The River is Not Kind

The Ohio is not a kind river.

When you grow up in the state of Ohio, you learn that the word “Ohio” comes from the Iroquois language. It means “Beautiful River,” but it’s closer to “Good River” or maybe just “Big River.” I suppose there was probably a time in history when the Ohio looked beautiful, though it doesn’t now. I don’t know if it’s a good river, but it isn’t kind.

The Ohio runs south between West Virginia and the state of Ohio, bending sharply around Weirton and more gradually down to Wellsburg. The river carved a trench in the Appalachian shale rock, and then the dynamite they used to carve Route 2 finished the job. You can see the stripes of brown sediment from eons ago, when all the land on earth was a single continent. The river itself is a ribbon of mercury-colored sludge, the most polluted body of water in the United States.

There have been so many drownings in the river this year.

Just after we went to Moundsville to see that Adena mound, the Ohio ate up the city of Wheeling and its surrounding small towns. The river backed up, all the little tributaries overflowed their banks, the flash floods roared through without warning, and at least seven people were killed. It took days and days to account for the missing. Just a little later, the Texas flooding with the much heavier death toll took over the news, but homes and businesses are still digging out up here. The people are angry at how long it’s taken to get any help– as if they’ve forgotten that this is Appalachia, where nobody ever comes to help.

I was so sorry for all those people, so outraged that the survivors will take so long to rebuild, so helpless I didn’t know what to do. But it kept raining.

Just two weeks later, a teenage girl drowned.

She was almost exactly Adrienne’s age. I was shocked when I heard she’d gone swimming in the Ohio. Nobody swims in this part of the river. If you want to go swimming and you can’t pay to get into the pool, you go to the lake or find a crick. I thought she must not be from around here and didn’t know how dangerous the Ohio can be, but she was from Burgettstown. Then I thought she must be a rebellious child who did something reckless without adult supervision, but it turned out there were two adults there. They weren’t her parents. They took a van of four children down to the riverside and let them play in the water without any flotation devices, nothing for their safety at all.

The river was high from all this rain, far higher and more dangerous than usual, but it’s never not dangerous down by the Veteran’s Memorial bridge. The youngest child in the swimming party was four, and none of them were strong swimmers. Neither of the adults tried to save the children when things started to go wrong. The locals are saying that the teenager was trying to save somebody else when the river swept her away.  She was found facedown in the water, fifty feet from shore. The medics tried to resuscitate her, but she was gone. Her father will never see her again. The people who took her swimming are in jail awaiting trial for their negligence, but no punishment seems severe enough.

Again I felt the grief, the helplessness, the anger washing over me as if I, too, was drowning. And then it rained again.

At the end of last week, a tractor trailer drove into the river.

It happened in Wellsburg, just about ten miles downriver, right next to the public library. Again, I was shocked. How could anyone be so bad at driving that they went over the embankment? But, in fact, he was an excellent driver. The news simply said that the driver sped through town and went over the bank, but a local sheriff and others who were there when it happened have filled in the rest of the story. It seems that the truck was heading down Route 27 to where it becomes Tenth Street with a wide load, when his brakes failed. Route 27 is a steep, steep road because of those shale cliffs. It dips down through the center of town, over Route 2 and ends in the library parking lot. All told, the truck and its cargo weighed 193,000 pounds. A truck that heavy with no brakes, on a hill that steep, is so dangerous it might as well be a bomb.

I’m told that the driver radioed his escort when he realized he lost control, and the escort made sure to halt traffic at all the intersections. He couldn’t stop or slow down, but he kept steering, and the truck didn’t go off the road. It didn’t hit the houses that are so close together in that part of Wellsburg. It didn’t hit the library which was open for business, and where a fitness class was taking place. The driver held his course, down that narrow road, hitting nothing but one tree, and then he went over the bank. They found the body still in the truck, eighteen feet deep, nearly twenty feet from shore.

People were praising the driver all over social media, posting ridiculous pictures of semi trucks with halos and angel wings.

I felt that rush of emotion again– horror, then sorrow, but not anger this time.

The Ohio river is not beautiful or kind, but the human beings here can be good. No one is coming to save us, but sometimes we save one another. There are foolish and reckless people here, but there are also heroes.

It rained again.

It is raining now.

It feels as if it will rain forever.