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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Old Lady Bowman's



worm poop


In the summer, kids would always walk over to Old Lady Bowman's house on their way to the creek. That's because she had this piece of old carpet at the end of her tomato row.
Every day she'd put all the grounds from Old Man Bowman's coffee under there, egg shells and all. That's why they was the fattest red wigglers around. Before the winter when everything stopped, Old Lady Bowman brought them worms indoors. She'd take and put
them into this wash tub in the basement where their root cellar was.
By spring all them worms would be gone and there'd just be this fluffy black powder that smelled like the ground under the leaves in the woodlot. Them coffee grounds and eggshells would be rich fertilizer for the year's tomato plants and carrot seeding. She even put them on that big spider plant in the parlor and on her geraniums.
She called them worm castings.
The summer kids called them worm poop

Rachel Loves’

bleating hearts
Mostly it’d be on the porch. In the summer it was after the chores was done, dishes washed up, before the mosquitoes was too bad, still light. Sometimes a barefoot girl’d stand on the bottom step while Rachel Loves dried red hands on her apron and then put them on her hips. Mostly young women, newly weds or homely, ones not so much wanting to be told advice as just to have someone to listen to them.
Even in winter, a girl’d start by standing there in the cold. They usually showed up at the same time, but in winter it was in the dark and instead of ginghams they wore cloth coats, barn boots if they had them. Rachel Loves never disappointed even one lovelorn girl. Old Mrs. Loves would wring her hands in that apron until tears froze on both their faces and then she’d ask her in.
The house had a parlor, where nobody let children play, where Mister Loves knew enough not to smoke so he didn’t go much, the room the Reverend sat when he had to come. The parlor had a table between two upholstered chairs and the hankies was in the drawer.

Rachel Loves didn’t weep, she bawled. She wailed with the women and groaned with the girls. They sounded like ewes in the lambing barn. They’d cry together until they both felt better. Then small matters was what they talked about as they calmed down. Always ended with Rachel Loves giving the girl some roots from her bleating hearts. That’s how the same ones got everywhere on Loves Road.

Matilda Jacks’

yellow irises

There was cats everywhere. Most farmers just let them run wild. Gave them some sour milk or table scraps, but the dog mostly got those. So some places had a lot of cats until the distemper come along and killed a bunch of them. Then they just started building up again, kittens everywhere.

People said Matilda Jacks’ cats was special cats. For one thing they was big. Not just long legged like some toms you see. These was almost dog sized some of them. With thick tales and mostly no stripes. Like them mountain lions.

And their eyes. The Jack’s house was on the way to town across the road from the cemetery. One side was tomb stones and the other was that cutbank people would walk thru the cemetery to avoid at night. They said you could see the eyes of them cats glowing in the dark. Yellow eyes.

The same people, walking by in the day time, could easily see that them eyes was just Matilda Jacks’ yellow irises on that cutbank. They may have been brightest in May sunshine, but people said they was there all year round after dark.

Martha Flowers’

white pineys
Most of the white pineys you see around come from the county home and Martha Flowers was the one what planted them there. That was probably when she worked there. The older one, the boy was still at home but working steady most of the time. The girl was still in high school.
Then, all of a sudden it seemed, she was all alone and maybe forgetting things? Oh yes, the girl wasn’t coming over as often now because she had children of her own and a husband to cook for. The boy was driving truck and hardly saw his own family let alone her. Pretty soon he up and moved them to some place in Indiana with the grandkids. She was still at the county home, volunteering, her gloves on, planting all those white pineys.
She planted them just deep enough, just barely burying them. First year slow, second year grow, and
third year show. She especially liked to see them through the county home windows. White pineys blooming in mid spring.
The county home wasn’t sure whether they could take her when there was no one else, being as her father was part Chinese. After all that time working there and all that time volunteering, she might as well move in just so she’d be closer to her pineys. They figured from the way she looked a little, but especially the way she said pineys came from China. Something about the way she said it.

Nancy Harries’

grapes

It wasn’t that she was a drunk. True she was the only woman who took a flask to church. At least she didn’t ask to borrow nobody’s. In June it was dandelion wine, sometimes with her own honey and sometimes with store bought sugar. Even with sorghum once. Awful stuff.

In August it was elderberry. You could tell from her purple hands. September was mead and October was concord and catawba wines. In November she had the copper for some brandy and even occasional mash but the weather often was too cold to ferment right.

But three months of winter got her listless and sad seeming. People said it wasn’t until the April grape hyacinths that she perked up. Just the word grape. Even though sometimes Mr. Harries had to fill her flask from town, the sweet grape scent of those big blue irises in June kept her spirits up until the next dandelion summer.

Mrs. D. Teeter’s

zinnias
When she read in the farm journal where you could save zinnias and how to do it, Mrs. Teeter just started growing more and more. By that time the kids was gone, at least out of the house even with that boy Skippy of theirs always in trouble after Mister Teeter passed on. She’d convinced Mister Teeter to put the store out of town, not compete directly with Dale Linscott’s already on the corner of Main Street. When he sold the store years later, they was already pretty comfortable you’d say, what with her buying and selling land and him owning the store nearer to the farmers on that side.
It started with a long row one summer right after Mister Teeter left us. All different colors. A couple of summers after that, zinnias was all there was in her garden. She said she’d been canning all her life and she just quit. She had enough sweet corn and beans and tomatoes from people who brought her their too-manys. That was twenty rows, a hundred fifty feet each, all mixed up with colors like nothing else. Zinnias.
After she planted all the wheelbarrows and inside-out tires, old cream separators and clawfoot bathtubs with zinnias, she brought in an old buckboard and filled it up.
Every September she made a pact with a goldfinch so they’d both have enough, the bird for the next winter, she for the next summer.