Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 5, 1995 TAG: 9511060123
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE HUDSON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Thirteen-year-old Samantha Blankenship gets up from the dining-room table and ducks down the hallway. She returns holding a coat hanger in the air.
"This is the yellow raincoat," she says matter-of-factly.
It's an image that sticks in the minds of many who remember - or have tried to forget - the Roanoke Valley's Flood of '85: A 3-year-old girl, lost in the violent waters of Mason Creek, found seven hours later, bruised but safe.
Rescuers recall that she was sitting on an island amid the raging waters. She was singing and crying softly to herself. And she was wearing a little yellow rain slicker.
Samantha, her grandmother and a cousin were swept into the creek after their car stalled at a bridge on Virginia 699 in Roanoke County. Sadie Gusler and Steven Gusler, 10, did not survive.
For the family, it was a day of wrenching, conflicting emotions - the joy and relief of finding Samantha and the shock and sorrow of losing Steven and Sadie Gusler.
"It's something that each person has to deal with on their own," says Brenda Blankenship - Samantha's mother, Steven's aunt and Sadie Gusler's daughter. "You go through it in your own way. Some take longer than others. ... You go on and you do the best you can."
Brenda Blankenship says that, for her, her dad, and her sisters and brother and many others in the family, "it's something we deal with every day."
For Samantha, it's different, because her memories of Steven and her grandmother are, naturally, so cloudy.
People tell her that when you lose a loved one, "All you can do is hold onto the memories."
But she says, "I can hardly remember anything. I was only 3."
As the rains came down and the creeks rose that morning a decade ago, Sadie Gusler strapped Samantha into the passenger seat and drove to get Steven at Mason's Cove Elementary, which was closing because of the flooding.
They picked up Steven, stopped at the store, and headed home.
About 11 a.m., the car stalled at the edge of a bridge over Mason Creek, which was rushing over and around the structure. Samantha remembers that her grandmother got her out and tried to get them out of the waters, carrying Samantha and holding Steven by the hand.
Sadie Gusler slipped on a log in the water. They fell in and split apart. The waters pulled them hundreds of feet downstream.
Samantha recalls hanging onto a small tree, perhaps on the creek bank or on the small island that had been formed as the floodwaters gushed around both sides of a high patch. Her grandmother found her and told Samantha to hang on while she went to find Steven. She did not return.
Samantha believes she clung to the tree for several hours. At some point - she can't remember when or how - she made her way onto the little island.
Brenda Blankenship worked the night shift, so she was asleep until the phone rang at 1:30 p.m. It was her sister, Debbie Herron. She wanted to find out if their mom and the kids had made it home all right.
No one was home, so Brenda Blankenship went out on the road looking for them. She found the empty car at the bridge. Chunks of pavement had been ripped away.
While police and rescue workers searched, they kept Brenda Blankenship in a room at the local rescue squad. She spent the day "just hoping and praying they were all OK."
About 6 p.m., a searcher spotted something yellow on the island. It was Samantha. A rescuer tied a rope around his waist and swam across. He strapped her into a harness, and a helicopter carried her up.
Her mother heard a helicopter overhead, came out, heard they'd found something, but was told to go back and wait. Finally, they brought Samantha to her, soaked but alive.
``The only thing she said to me, she looked at me and said, `Mama, I lost one of my shoes.'''
They found the bodies of Steven and Sadie Gusler downstream.
Rescue workers told Brenda Blankenship that Samantha might have been saved by three small air holes under each sleeve of her raincoat. They surmised the holes might have trapped some air inside her coat, allowing it to act as a life preserver in the water.
They stripped off the jacket and her clothes, wrapped her in a towel and whisked her off to the hospital for X-rays and other tests. She had a cold, a few bruises and sore muscles.
In a few days, she had all her energy back.
Still, she feared the bridge.
"I remember I didn't want to go down that road again," Samantha says.
She was afraid the waters would take her grandfather just as they took her grandmother.
"She threw a fit every time we tried to go that way," Brenda Blankenship says. "She didn't want 'Pops' to die. That's what she said."
Finally, they took her to the bridge and showed her that the flood waters were gone.
People in the community reached out to the family. A neighbor took up a collection. Steven's school dedicated a tree to him, and his Cub Scout troop presented a plaque to his mother and grandfather. The Moose Lodge honored Sadie Gusler.
Samantha, who turned 4 a few weeks after the flood, dealt with it in her own way. People didn't press her to talk about it. But when she wanted to talk, they listened.
Some folks called her "little miracle child." They told her Jesus had held onto her when she was in the water.
One day not long afterward she was watching TV at an aunt's house. The aunt was in the kitchen doing the dishes. Samantha walked in quietly. The aunt turned around, and there she was.
"You know what?" Samantha said, reaching her hands out into a grasping position. "Jesus didn't have to hold onto me because I was holding on just like this."
Samantha is now a ninth-grader at Craig County High School. Her family plans to move to Craig soon. She will turn 14 on Dec. 16, and she's started wondering about when she can get an after-school job.
Back in 1985, in the days after the deadly flood, some people told her mother that Samantha shouldn't be at the funeral for Steven and her grandmother.
But Brenda Blankenship said, "No, they can't just disappear on her like that." She took Samantha up to look in the caskets and told her that Steven and "Nanny" were "going to live with Jesus and they weren't coming back here."
She believes that helped Samantha deal with the loss.
Folks have often told Samantha: "It was God's time for them to go."
It's not an easy thing to understand. Samantha is still trying. "I'm not blaming anyone," she says. "I just don't get it. It may have been his time for them. But it wasn't our time for them to go."
by CNB