Recovery along Lake Katherine includes sadness, patience and perspective

Cole Marshall can hardly catch his breath, the tears come so quickly as his father hugs him tightly.

“Those memories are just so sweet,” the 7-year-old says through heavy sobs and sniffles.

His father, Steve Marshall, had been reciting memories they had made in the house on Burwell Lane.

Racing toy cars down the hallway. Shooting Nerf basketballs in the living room. Playing baseball in the front yard and hitting home runs across the street. Walking up the hill together to Brennan Elementary School.

“You’re right,” Marshall tells his son.

“But we’re going to make a lot more. ... It’s good to be sad, as long as we don’t stay sad. Grief and being sad about certain things, that’s part of life. ... It makes us sad that we don’t have the house any more, but we still have the memories.”

Devastating floodwaters swept through Marshall’s neighborhood at the foot of Lake Katherine on Oct. 4. The flood stole his home, most of his possessions – and nearly his life.

With a little over a month’s time now between them and the disaster, Marshall and his neighbors are working through the process of recovering and starting anew.

More than 70 homes on either side of Gills Creek below Lake Katherine were flooded. Homes on Burwell Lane were among the hardest hit. Now, their owners find themselves in various stages of the recovery process, from taking inventory of their lost possessions to filing claims to securing construction permits and hiring contractors.

Marshall, like many others, is playing something of a waiting game for the moment, as he sorts through claims with his insurance company and FEMA.

But he’s grateful to even be in the position he is in.

Marshall awoke that Sunday morning, Oct. 4, around 5:30 a.m. and stepped out of bed into ankle-deep water. He looked out his kitchen window and saw the water standing within a foot of the roof of his Honda Civic.

He went out a side door to check on an elderly neighbor next door, now wading through thigh-deep water. He called 911 from the neighbor’s porch, then tried to walk across the street.

Then the water swept him away.

“I was able to hang onto a tree, and that’s when I called for help,” Marshall remembered. “I yelled for help, and the second time I said ‘help,’ the guy said, ‘Where are you?’ The fireman. And he swam in and got me.”

Marshall is still hoping to reconnect with his guardian angel firefighter.

“He was a true hero,” he said.

Jeff and Karen Whalen know who their angel was that Sunday morning.

John Bradshaw in his jonboat rescued the Whalens and their two golden retrievers, Rosie and Molly, from the porch of their Burwell Lane home.

“There was no reason to panic,” Jeff Whalen said he had thought at the time. “Emotionally, it never hits you really until ... we turned right off of Burwell, and people are standing there clapping. And you realize, ‘Oh, wow.’”

The Whalens, who are still waiting for their gutted house to dry from the two feet of water it took on, hope to complete reconstruction and move back in by the end of May, at the latest. In the meantime, they’re living in a condo downtown.

Still, they’re discovering items that washed – from where? – into their yard and woods by the creek. This week, Karen picked up a small china bowl from the creek bank on a day when she waited for a contractor to come by to talk about cabinets. She placed the bowl inside someone’s red plastic box that had washed up earlier in their yard. Inside, someone’s perfectly intact china pieces, wrapped in newspapers, had been kept bone dry in the flood.

Down the embankment behind their house, a muddied, toddler-sized bicycle hangs suspended some 12 to 15 feet up in a tree.

“We’re just going to leave it there for perspective,” Jeff Whalen said.

Steve Marshall finds his perspective sitting at a breakfast table with Cole, visiting for a weekend from his mother’s house in North Augusta, and his older son, 23-year-old Ryan, who lives about a mile from the Burwell Lane house.

He finds a sense of normalcy in watching Cole play soccer on his North Augusta team, in talking baseball with his boys, in umpiring games for Trenholm Little League.

Living in Irmo now, Marshall misses his in-town home, misses his running trail along Lake Katherine, misses living so close to Ryan. Unlike the Whalens, Marshall won’t be rebuilding on Burwell Lane; it would be “cost prohibitive,” he said.

But he has his sons, his fiance and his dog, Spencer, who survived the flood by floating atop the living room couch.

Other than the days his sons were born, Marshall said, “I don’t know if I’ve ever cried with joy like I did when I saw her sitting on the couch” when he returned to the house.

Perspective is the gift the flood has given Marshall.

“The little things, they matter more, and the little things matter less, if that makes sense,” Marshall said. “Family time and time to be a dad, be an employee and a public servant. But people fretting over the small stuff, that’s very remote from my thought process now.

“From that standpoint, as crazy as it sounds, I feel blessed to have gone through what I’ve gone through.”

This story was originally published November 14, 2015 at 6:02 PM with the headline "Recovery along Lake Katherine includes sadness, patience and perspective."