continuously eroded. The rocks stood up in the water, all along our stretch, causing a series of rapids just in the center of the river. Just on the other side of Sheldon’s house next door, was the Cochise River Club where we spent most of our time those summers.  

At night, granddaddy would tell us bedtime stories about the Magic Pillow. The stories were always different, but every time granddaddy would lead into the resolution with, “…and sure enough.” There was security in those words, and I knew when I heard them, the Magic Pillow was going to fix whatever problem there was. My big sister, Nicole, and I would lie in our white painted wicker framed beds side by side with the matching wicker nightstand between us, listening carefully to each word. When we started spending more time there, Granddaddy put a light fixture with a red bulb in the closet next to my bed. We used it as a nightlight, but the stripes of red light that peered through the slits in the shutter scared me more than they comforted me on those short, hot nights. Sometimes we’d poke holes in the top of a canning jar and catch lightning bugs before bed. Their tails gradually flickered on and off like the colors of a traffic light.

On the nights my granddaddy didn’t tell us stories, my mom would take over, and Nicole and I would pile into her bed. Each time, she’d tell us the story of the Princess and the Pea as the crickets sung us to sleep. I’d gaze at the wall next to her bed where a framed print of the Villa d’Este Palace hung. As my mind filled with images from the story, I always pictured the Princess living in that palace with the complex architecture, tall ceilings, and fountains all over the garden. We think it was our ancestors’ palace back in Italy. The print was one of the few things salvaged from the flood.

It came one day in mid-September. I was a freshman in high school and I’d been back to the South that summer, but most of my time was spent out at my cousin’s house relaxing by the pool, rather than playing on the muddy banks of the river. I got a call from Jamie Rubel from up the street one-day after school that September. She hadn’t seen the house yet, but she told me about how she’d been canoeing down Cochise Drive earlier that day. I didn’t realize how bad it was until later.

The rains started on the 15th day of the month. The weather was no different than the countless Augusts I spent there. The days were starting to get shorter, but the nights were never long enough for the air to cool down. The crickets were so loud that even a pillow over your ears couldn’t shut them out. We didn’t mind though, they lulled us to sleep each night. What we did mind were the thunderstorms. Being from California, I had felt a mild earthquake one or two times, but those didn’t shake the house the way the thunder seemed. Every thunderclap was followed by a flash of lightning that projected the tree’s silhouettes onto the closed curtains of our room. Like bread in a toaster, my sister and I would pop right out of our beds, into mom’s room and under the covers.

I was at home that September, but, unlike the time I’d spent in Georgia, the storm lasted two weeks instead of just an afternoon. Despite the .04-inch rain expectancy, the water rose five inches in thirteen hours. The water crept from the river and into the house.

My granddaddy was a tough man, a pilot who flew in the United States Air Force, and, while working for Delta, crossed the country innumerable times with four gold stripes on his shoulder. He pinched his pennies and indulged infrequently. This house was one of those indulgences. He was so in love with his wife that he wanted to build her the house, and some water in on the floor wasn’t going to stop him from living in a place he worked so hard for. As the water levels elevated, so did my grandparents. They moved some things upstairs and camped out there as they waited for the river to retreat to its banks. But the water wasn’t going back down.

I suppose firefighters do more than put out flames and save cats from trees, because a few hours after my grandparents made their way upstairs, some firemen paddled up to the house in a canoe, just like Jaime had. The water was only three or four feet high at the time, so my granddaddy insisted that they’d be “just fine” and the water would retreat. His perception was that he and his wife could overcome and carry on, just as they had with other problems they’d faced, like the car breaking down, their own infant son’s death, or later when their living child moved out West. He treated all their problems in the same manner, so he applied the same rule to this one. After the firefighters explained that the water wasn’t going down, the elderly couple made their way down the stairs and waded through the sewage and debris filled water out their front door and into the fire department’s canoe. They paddled down the driveway, and granddaddy looked back at the house where they’d thrived for so long. He still thought that they could overcome and carry on.

It was lucky that my grandma and granddaddy made it out when they did, while the water was still relatively low. It reached 8 feet at its highest, almost spilling across the second floor. My mom flew out as early as she could, but there was still a lot of time before the waters went down. Even after that, she wasn’t allowed in the house because it had to go through some sort of toxin inspection by men in HAZMAT suits.

I was at home in California during all of this. I remember hearing hushed conversations between my parents, and my mom constantly on the phone, tears spilling from her eyes. The house off Paces Ferry Road was her home too, the place where she spent the latter part of her youth. My parents tried to play it down for me, but I knew what was going on was severe. I felt the loss, but not as deeply as I would in the following years.

It was a long time before I went back to Georgia. The mold-saturated walls couldn’t hold the house up long term, so a demolition crew was hired when things calmed down and the river was back in its intended shape, between our rock wall and the high school on the other bank. When I finally made it back to the property the next summer, there wasn’t much more than the black tarmac driveway, lined by those tall hickory trees that blocked out the sun. The overgrown grass grew around where the house once stood, allowing the infertile ground to map out the shape of the kitchen and living room, connecting with the bedrooms by a long hallway. It was like looking at a silhouette; all I could see was the outline but I knew what was there, hidden from the eye.

I saw where the sliding glass doors in the kitchen had once been because of the slanted little patch of cement that marked where the patio was. An awning used to stretch out from the house over a black steel table with matching bistro chairs. On hot days before we ran off to the pool, Nicole and I would be there jumping up and down to avoid standing on the scorching tarmac for too long as my mom rubbed in our sunscreen from head to toe. On warm nights we stood there as granddaddy sprayed us with mosquito repellant so we could go chase lightning bugs through the ivy along the driveway.

My first memory of Georgia was at that table under the awning. I was eating watermelon in my underwear. I’m not sure if it’s a real memory or I’ve just seen the photos so many times, but I feel like I remember it. We were so messy back then, any shirt of ours would be all pink after just one slice of watermelon. It didn’t really matter, we were young and it was hot and sticky out. We never wanted to wear shoes because we wanted to be able to feel the mud with our feet. It cost us sometimes because the driveway was always so hot in the August sun that getting around the property was like playing “hot lava”. Crossing the grass wasn’t much different as the crab grass and pine needles stabbed our feet, and the fire ants bit our toes. Once we got to the riverbank, we were safe. The mud cooled the soles of our feet and the water washed off any ants that had hitched a ride with us. The sun beat down on our fair skinned faces, burning our shoulders to a crisp, and popping out our freckles.

We’d cover ourselves in mud, as kids do, and despite any attempts to wash it off in the river, we were always subject to a hose-down back on that little angled patch of cement. The hose was a painful one. It felt like a fireman was trying to put us out like a burning building, or like someone was taking a power-washer to our skin. After the house was torn down, the only remnants of those painful hose-downs was a spigot next to where the table and chairs used to be, but I don’t even think it was the one that the hose was connected to because the bush that always concealed it was gone.

The house is only half of my memories from my summers in Georgia. The rest are of playing down at the river and swimming down the road at the Cochise River Club. The River Club didn’t fair much better than the house through the flood. The pool filled with the same sewage and debris and the deck furniture was strewn across the field where I used to play soccer. The building was demolished and rebuilt on stilts in case the floods come back one day.  Unlike the house, the River Club has recovered. It reopened with new facilities replacing what was lost to the rains. Other than the layout, everything about it is different. The pool has turned from the casual family hangout to the more upscale lounge swimming as mansion-dwellers take over the neighborhood, constructing massive houses to survive the next flood.

That pool is where I first learned to swim. Dustin, a young man with a heavy Georgia twang taught me by throwing starbursts at the bottom of the pool and having me jump in to get them. To a certain extent, his hands off way of teaching worked, but I’d always accidentally drink the pool water, so every time I climbed out with my belly protruding like a pregnant three year old.

Once I was a strong enough swimmer, and probably even before that too, Nicole and I began hanging out down by the river. We were usually unsupervised because that just how things were back then. Nothing really came of it, except this one-time Jaime almost died on the way down. We were walking under a big oak tree headed toward the river with Jennifer and Jaime, and we found a big black snake. I’m still not sure why we thought it was a good idea, be we poked it with a stick. It sprung itself at us and nearly snagged Jaime’s ankle. It’s not that we didn’t expect a reaction from the snake, but we thought it was just a harmless water snake. Later we found out it was a cottonmouth. The girls from up the street who lived there year round were always trying to freak us out by telling us there were snakes and gators in the river. It scared the bejeezus out of us, but somehow we always found ourselves back in the water, even though they were probably right about the critters.

When I revisited the property, I walked under the same big oak tree I did the day we saw the cottonmouth down by the river. We used to swing on a tire swing there. It was really the neighbor’s, but they didn’t mind much. We’d wander all over their property anyway. The grass was still thick under my feet as I walked back to the river. I walked along the red clay wall that formed along the water. It led down to our rock wall that extended 50 more feet. Just about half way down the wall I saw the log. I recognized it from its roots that protruded from the water. The floods had moved it, but it didn’t get far.

Our first year swimming in the river, the same year that we met the Rubel sisters, was when we first discovered the log. If you walked a straight line from the back kitchen door to the river, you’d come upon a big log half submerged in the water. It was always something just out of reach, just beyond our capabilities. It’s not like we even had to fully immerse ourselves into the water to get to it, but the mud was sticky and sometimes we’d sink up to our knees. I was finally the first to get to the log. It felt like an act of courage, but anyone who wasn’t afraid of quicksand and crawfish could’ve done it. Eventually we all made it to the log and it became our yearly tradition to start the summer. It was a simple time; we didn’t need a tree house or Barbie dolls to entertain ourselves, but a log and some rocks in the river would do. Of course on the days when the thunderstorms clouded over the whole afternoon, a toy box of trolls served hours of entertainment, just like they did when my mom played with them as a kid.

The flood took the trolls too. I could just imagine them floating through the dirty water, the orange hair tangled with debris. In my head I could see the blue haired one washed up in someone’s garden, staring blankly at the sky as the sun dried up the land. It was chaos-- like the house had been turned into a washing machine, everybody’s belongings spinning around in the filthy toxic water. They found a neighbor’s American flag dangling in a tree along our driveway, just another sign of my grandparents’ American Dream crumbling. Household objects like papers, lampshades, and dishes were strewn across front yards and all down the street. The toxic water soiled both my mother and grandmother’s wedding dresses. Wedding photos, ruined. Yearbooks, ruined. My mom’s teddy bear, never seen again.

The night before the flood was the last night my grandparents would ever stay in their dream house. They eventually relocated to an apartment in the area, and my grandmother’s sickness worsened. After losing the house and their belongings, it seemed there was nothing for them to live for, except each other.

I don’t remember much of my grandma before she got sick. One year we went back to Georgia for Christmas with the family. All the cousins got together and with the many uncles and aunts indulged on some rich, Southern cooking, the kind that will let you gain five pounds in one night. That one year, things around the Gulf cooled off and it snowed in Atlanta. Not just a little snowflake on the frozen windshield, but a good few inches across the whole region. So like any white Christmas, we build a snowman and made vanilla ice cream with Grandma. That was before she got sick with Alzheimer’s. It was one of my first memories of her, but probably one of her last of me. When I was young, she was always telling me to put on socks or my feet would get cold on the tile floor, but the tile floor is long gone and my toes were never cold anyway.

After the flood, nothing was familiar. My grandparents hopped from apartment to apartment and eventually to a retirement home, where my grandma could get treatment. The spaces were strange. There were no familiar belongings or heirlooms, as there had been in the big gray and blue house. The only pieces of furniture that made it through the flood were two chairs from the fifties, wooden frames with scratchy beige cushions. When my grandparents’ time came, we took the chairs home. A few other possessions that were kept upstairs made it through the flood. I got to have the old typewriter and a lamp with a porcelain shade shaped like an airplane. My granddaddy used to keep both on his desk at the Delta Headquarters in downtown Atlanta. It was the end of something, receiving those items. As grateful as I was to have them, there’s nothing I wanted more than to have the big gray and blue house back, with my grandparents inside it. I was never about the objects and possessions. The trolls, the books, the twin wicker beds, I didn’t need any of those things anymore. I started to accept the loss, and move on, knowing there was nothing I could do to bring any of it back. And sure enough, I started to realize that maybe the memories I had of those summers were more valuable than anything I could have taken home from the house off Paces Ferry Road.