Moving to Italy: Stranded--Part 4

Meanwhile, back on the road:

With much slipping and sliding and a fair share of Italian curse words from George, Zio Silvio drove them safely along the mountain track to Montaldo. Still worried about the sliding hillside that they would have to face on the way back, they rocketed down the paved road to the two-lane highway then headed towards Gaminella. The driving became more difficult once they neared the village as the swollen river had reached the road. As they splashed along, they saw many houses on the river side of the street with muddy water up to their front doors. After parking the little Fiat on a high spot, they sloshed to the pharmacy for my father-in-law's medicine and to the grocery store for food. Then they headed back the way they had come.  

The hillside track was still open and the rain had let up, but through the drifting fog they could see the hunk of grass and mud had slipped even closer to the road. They paused. Eyeing the dangerous mudslide, George wanted to turn back, but Zio Silvio was determined to brave the threat—and he was driving. He put his little Fiat in gear, forged through the muck, and gunned it past the threatening overhang. He continued fighting the fog and the puddles along the track until they got back to the gravel road of Bertola.

Pacing once more, I heard the putt-putt of the little Fiat coming down the hill. The children yelled “Papa! Papa!” as the car rounded the corner of the house and pulled into the courtyard. The men brought enough food and medicine to last for five more days, but I prayed that none of us would have a serious relapse, at least until the bridge was visible once more.  

The rain drizzled off and on all that day and half of the next. We couldn’t tell what was happening to the river because the world below stayed shrouded in the fog bank, but inside we were warm and dry and fed, and my in-laws were slowly recovering from the flu.

On the third day we heard the whine of the mailman's motorcycle as it crossed the fog-bound bridge and climbed the hill. We all cheered. We were reconnected to the world!  

I raced down the stairs and stood outside our front door while the mailman, still straddling his purring bike, pulled the damp letters from his pouch and held them out to me. As I took them from his hand the bands of tension around my heart released, and I felt a rush of relief.

But at that moment it hit me just how vulnerable we really were.  

NOTE:

The story of our move to Italy starts with "Arrival" on the June 26, 2017 blog post.

Moving to Italy: Stranded--Part 3

In wondering what was happening to George and Zio Silvio, I began to think about food. I checked my stock and found we still had half a jar of the peanut butter my sister had sent, but only two remaining rolls of chewable bread. We had three hard-as-nails rolls that we could use in soup, but just a small hunk of beef to make it, and one onion. We had two packages of pasta and three jars of pears that I had canned in the fall. The vegetable garden was in its winter doldrums, having been under snow just a few weeks before, so we couldn’t go there. Allowing our supplies to get so low was foolish. With my in-laws there were seven of us left in the house. If George and Zio Silvio didn’t get through, or if they couldn’t get back, we had only enough food to last a couple of days.

What to do? In my nervous pacing I pictured myself leaving the twins with my mother-in-law, hiking with the boys through the rain up the hill to Bertola and knocking on the door of one of the villagers there. I had only nodded to them and didn’t know their names, but surely they wouldn’t refuse to help us. I pulled out my Italian grammar book and practiced saying “My children are hungry, do you have any food?”  

When I look back at this time I can’t help smiling at how melodramatic this sounds. I was, and am, a relatively private person so to knock on the door to beg would be opening myself up to relative strangers, surrendering my dignity and self-respect. But to give credit to my 25 year-old self, I wasn’t content to sit back and wait to be rescued. I would have done whatever it took for my children.

Those morbid thoughts just made me more anxious, so I put away the grammar book, and started a load of laundry. After that I settled the twins with Lego while I tried to teach Paul and James the alphabet, then wrote a long letter to my sister describing our predicament. All the while my thoughts were with George and Zio Silvio. Too tense to pray formally, I just kept thinking, “Please God, let them be safe.” 

View from the balcony on a foggy day.

Moving to Italy: Stranded--Part 1

Despite my fears, Marino didn’t die during that first night home from hospital.  

To our great relief, he was much better the next morning . In spite of coughing most of the night, he said it was the first time he had slept at all in ten days. It was a good thing he was no worse, because when we looked out of the window we saw that the river had risen dramatically.  The night’s heavy rain, combined with the run-off from the melting snow of the distant Alps, had been enough to overflow the riverbanks and flood the bridge. All that day, as I rotated the laundry drying on the radiators beneath the windows, I could see the large puddle of river slowly spread in uneven muddy swirls into the fields on either side of the road. At the place where the bridge should have been, a muddy torrent curved as it raced by the fields.

Once the river submerged the bridge, it meant the downhill road to and from the village was useless. There was only one other way to get out of Gabi, but it was difficult and dangerous. If we followed the road up the hill past the little hamlet of Bertola, we could make our way along a single dirt track. This narrow track meandered through a copse of trees to the hilltop settlement of Montaldo. From there we could take the paved road down to the main highway that ran along the center of the valley. We had traversed this back road often during the summer when we went to church in Montaldo, but when it rained the track became muddy and treacherous, so we avoided it. Our car, although small by American standards, was really too large for such a narrow road. After the heavy downpours of the last few weeks we knew the track would be impossibly soaked, and the mud could either suction our tires, or slide us down the steep hillside. The drop was enough to guarantee serious injury. We watched the rain as it stopped and started all day, hoping it would let up enough for the river to subside. I desperately wanted to see the bridge reappear, but no matter how often I looked out it remained hidden beneath racing muddy water. We were essentially cut off from the outside world.

By the following day my father-in-law had taken all of the medication the hospital had provided for his supposed airplane trip, but he was still coughing. On top of that, our food supply was getting low. Between our illnesses and the hospital visits, our customary daily trips to the village shop had been interrupted, and so we had relied on Zio Silvio to bring us a few things that we needed. As a result, we had not really restocked in two weeks and many of our food staples had been used up. However, it was still raining, and the bridge was still flooded blocking the road to the grocery store, and more importantly, blocking the road to the pharmacy.