Last Updated on May 24, 2026 by admin
The Tygart Valley River breached its banks at 2:14 in the morning on a Saturday in mid-May, and by sunrise three feet of brown water was moving down the residential block where Aurelio Vargas had grown up, in the unincorporated edge of Rusk County, West Virginia.
Aurelio is forty-six. He works at the lumberyard. The house is the one his grandmother left him. Inside the house, on the morning the water rose, were a forty-six-year-old man trying to get a generator out of the basement before the basement filled, and a four-year-old brown tabby cat named Cricket, who had figured out something Aurelio had not.
By 6:30 a.m., the West Virginia National Guard had a flat-bottom boat on what used to be Pine Street.
By 7:10, they had Aurelio on the boat. Aurelio had Cricket’s empty carrier in his lap and a piece of paper that said GRANDMOTHER’S WEDDING PHOTOS HERE in the front pocket of his work shirt. He did not, on the boat, have Cricket.
He had looked. He had called. He had looked in the basement. He had looked in the bathroom on the first floor, in the linen cabinet, on top of the kitchen cabinets. He had not found her, and the water was at the second step of the front porch, and the National Guard staff sergeant on the boat had said, quietly, “Sir. We have to go.”
The Vargas house was on the evacuated list for thirty-six hours.
When Aurelio was allowed back in on Sunday afternoon, the water had dropped four feet. The first floor was a sluice of brown silt and uprooted floorboards and one floating armchair. The basement was full to the ceiling. The second floor — accessed by a back staircase that had survived because it was sheltered by an interior wall — was, somehow, dry.
Cricket was on the second-floor hallway carpet.
She was sitting upright, paws together, in the spot where a runner used to be, looking at the back staircase, waiting for somebody to come up.
Aurelio sat down on the carpet. He did not pick her up immediately. He just sat. After about thirty seconds, Cricket walked over and put her head against his knee.
The house is uninhabitable. Aurelio is staying with a cousin in Grafton. Cricket is staying on his cousin’s couch, on a folded blanket, in a corner of the room with a window that looks out on a parking lot.
The grandmother’s wedding photos were not recovered.
The cat was.
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