Disaster in Paradise. Amanda Bath

alive, salvage the valuables, extract some of the furniture. Perhaps all was not yet lost.

      The roof and walls collapsed like a house of cards, crushing everything.

      Photo: Greg Utzig

      Chapter 2: In Limbo

      Friday, July 13

      The morning dawned overcast but calm. I’d worried the lake might be too rough for a boat trip. Osa had arranged with family friend Deane to take us over. I was up and dressed before six a.m., barely able to swallow a bit of toast and a cup of tea, anxious to be off. Every second counted, I figured, if my little Ozzie was still alive, terrified, perhaps injured. I indulged a brief fantasy in which I heard his voice calling from the wreckage as he ran towards me, his tail held high, indicating unbounded delight and relief that I’d come back for him.

      Osa arrived on foot with their battered old beige cat carrier. It cheered me no end that she’d thought to bring it. Deane’s truck pulled up. Uli, who’d stayed the night, waved us off in his batik sarong.

      Deane is a skilled boat operator, calm and professional. At the Kaslo marina he went over the safety drill, handed us life-jackets and checked the boat, a sixteen-foot white fibreglass Bowrider runabout, with a 50 hp outboard motor.

      “I was over twice yesterday,” Deane said, zipping up his jacket and donning a knitted cap. “I brought Rachel Rozzoni, her three children and their dogs to Kaslo, then went back for the household essentials on the second trip.”

      It seemed to take forever to unmoor and putter out of the bay at “Dead Slow” speed. It was getting close to 9:30 a.m. My heart was racing and I felt like screaming: “For God’s sake, hurry up, come on, let’s get out of here!”

      Deane told us that RCMP and Kaslo Search and Rescue boats patrolled the shore. “I doubt they’ll let us land today.” I could tell he hoped that would be the case. Osa and I gave each other a look. We were definitely landing today.

      Finally we were outside the bay and picked up speed. The wind tugged at my hair as the boat bounced over the waves, heading north across the great grey expanse of water under looming clouds. I soon got cold. I’d had so few clothes to choose from that morning and had made do with a pair of horrendous blue and white striped gardening pants, an old cotton tank top and a yellow work shirt that held no heat. Osa, well-prepared as always, handed me a windbreaker jacket.

      It was nearing ten a.m. as we approached the Landing. A helicopter circled overhead but abruptly turned and sped up the hill. Had it seen something? The bay was empty except for one boat with a news camera. Osa said, “They’ve no right to be here filming people’s misfortunes.”

      I nodded, thinking only about how I was going to rescue Ozzie. I knew he hated cat carriers. Would he be too frightened to let me pick him up?

      We slowly cruised the shoreline. The boathouses, the canoes and other watercraft were already pulled high above the inundated beach. At the end of June Christopher had used the winch on George the pickup to drag the Burt boathouse three metres back because debris in the water was slamming into the front posts.

      We continued round the bay. I saw Christopher’s two sentinel driftwood trees, partners to our garden gateposts, standing next to our beach path. “Everything looks so normal!”

      But what came next made us gasp: a rampart of logs stacked as high as a house sat at the mouth of Gar Creek. Greg was right: the landslide had halted right there at the edge of the lake, and barely any debris floated around it.

      The lakeshore itself was untouched except for the effects of the high water, which had covered many landmarks. I craned my neck to catch a first glimpse of our home through the underbrush. Where was it? “There!” I shouted.

      “Oh my God!” cried Osa.

      Pinned against the tall fir trees, the deck slanted downwards, the corner post snapped off. The walls were gone and the roof lay on a crushed tangle of cedar shakes, broken glass and deck furniture that included my lounger. The house stood only about ten metres back from the new high water line. I saw my planters and geranium pots, bright smudges of red and salmon pink, still clinging valiantly to the edge of the deck.

      Deane cut the engine. “This isn’t a good spot. It’s dangerous and I don’t want to let you off the boat.”

      I cajoled and insisted. “Deane, I just want five minutes to call Ozzie. Surely we haven’t come all this way just to look at the house from the water?”

      Osa chimed in. “Yes, we’ll be okay. I really want to have a look too.”

      I gazed at the destruction in front of us. “It’s been twenty-four hours since the landslide and everything’s exactly the same as in Greg’s photos yesterday. Go on, Deane. Surely five minutes on shore won’t make any difference?”

      He nosed the boat in, bow first, and I jumped out onto the rocks. Osa shimmied off and went racing away towards the house.

      “Are you coming?” I asked him.

      “No.” He shook his head. “Listen, stay close to the boat. Tell her.” He gestured in Osa’s direction. “Stay close to the boat.”

      I nodded and placed the cat carrier on a log. I took one photograph of the weirdly deformed deck, put my camera away in my pocket and called out to Ozzie.

      Just seconds later I heard an ear-splitting cracking noise above us. I thought of the sharp thunderclap you hear when a storm is directly overhead. I looked up: was this a thunderstorm? The snapping and cracking became more insistent. What was that deep roaring sound?

      Deane shouted at us: “Run! Run! Run! Run! Run!”

      I flew back to the boat, didn’t notice the rough, uneven rocks. My feet didn’t even get wet. Osa, however, had farther to go. From the boat I watched her scramble over logs, trip, recover, then she was at the shore. Deane already had the motor in reverse as Osa struggled to climb over the bow. Deane yelled at her to jump, and I hauled her in by her jacket, pulling on her upper arms.

      For a split second that felt like eons the weight of the two of us in the bow held us pinned to the rocks. Trees just above the shoreline were beginning to bend towards us. The noise was deafening.

      Osa screamed, “Go! Go! Go!” Deane was already revving hard and we were off the shore, thrusting backwards at full throttle as trees toppled. A mountainous surge of mud and debris thundered down over the spot where we had just been standing. The boat accelerated backwards.

      As the mudslide hit the water it created an enormous disturbance that tossed us like a cork. Whole trees submerged and leapt skyward like torpedoes all around the boat. Any one of them could have capsized us. A tsunami-like wave, with log debris behind it, followed us out from shore, higher than the boat, catching up fast. It was right on the bow when it seemed to shrink slightly and gave Deane the opportunity he’d been looking for to turn the boat around, bow to the lake. Then the great swell hit us.

      Deane gunned the engine into forward. Debris hit the propeller; the motor slammed left. Deane pulled back on the throttle, wrenched the wheel right and jammed the throttle forward again. We sped a hundred metres out before we stopped, the boat rocking wildly. Mud washed down the hill in wave after brown wave.

      My eyes were glued to the place on the shore where we’d just been standing, now unrecognizable, as the creek disgorged its innards. The house disappeared under mud. There was no hope for Ozzie, or for salvaging anything. I stood up, grasping the rear seatback with frozen fingers as we rocked. The slide went on and on.

      Francis Silvaggio and his cameraman, Mike, a Global News TV crew, were in the other boat and had filmed everything. I beckoned them over, urgently wanting to talk. Silvaggio interviewed me as we held the two boats together with our hands. This was the first of many media interviews I gave over the next seventy-two hours.

      I felt calm and strangely clear-headed. I don’t