Prologue
You have probably never heard of Wolf Valley. Most people haven’t. Before last fall, I was one of those people.
Its flood was a forgotten tragedy in American history, overshadowed by 9/11 and the war and eventually Katrina, I presume. But retelling that story was now my job. I have spent the last few years trying to break into the freelance writing world. The gig came from one of my most reluctant clients, a small literary magazine based in the northeast that you have surely never heard of. Why they cared to run an anniversary article on the flood more than 20 years later I am not entirely sure, but I wanted to nail it.
The assignment was to document the progress that has been made since the flood. “Talk to some locals,” my editor said. “Get a feel for how things have changed, what’s rebounded, what new struggles persist. Find a story to tell. Make it human.” So that’s exactly what I did, packing up the car and kissing my wife and baby girl goodbye. It took me about seven or eight hours to reach the valley. As the Wolf River winds, the state highway traces the bends and small towns appear along the way—Livingston, Huell, Elmswood, Jefferson City. For the better part of two days, I stopped into coffee shops and gas stations and libraries—anywhere I thought there would be people who could help me tell this valley’s story.
I met some interesting characters along the way, that was for sure. One man owned a barbershop that flooded and so he spent nearly 48 hours sitting on the roof in the rain. I met two sisters who were asleep in the same room when a tree came crashing through their ceiling, pinning them to their mattresses until help arrived hours later to cut them free. But the most interesting story came, as they often do, sitting in a bar.
This was a weekday afternoon and I was occupying a stool going over notes and listening to interview recordings I had made. It was one of those local haunts: low ceilings, dark even in the middle of the day, walls lined with beer signs and pictures of local high school teams. Despite some decent leads, I was feeling discouraged about my prospects of spinning a good story to the tune of eight thousand words, as my editor requested. The bartender was a young woman who looked to be flirting with the legal drinking age herself, with tanned skin and long, black hair that was braided and draped over her shoulder. She must have noticed my angst and brought me another Yuengling.
“What’s eating at ya?” she asked.
I sighed and set my pen down on the bar. “I’m supposed to be writing a story about this valley,” I told her.
“What about the valley?”
“About the flood, basically, and how the area rebounded. I can’t imagine you have any stories yourself,” I said, a nod to her age.
She smirked, still holding an empty pint glass with a thin layer of amber at the bottom swishing back and forth. “If you’re writing a story about the flood, there’s a guy you should talk to.”
The next day, I walked into the same bar to meet a man named Howard Lynch. I found him sitting at a table near the back, reading a worn copy of The Empty Hills of History, a novel I hadn’t read since high school.
“Mr. Lynch?” I asked as I stepped toward him. The first things I noticed were his hands. One was wrapped around a coffee mug, making it look more like a shot glass. He donned a white undershirt and had close-cropped gray hair that was receding. For a brief moment he ignored me, then he glanced my way and then back at his book, all without changing the expression on his face.
“You want to know about the flood, or you want to know my story?” he said more as a statement than a question.
Unsure how to respond, I asked if I could sit down. He nodded toward the vacant chair across from him. “Well, sir, I’d like to know it all.”
“Everyone wants to know it all these days,” he said and then finished his coffee. “Let me ask you, do you like stories? Because if you have some time, I have one you won’t believe.”
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The assignment, as I said, was to write eight thousand words for the literary magazine. I didn’t do that. Instead, I passed on the assignment altogether and wrote this book.
This is Howard’s story.
