Part 6
It grew. Lyle had stood beside the haul road at shift change with forty pieces of heavy equipment rolling past in the dark. This was that sound, and then more, and it kept building. The gravel under his boots began to shiver.
“Everybody out of the shack,” Hollis shouted. “Up by the loader. Now.”
They came out and stood in a ragged line in the floodlight glare from below. Nobody spoke. Jen had her hand over her mouth. Dana was beside Lyle, and he felt her find his sleeve and hold it.
The front came around the bend above the camp at 8:41.
It was a moving wall of broken ice slabs, whole spruce trees, rock, and gray water that steamed in the cold. It came down the creek channel far faster than anything that heavy should move, grinding and booming. It hit the bridge approach, and the approach was gone.
Asphalt peeled up in sheets and tumbled. The water climbed the shop doors. One of the graders they had left by the tanks tipped slowly onto its side and went under. Then the generator shed flooded, and every light in the camp went out at once.
In the dark the roar went on. They could hear the water pounding against what was left of the bridge, and fuel drums booming as they rolled away downstream. Something big tore loose somewhere and went with a long scream of metal.
Hollis counted heads by voice in the dark, calling each name and waiting for its answer. There were eight, and Dana, and Lyle. He counted a second time, and then a third.
The water ran high for an hour, then slowly began to drop. By eleven, when Jen got a flashlight onto the camp, the shop stood in a gray lake of ice and silt up to its windowsills. The cookhouse where they’d been drinking coffee at seven had shifted a foot off its blocks, and the chair Lyle had stood beside was sitting on the steps outside, on its back.
No one said much after that. People slept in shifts, in the shack and the cab and the crew truck.
Toward three in the morning, Lyle and Dana sat together on the bench in the shack while the others slept around them. A propane heater ticked between their feet.
“There’s a folder in my sled bag,” Dana said, without looking at him.
“Birch Hill.”
She turned her head. “You saw it.”
“The corner of it.”
“I was going to bring it up this weekend. I had a whole speech.” She rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. “About how you can’t live up there alone anymore, at your age, with no road and no neighbors and a bear in the yard. I practiced it in the plow.”
“Tonight would be a good night for it,” Lyle said. “You’d win.”
She didn’t give the speech. After a while she leaned sideways until her head rested on his shoulder, the way she had when she was nine and fell asleep in his truck on the drive back from her grandmother’s. He let it stay there. He kept one hand on the ledger inside his coat.
In the morning a state geologist landed a helicopter on the bench road and flew the valley. The dam had a breach through its center wide enough to drive a truck through, and the pond behind it was empty. Before she left, she photographed the January page of Lyle’s ledger, times and all, including the line B. heard it first, and didn’t ask about it.
Two days later, when the creek road had been scouted, Dana took him up to the station.
The cabin was still standing, but the creek had gone through it. The water had come in under the door and climbed to the windowsills, then frozen where it stood. The whole lower half of the room was a block of gray ice with the legs of the table sunk in it, and the stove stood in it to the firebox door. The instrument shelter lay flat in the yard, and the rain gauge was gone.
The second shelf of the bookcase was below the line.
Lyle walked to it on the ice. The thirty-one ledgers had swelled and fused into a single gray brick, cloth and paper and silt frozen together. He took out his knife and worked at the edge of the first one for a while. The cover came away in a gray flake, and the pages under it were pulp.
He stopped and put the knife away.
Dana stayed in the doorway and let him have the room.
When he came out, she was standing by the sled with the manila folder in her mitten. The corner was still bent where he’d first seen it.
“They have an opening in March,” she said. “I’m not going to make the speech. I’m just going to hand you this.” Lyle took it from her…
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