the great Amesville flood of 1998

Prologue

For three days before June 28, 1998, it had rained, a gentle rain at first, but a steady one. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, the sun only came out once. But for most of the spring up to then, all there’d been was sun. It was so dry what few weeds came up were turning gray. You had to drive half a mile behind the pickup in front of you, the back roads billowed so dusty. Those little fish that always make it into the pool between the ford and the bridge? They were gone. The water had kept getting less and less. They had a sporting chance when the water was high and they could dart away from the snake that enjoyed them so much. When they got so concentrated, as the water dried up, that snake grew fat.

Dry spring. People had planted potatoes on St. Patrick’s day as usual, only to watch them wither and even brown through the end of April, all of May and most of June up until three days before June 28. Gardens gasped. Wells ran dry and men had to haul water from Chesterhill for the stock. Cows and pigs panted like coon hounds. The sun had cracked the surface of the soil like a jigsaw puzzle down the corn rows. So dry, you hardly had to deal with chickweed or burdock. People weren’t running the big wheeled cultivators between the rows in their gardens, didn’t have to. The weathered rough boards of barns shrunk up so dry the siding separated great gaps between. In that drought’s glare, you could see right through them.

Stunted was how it felt. Women were just barely keeping their tomato plants by using dishpan water and dipping to rinse instead of running the tap. Still what few blooms there were looked frightened and anemic? If you washed your car, and most men didn’t, you washed it on the lawn so that the hose might do the grass a little good. Lawns sometimes had these green rectangles in them where someone washed the Chevy. Otherwise the grass was laid out and pockmarked, wounded. You emptied the dog’s bowl into the flower bed next to the kitchen door. There’s a bunch of hippies living on the old Bodinot place. Bought it in the 70’s. One of the guys out there actually figured out a way to use the water from the shower and bathroom sink for their sweet corn. Stale coffee, sour milk on the garden, now down a drain. Men even peed on the asparagus bed. Mart Tish says peeing on the bed makes the asparagus grow better. So they felt like they were doing double good, using water carefully and fertilizing plants. Up until three days before June 28.

People along Wyatt Run and Federal Creek and the Linscott and all those little waterways, they’d gotten careless and left stuff near them. One man had even built a shed with all his tools in it, his two tractors, a couple of heavy old refrigerators he was working on. Pole barn ten yards up from where the drought blotted stream was before the rain started.

Aahh. You could just feel the earth soaking up that warm bath. When it first started, hardly anything ran off because the sponge was so dry. One feller said he could hear trees pumping sap up into their leaves. Carrot and beet tops straightened up even with the weight of the rain drops on them. It looked as if the lawn would need mowing right after the rain stopped.

And that first day people were using excuses to go out in such sweet rain, it felt so good. An extra trip to the mailbox. Out to get something from the workshop in the garage. To see if he’d left the keys in the car. Welcome rain that first day. Quenching the parched hollows and valleys it fell on, creases in elbows, wrinkles on the backs of necks.

The second day of rain, two days before that night, the rain was tolerable. The rain was heavier than the first day. One cloudy day in June is enough for most people, and they needed to get out of the house. But nobody wanted to go out in that downpour. Wet gusts banged the porch swing against the house. Anything you’d left out got soaked. People in the village who got The Athens Messenger delivered mostly found the news too waterlogged to read. The rooms were beginning to get stuffy, even musty. Windows had to be kept closed because squalls could come from any direction and wet the sill inside, a book on the table below. And the streams started to trickle. A drenched kingfisher hunched on the bridge railing even with no little fish in sight. The snake started to dart into the water again. Though the minnows had turned to dust, more would materialize. Mister S was fat already, he could wait. Lettuce was muddy from the splashing of rain drops the size of cats’ eyes. Vegetable leaves that had perked up with the first day’s drench were beaten back into an emerald wilt: spinach, broccoli, kale, even peas and runner beans. The rain was building to a deluge, not there yet, but definitely with a bullying attitude.

The last day before that night in 1998 was fierce. Winds tore tin roofs off barns. Up the hollow in Canaan Township, people heard that rolling sound of a tornado they said, but there wasn’t any evidence of one. Only straight line gusts that took down trees and with them power lines. Rain got opaque. It could have been raining cats and dogs and people wouldn’t have gone out to look at the puppies and kittens, too wet. Too much rain. The dams of farm ponds were threatening to overtop, the spillways were so full. Creeks and runs were up to the bottoms of the bridges and low lying roads were already impassable in places you almost always could get through other wet times. Some folks were really cut off by road and had to take four wheelers through the woods to get out. Even on hillsides, slips started happening, ditches along roads overtopped and washed gullies across to the lower side. Then about five that last afternoon, a lot of the day left to be light, for a while on that week after solstice day, the rain stopped. An already set sun peached huge thunderheads as they swept by from the south and to the east using lightning like stilts. The silence from the departure of the drumming battering rain was picked up by crickets and katydids whose homes were starting to dry out. Frogs that had enjoyed their immigrant status in the rising water, swam back to their honking grounds, coyotes cleared their throats.

The air was so clear that it seemed to magnify everything you looked at. Trees were closer. You felt as if you could touch hills and buildings beyond your reach. Breathing was more bracing than it had been for almost three days. That’s not to say that there wasn’t a little mist forming, not surprising considering how saturated the earth and its dominions were. When most people went to bed that night, June 27, 1998, they expected it to be bright and sunny the day morning. It was. It’s just that upstream some of those storm clouds broke loose again in the night and covered the village of Amesville, Ohio, with 12 feet of water. The sound woke some, like mill stones grinding together, like a great truck or locomotive, like the earth subsiding beneath their beds. A bunch dreamed through it and some were caught out in it.

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