The Patience of Floods

The official position of the Riverbend Water Authority was that the bell did not ring. Engineering had a memo on it. The sound reported by fishermen, kayakers, and one badly shaken insurance adjuster was attributed to thermal expansion of the intake tower, to gas releases from decomposing vegetation, to wind shear across the spillway gates — to anything, in short, with the decency not to be a church bell, because the church in question had been at the bottom of the reservoir since 1968.

Nora Vasquez had read the memo. She had, in fact, written the most recent appendix to it. She was the Authority's senior dam inspector, twenty-two years of crawling galleries and reading piezometers, and she did not believe in drowned bells.

She believed in her instruments. Her instruments, on the third Tuesday of June, recorded a low-frequency acoustic event at 4:11 a.m., centered not at the intake tower but a half-mile upstream, at the coordinates where the maps from before the flood showed the steeple of St. Brendan's.