Water, Stone, Heart - By Will North Page 0,92

up to the garden terrace cut into the hillside above, and then up a ladder she'd had built to enable her to ascend to the main road, which did a switchback above her house. She had no opportunity to look back. Thus it was that she was spared the moment when the venerable, three-centuries-old Harbour Light building, with a sigh like a last breath, collapsed into the flood and was sucked downstream like so much driftwood. It made hardly a sound, as if its seniority rendered complaint undignified.

Once the car park was clear of people, Jamie retreated to the flood's edge, where crowds, unaccountably, still milled about in the downpour, gazing at the disaster before them as if hypnotized. He tried one more time to urge them up the main road north out of town, and then turned toward the Cobweb, which, because it was on slightly higher ground, had thus far avoided the kind of massive inundation its neighbors had suffered.

Flora met him at the door.

“I thought I told you to stay upstairs,” he snapped.

Flora ignored this and pulled him toward her in a full-body embrace.

“Be quiet, you,” she whispered.

Jamie relented. He was exhausted.

“I've been watching you from upstairs, you maniac. Did you think you could rescue the entire car park?”

“It was worth a try,” he said weakly. “Any chance of a pint?”

Elizabeth, her assistant, and the two-family brood in the loft of the Visitor Centre had been able to keep their spirits up in the dim light by means of the stories, games, and songs she improvised to distract the children. This strategy had been largely successful … until, at about 5:00 p.m., another massive wall of water and debris smashed into the building. The upstream two-thirds of the structure imploded and was torn away in moments, engulfed in the torrent. By some miracle, the loft was in the portion of the building that survived. But when Elizabeth saw that the water now was up to the top rung of the ladder they'd used, she pushed the Velux skylight open as far as it would go and she and her assistant helped the parents and the children up to the apex of what was left of the roof.

Exposed to the downpour, straddling the roof peak and the lower apex of the building housing the Visitor Centre's public restrooms, Elizabeth and her stranded families felt that if they didn't drown from the flood, they would surely drown from the rain itself. Visibility was nil. So when a new sound found its way through the thunder of the river and the scream and thud of collapsing buildings, Elizabeth struggled to place it: a rhythmic whomp-whomp-whomp that throbbed in her bones, not just in her ears.

“And then I realized what it was,” she would later tell a reporter. “I felt like Radar O'Reilly on that American television show M*A*S*H. Incoming helicopters!”

Earlier, in far northern Scotland, the rescue coordination center at the Royal Air Force base at Kinloss, on the Moray Firth near Inverness, had responded to initial police and coast guard reports of a flood at Boscastle by scrambling rescue helicopters based at RAF Chivenor, fifty miles north of Boscastle, in Devon, and the Royal Navy Air Squadron base at Culdrose, forty-five miles to the southwest, in Cornwall. Rescue 169, a big yellow RAF Sea King, was first on the scene. It made its initial pass through nearly impenetrable rain and hail, with lightning strikes happening almost continuously at higher ground. Moments later, another Sea King, the red and gray RNAS 193, approached from the south along the coast. Marine captain Pete McLelland, peering down from his copilot's seat through the teeming rain, watched as a swollen fan of coffee-colored water surged out of the harbor into the bright green sea, followed almost immediately by a churning mass of debris, trees, and automobiles. They dove close to the sea to look for trapped drivers, but could find none, and, in any event, most of the cars were tipped nose down, like feeding ducks, by the weight of their engine blocks.

Responding to a police report, the yellow RAF helicopter went off to deal with a reported heart attack. RNAS 193 then dipped into the mouth of the valley.

Several of the crew members were veterans of the first Gulf War, but what they saw below horrified them nonetheless: the valley, from hillside to hillside and in both directions—indeed, the entire lower village—was one vast, raging river. “My God,” McLelland heard someone say through