Camille stories still need telling

Early on in my newspaper career, I became aware of an important truth.
It’s one of those things you can hear someone say a million times, but never really get until it resonates in your own heart. This truth being that it’s the people opening up their hearts to the writer that makes the story.
An example of this is when I was gathering information in 1994 for a story commemorating the 25th anniversary of Hurricane Camille. Not having been a Virginia native, and having been serving in Vietnam when the storm struck the area on the night of Aug. 19-20, 1969, I had known nothing about it.
Because of people like Russ Simpson and the late Thomas Huffman and his wife, Adelaide, Camille became for me something much more than a name and tragic statistics.

I had sat at the Huffmans’ kitchen table in their home near Davis Creek in Nelson County as they told me about that horrifying night.
Neither Tommy nor his wife had ever talked publicly about their experiences before. It was their sense of duty to history that ultimately motivated them to open up.
“I don’t know if a person can completely get over something like that,” Tommy said. “I’m not a real religious person, but I’ve always had my faith.
“Without that I couldn’t have made it. The loss was so great — men, women, children, small babies. So great.”
Tommy and Adelaide lost 22 relatives in what continues to be the worst natural disaster in inland Virginia history. The hurricane claimed more than 150 lives, 125 of them in Nelson County.
Knowing the numbers is important, but numbers don’t break hearts when they’re erased. Neither do they convey a memory like a smiling face beneath an Easter bonnet, or a giggling baby yanking on grandpa’s beard.
Survivors have to tell those stories, so that history doesn’t become as still and lifeless as the graves of those who perish. Without eyewitness testimony, history can only relate a sterile fact like that it rained hard that night.

It’s far different when you hear someone like Tommy talking about seeing kinfolk wading through water to get to the safety of his home. His brother, his sister-in-law and their kids lived close to Davis Creek, and had their house swept away by floodwater.
“The rain was so dense you could hardly breathe,” Tommy said. “Russell had coats and sweaters laying over the children’s faces so they could breathe, it was raining so hard.
“The lightning and thunder was continuous, and the earth was trembling. The clouds seemed to come right down to the ground. We had been through some pretty bad thunderstorms in the mountains, but nothing had ever come close to that.”
As vivid as that made the tempest for me, what Adelaide then said was the most arresting thing I heard during all my interviews pertaining to the calamity.

When she had opened the door to let her brother-in-law and family in, a sinister odor hit her in the face like a fist.
“I asked Tommy what that terrible smell was,” Adelaide had said. “It was just awful. Tommy told me it was the smell of deep soil being turned up.”
I also clearly remembered Russ Simpson driving me in his pickup to where his cousin’s house had been just off Davis Creek Road. His cousin Jimmy had been his best friend.
“Right here is where Jimmy’s house had been,” Russ had said as he stood among trees as big around as his waist. “The whole family — seven people — were swept away and killed.
“Only their coonhound, Knucklehead, survived, because he was chained to an apple tree high on the hill. I haven’t been here since the year before the flood.
“I never wanted to come here, and it makes me feel uncomfortable to be here now.”
Despite the personal anguish felt in relating such awful events, people told me their stories. Bill Layton, who was 5 at the time, recalled how a dump truck filled with rocks was swept away like a toy by a rampaging Tye River.
Sheriff Whitehead told about being stunned by the sight of Hat Creek, so narrow he jumped it easily as a boy, being a quarter-mile wide with whitecaps on it. Warren Raines told me about clinging to a tree and watching houses and debris rushing by.

As each story was told, I felt an ever deepening responsibility to the tellers to make my story worthy of their words. The piece appeared on the front page of The Daily Progress on Sunday, Aug. 14, 1994.
A few days before that, with the deadline looming, I thought of something I had missed. I hadn’t asked Tommy where his relatives were buried, and beyond that I felt I needed to see the graves for myself.
It was something I could have easily written around, or never mentioned. But after a few minutes of trying to convince myself that the time-consuming trip to Nelson County wasn’t necessary, I hurried out of the office and headed south.
It was early evening when I got to Tommy’s home, and asked the question. He said he would take me there, as it was right up the road.

When we got to Oak Hill Baptist Cemetery, Tommy walked me over to two long rows of graves, each containing relatives he lost to Camille.
“I was here with every one of them,” Tommy had said. “There weren’t any flowers, few people, only those who could walk here.
“No church funerals, only graveside services. Once we made a positive identification the next thing was to get them buried. Sometimes we would bury two or three in a day here.
“Those we didn’t find we believe are buried somewhere under the sand, in bends of the rivers — buried in the bosom of the earth.”
I ended my first story about Hurricane Camille with Tommy’s words. I’ll end this one by thanking all the brave people who share often painful memories with strangers so that history might live.

On Thursday at 7 p.m. in the Nelson High School Auditorium a program of remembrance will be held to mark the 40th anniversary of Hurricane Camille. The event will include a reading of the names of those who perished, a slide presentation of rare photographs of the storm’s destruction, music by the Fortune family as well as the accounts of two survivors. The school is on U.S. 29 about 3 miles south of Lovingston. The program is free and open to the public.