Donkey Rescued From a Flooded Highway Underpass

A highway underpass in rural Texas is a concrete trench through which a road stoops to pass beneath another road, and in dry weather it is the most forgettable structure in the county. In flood weather, it becomes a basin with an agenda. Water obeys the shape it is given, and the shape an underpass gives water is: collect here. Everything the flooded fields and ditches send downhill arrives in the underpass and slows there, deepens there, and swirls there, in the complicated, debris-carrying eddies that standing concrete makes in moving water. The grey donkey had been delivered to that basin by the flood’s own logistics: whether it had sought the underpass as shelter from the storm, or been walking the road when the water rose around the low place, it now stood at the basin’s edge — chest to the water, as it were, at the margin where the slope came down — with floodwater standing around it to nearly its belly, the depth increasing behind it toward the underpass’s heart, and the way out, the ramp of road that climbed to high ground and the open fields, blocked by the flood’s furniture: a traffic barrier, a stout, striped, highway-department barrier, knocked off its footing by the water and fallen across the ramp’s foot like a gate the flood had closed on purpose.

A donkey trapped at a flooded underpass’s edge is in danger from the water’s patience and from its own famous trait, which the world calls stubbornness and donkey people call judgement. The water at its belly was not yet the emergency; the emergency was that the water was floodwater, which is to say it was going somewhere, slowly, and carried, in its swirls at the underpass, an unsettling, shifting pressure against the animal’s legs, a pressure that makes footing a negotiation renewed by the second. And the donkey’s judgement, applied to the situation, had produced the correct donkey conclusion: I will not move through deeper water, I will not climb over a fallen barrier into a swirl, and I will not be hurried by weather. It stood. It stood the way donkeys have stood at the centres of a thousand human frustrations, grey, dripping, ears in their eloquent semaphore, entirely immovable by anything except the one thing donkeys respect, which is a situation that has been genuinely improved. The rescue team’s work, therefore, was genuinely improving it: they had a lead rope — the donkey, farm animal that it was, wore a halter and accepted a rope as an old arrangement — and they had the barrier to remove, and their plan ran in that order: move the barrier, by hauling it with ropes out of the ramp’s foot, so that the ramp stood open as a visible, climbable fact; and then, and only then, ask the donkey, on its lead, to walk up out of the basin into the country it preferred.

The bodycam POV came down the flooded road’s edge in waders, water to the knee, and the donkey came into view at the basin’s margin like a statue the flood had commissioned: grey against the grey-brown water, standing in it to the belly’s fringe, its coat dark to the waterline and silver-dry above it, its head carried high and turned toward the approaching people, its long ears rotating through their assessments — water, barrier, humans, sky — with the air of a quality inspector finding the whole site unsatisfactory. The barrier lay across the ramp below the water’s surface line, its stripes showing through the swirl, and the ramp itself rose beyond it, up out of the basin, wet but walkable, a road again instead of a river, all the way to the high verge where the team’s second vehicle stood being the donkey’s evidence that up was a place.

The lead rescuer, taking up the halter rope with the slack and ceremony that donkeys require, addressed the animal in the tone that Texas donkey work has evolved over centuries, which is the tone of a man entering a negotiation with a respected equal who has, historically, won most of them.

“Hey, old grey… I see you standing in this mess. Barrier’s coming out of your ramp, and then you and me are walking up out of it, nice and steady.”

The barrier work was done from the ramp’s sides, by ropes and shoulders, the team hauling the fallen barrier sideways out of the ramp’s foot in a series of heaves the donkey audited with its ears, the barrier grinding, buoyant and awkward, across the submerged road until it came to rest against the underpass wall, retired from the situation. The ramp stood open. The water, given the opening, adjusted its swirls through the new geography, and the moment for the negotiation’s second half arrived: the lead rescuer took the rope’s contact — not a pull, a communication, the suggestion of a direction — angled his body up the ramp, and invited the donkey, by walking himself, to discover that the ramp was now the world’s most reasonable idea.

The donkey considered. And then, with the air of an animal conceding a point it had intended to concede all along once the site was brought up to standard, it moved: one foreleg, placed up the ramp; the other; its body angling out of the deep margin onto the rising road, the water falling away from its belly, its hooves finding the submerged road’s texture through the shallowing sheet — and precisely there, on the ramp’s wettest reach, where the underpass’s swirl still crossed the road in a brown, hurrying band, the rescue arrived at its climax in the form the water had been saving: the donkey’s forefoot, placed in the swirl’s path, met a surface that the current had polished and a pressure that the current applied sideways at the same moment, and the foot went — a short, skating slide on the wet concrete, the donkey’s shoulder dropping with it, its whole grey mass lurching toward the deeper water at the ramp’s side, in the one movement the lead rope existed, that morning, to answer.

The answer was already in the rescuer’s hands, because donkey people, like giraffe people and rhino people, rig for the moment before it arrives: the rope, slack all morning as a courtesy, came taut in the lead rescuer’s grip in the same second as the slide, not as a drag — no human drags a donkey anywhere, least of all sideways out of a slide — but as an anchor for the head, a fixed point of orientation that the donkey could, and instantly did, use to organise its own recovery, its neck and forehand steadying against the rope’s hold while its feet, those famously sure, famously opinionated feet, scrabbled once on the wet road and found, on the second placement, the grip the first had missed. A second rescuer was at its shoulder in the same moment, a braced human presence on the downhill side, not pushing the donkey up but declining, with his whole stance, to let it go down, and the two of them — rope ahead, shoulder alongside, donkey in the middle supplying the actual strength, as is traditional — walked the remaining metres of swirl-crossed ramp together, up out of the basin’s reach, the water falling from belly to fetlock to a sheet around the hooves, and then to nothing but wet road underfoot, and high Texas ground, and grass.

“Easy, old grey — foot slid in the swirl, I’ve got your rope. Lean on us, up the ramp, right now, one step at a time.”

On the high verge, the donkey stopped, in the manner of a chairman adjourning a meeting, and shook itself from ears to tail, a grey explosion of floodwater that baptised both its rescuers impartially, and then stood, dripping and magnificent, auditing the underpass below with an expression that suggested it had always known the basin was a poor idea and that its opinion had now been entered, permanently, in the record. The team checked it as donkeys are checked after floods: legs, for the slide’s possible prices; belly and chest, for debris the swirl might have introduced them to; breathing, feet, the whole grey catalogue, and found a donkey whose accounts were in order, whose only injury was to its dignity, an organ that in donkeys regenerates instantly.

“There you go… up the ramp and out of that underpass, old grey. Safe now. Let’s get you checked and find you some dry ground.”

It would be led to the high pasture the team had earmarked, watered with clean water, and left to give the flood the benefit of its reflections, while the barrier was scheduled for righting, the underpass for its eventual return to forgettability, and the report for its plain concluding sentence, which the lead rescuer dictated, wringing out his sleeves, in the donkey’s hearing and with its ears’ full attention: animal recovered by improvement of circumstances; rope required once; donkey, as usual, right about the ramp.