Drowned in Hell's Creek

I look out the back passenger window while my friend Lori and her father return me home after a day of swimming. I watch my thirteen-year-old world pass; red clay embankments, kudzu, cotton fields, pinewoods, and waterways all around. We approach my parent’s patch of land on my maternal grandfather’s old farm. My grandmother’s house is nestled at the bottom of their hill behind a tributary of Hell’s Creek. We turn right onto their road over a large metal culvert sticking out from the embankment allowing the little brook to go under the gravel lane and form a small pool between my grandmother’s and aunt’s houses.

“You can drop me here,” I tell Mr. Sanford. “Looks like everybody’s on Mawmaw’s porch.” My mother and her two sisters are visiting with my grandmother. Their husbands and most of the kids are enjoying this fine afternoon outside too. “Thanks for the day and the ride home!” I wait to wave goodbye after hopping out. Something amazing and envy inspiring happens. Lori and Mr. Sanford swap places. I watch in wonder as my best friend drives away.

Our family time continues around me but I’m uninvolved, intent on imagining myself driving away like that. When Daddy announces he is going home, I want to go with him. “Can I drive?”

Dad doesn’t hesitate. “Sure!” I can’t believe it. He’s going to let me drive. I’ve seen him and mom driving all my life. I know all about it: the key turns, the gas accelerates, the gear shifter makes it go forward or backward, the brake stops, the wheel turns. We climb into his International Harvester Scout II, and I get behind the wheel. Daddy buckles his seatbelt while I execute step one; the key turn. The engine roars to life like it would for a fully-licensed driver. I am over the moon. This is big. My mother and her extended family will see me so grown-up.

I push down the brake and move the shifter into drive. I pull to the end of the driveway and tap the brake, then accelerate, turn the wheel left, and move the SUV onto the road. I don’t know how to straighten it back; the car continues curving left toward the creek. The Scout does a nosedive, headlights and front fender smack sternly into the culvert, and we flip upside down into the water. My head strikes the top of the car and I’m knocked out. The next thing I know, I am coming to on the sand bar between the creek and the yard, drenched, sputtering water, and covered in glass and sand. I try to rise but my cousin Sonia won’t let me. “Just wait for the ambulance.”

“I’m okay, let me up.”

“You are not okay. Just lay back down.”

I drift in and out of consciousness and am so confused each time I wake-up. I want to sleep for days, and little registers until I am finally fairly conscious in the hospital emergency room. My wet sandy clothes have been removed, and my mother covers me better with the hospital gown. I have no memory of what happened but I know it must have been bad. “Where’s Daddy?”

“He’ll be right back.” Is she just telling me that to placate me? I have fuzzy ideas that we were in an accident. Is my Daddy alive? Oh no, what if I killed Daddy?

It seems forever. Doctors and nurses check on me, and I am in and out again, but eventually more in than out. They are ready to move me to a room for observation overnight. My sunburned arms are even more irritated by clinging sand. A large shard of glass is removed from my left upper arm and another from my left thigh, right above the knee. Finally, coming around a corner I see my father. Relief and sorrow rush through my system and out my tear ducts as I cling to him from the top of my gurney.

I am not allowed to shower. I am not allowed out of bed unaided. I spend 24 hours wishing my bedclothes weren’t a sandbox. When it’s checkout time, my father has procured a Pontiac Bonneville from a local used car dealer (we are a one car family) which I quickly name Lurch. “Can I drive home?” I am a cheeky little brat. But my parents laugh and simultaneously say no.

The Rest of the Story

It is many years later. I am grown and married with two kids of my own. My mother’s sister, Charlotte, and her husband Ray are visiting us in New Jersey. After enjoying spectacular Italian Hoagies from our local corner Nixon’s General Store, we linger at the table catching up and reminiscing. I try to make amends for the time we were on my grandmother’s porch and I teased this NJ native, Uncle Ray about being a Yankee. “I will never marry someone from New Jersey,” and here he is visiting my Pine Barren home. He recalls the scene seared in my family’s collective memory from that same porch. It is like a scab formed around the part of my brain holding the accident, and now the scar only allows vague images to come to view. Uncle Ray tells the story of what they saw from the porch; the nose dive, the Scout’s wheels above the water, their dash to the sand bar, my father emerging from the creek, looking around and saying, “Where’s Rhonda.” I am still inside the car, submerged and unconscious. Dad goes back into the creek, under the water, through the broken driver’s window, and hauls me onto the bank. I am not breathing. His Marine Corps training kicks in, and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation saves my life.

After Uncle Ray recounts the horrible trauma my whole family had to witness, I feel incredible grief. I can’t imagine a mother watching her child drown. Thank goodness for a father’s willingness to leave the safety of the bank, go back down under Hell’s Creek’s waters, drag out one as good as dead, and breath life back into her.

Your turn: I didn’t speak of the accident for many years, partly because I couldn’t remember it well, but mostly from embarrassment. Only after my uncle retold it from his point of view, did I thoroughly revisit the event. Would hearing a childhood trauma from another perspective help you process it?