Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America's Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever by Geoff Williams

into the open sewer tunnel and disappear into the darkness. Then Ralph picked up a railroad tie, or, in layman’s terms, a wooden plank that the steel part of railroad tracks rest on. Thinking the wooden plank might float nicely, Ralph pushed it over the edge of the dirt cliff. Unfortunately for him, he also went tumbling down the side of the embankment and into the pond.
    Even if Ralph could have swum, it wouldn’t have mattered: he was sucked right into the sewer tunnel. Screaming for help, the remaining boys raced to the factories, one of them being a rubber factory where Ralph’s father worked as a foreman. At least two men, Edward Miller and Mike Cassidy, came running to help.
    Quickly surveying the situation, Miller and Cassidy decided that they needed to rush to the other side of the sewer, three blocks away, where Ralph would come out and, with any luck, still be alive.
    Inside the tunnel, Ralph was fighting to keep his head above water and losing badly, until he suddenly saw his railroad tie floating past him. He lunged for it and hung on.
    Above ground, the boys and men reached the end of the tunnel, where water spilled into Duck Creek. There was no sign of Ralph. The boys or men would later report that another ten minutes would pass. If that’s true—it may have just seemed like ten minutes—it makes one wonder what Ralph was doing all that time. Maybe he was able to stop himself from shooting down the tunnel for a while and attempt to crawl back the way he came. In any case, Ralph shot out of the tunnel and into Duck Creek, and, while he didn’t look well, he was alive. Before being carried down Duck Creek, Ralph managed to grab a hanging tree branch, which quickly snapped, and he was swept away again. The boys and men gave chase.
    Ralph grabbed another branch, but that broke too, and Duck Creek, which wanted him badly, carried him further until he crashed into the side of a tree. Screaming for help, Ralph then sank out of sight. Miller and Cassidy dropped into the creek, the water coming up to their necks, and fished him out. Ralph didn’t appear to be breathing.
    Miller and Cassidy carried Ralph to a nearby barrel, draping his body over it so that water easily spilled out of his lungs. It took a few minutes, but Ralph eventually came to.
    A doctor was called, and just before Ralph was taken home, he weakly offered instructions to everyone. “Don’t tell Mother I nearly was drowned,” Ralph pleaded. “Just say I got wet.”
    Ralph Korengel, who would live a good long life and pass away in 1980, lived in a world in which swimming was not yet much of a sport, and as a pastime was only now starting to become mainstream. In 1909, the YMCA—which was still off-limits to anyone without aY chromosome—began a campaign to teach every man and boy in the country to swim. But in May of 1913, Syracuse, New York’s park commission let it be known that girls were going to be given swimming lessons, and three months later, forty-eight girls in Janesville, Wisconsin, participated in the town’s first swimming lessons. Some universities were even making swimming lessons a required part of the curriculum, a trend that really caught on for a while. At its peak, in 1977, forty-two percent of colleges had a swimming requirement. Just five years later, the number of colleges that mandated swimming before handing out a diploma had plummeted to only eight percent. Today, there are just several universities and colleges across the country that enforce swimming. Some high schools require students to swim, but many don’t, and as budgets shrink and public swimming pools close, arguably, large swaths of the population aren’t learning to swim. There are some understandable arguments for not forcing students to swim—not everyone is physically adept enough to swim well enough to pass a test, some people don’t feel comfortable being in a bathing suit in