This is a section of the farm story

The flood horror of 1994 finally told

September slowly lost its’ leaves into October. It started to rain. That year we had a pacific hurricane come across Mexico. By the time it hit us the middle of October it was only a tropical depression. It was still strong and wet enough to make the place a mud hole. After a week the storm seemed to move off to the east. It left us overly saturated. After a couple brief days of sunshine the storm made a 180-degree turn and hit us again.

I was at work at the furniture building the morning it started raining. The building was made of tin and the rain riveted the roof like jackhammer. Then it started to leak. They drug out buckets and pans and placed them on the tables and kept on working. It rained all morning. At lunch I watched the weather from the open door and all I could see was a solid sheet of rain. The water made deep grooves in the ground as it ran down the hill and into the ditches. By the time I got off work at five o’clock the storm was beginning to move to the east and the sun was starting to come out. It didn’t look too bad on the road home. As I drove toward the black cloud I could see the ditches were full and the river was swollen. As I came closer to the farm I could see the run off was greater and the field on the south side of the highway from my road was full of water. We had seventeen inches of rain that day. The ditches were overflowing everywhere because there was no place for the water to go but up. That did not even prepare me for what I found when I turned into my gate.

Oh, My God!

I did not even have any property. I had a lake. As far as my eyes could see was water. Carl stood by the gate with the goats tied to the ends of rope. I could not even drive in. I parked the car on the highest level, which was the edge of the road and got out. I took off my shoes and waded to the cabin with my pants rolled up to the knees. Everywhere I looked was under water. Stuff was floating in the patio, cabin and breeze way.

This was ghastly.

My next thought was, ‘where are my chicken girls?’

I managed to find and put on my rubber boots, which didn’t make any difference as the water flowed over the tops and filled them. I sloshed through the yard toward the chicken coop. All my birds were marooned on their perches. I had a couple of chickens desperately clinging to the chain link fencing. I plucked them off and found them covered with ants. I rushed them back to the cabin as fast as I could drag my water filled boots. I dodged the piles of ants floating on dead ant colony beds rafting along the moving water.

My poor chickens were ant bitten and soaked. I had to pick and wash off the ants out of their feathers. I managed to get them clean and toweled dry. Even though they were badly bitten they seemed grateful for the attention I gave them. They held still as I worked on them. When I took the chickens back to the coop, I put them up with the others that sat high and dry on the roost.

I still couldn’t believe what I was seeing around me in the yard. It was like a surreal landscape out of a movie. The ducks and geese could have cared less. They just swam all over the place. I knew they were safe so I walked all the way back to end of the property to the dry creek bed. It was on the other side of the fence and ran along the back property line.

The creek started somewhere up in the State Park and ran down to the highway. I managed to climb over the hog wire fence. When I approached the riverbank I could not find it. I had to be careful that I didn’t step off the edge. I felt each step I took in front of me to make sure I had ground under my feet. One step too many and I would have fallen in and been swept away by the swiftly churning water. The dry creek was 25 to 30 feet deep and was about 30 foot across. It had overflowed its banks and ran onto my property. It met the water that left the ditch along the edge of the road in the front seeking its own level somewhere in the middle.

I could do nothing about anything in the back so I sloshed back to the front. I met Carl at the cabin. He had tied the goats to the gate on the last high spot of ground. I looked at the damage. He had managed to pull the books off the bookshelves that were still dry. Most of the clothes in the dresser were wet, as he had pulled out the drawers out of the dressers too late. Everything on the floor level bobbed and floated in the water. We sure couldn’t sleep in this mess. The patio, Studio and breeze way were the same. What was wet had to stay wet. Fortunately the washer and dryer we had mounted on the platform were high enough and were sitting in about 2 inches of water.

I was so mad at the condition of my home, and angry at myself because I couldn’t do anything about it I lashed out at the closest thing I could.

Even though we still had electricity, the phone was dead. I waded to my car and drove to the police station in Smithville. I scared the dispatcher half to death standing in front of him in my rubber boots. My clothes were wet to the skin and I was dripping all over his floor. I started ranting and raving about needing help and he better call the county commissioner and have him come out right away and do something about it.

I had no clue I was in such a state of shock. I was a raving lunatic. I went back home after he made a futile attempt to calm me down and humor me. He told me he would call the country commissioner to come out and look. (By the way, he never came until the next day.)

Mean while back at the farm, the trailer on the other hand was three feet off the ground and provided us with our only island of safety. We opened up the couches and made a bed. By that time I was in such a state of shock, I slipped into a manic mode. I found some of the books that were not replaceable at any cost. I drug them into the trailer and started ironing the glossy pages. If they had dried by themselves they would have been glued shut. I was trying to save the closest thing I could and ironed and ironed until the wee hours of the night. When exhaustion took over I collapsed in agony.

The next morning the place was still filled with water. We managed to find a 2x12x12 foot-long board and made a bridge from the trailer to the patio. The water went down enough on the patio cement to be able to walk through with rubber boots.

I fed the chickens by putting feed in buckets and hanging the food close to where they were roosting. The birds stayed on their roosts for four days. Even though the corn was wet they could still eat it. I didn’t have very much on hand and it didn’t get a chance to sour before it was used up. After that I found some old freezers and put them on pallets to store the grain in.

There wasn’t anything I could do so I went to work. I had to walk to the road with my boots. The day after that was the weekend and the water had gone down a little more. We took all the clothes and started drying them. What we couldn’t get in the dryer we hung on the clothesline and on the fences. It seemed to be never ending task. We moved the small pieces of furniture into the trailer. The rest we tried to block up high enough to get out of the water, or stack on top of others. The bed was another matter. It was a waterbed and there was no way to move it in any direction.

The water finally went down a week later in the cabin. We started drying the carpet with several fans. We cut the carpet around the perimeter of the bed and took out what we could and hung it on the fence. We put a fan under the bed and the others blowing on the rest of the furniture. We did the same to the patio and breezeway. We took off the paneling and set it in the sun to dry. We also took out the insulation and dried it.

In the studio we sifted through the things that sat in water on the floor, blocking up what we could and making a pile of stuff that was beyond saving. That was exhausting. Besides that, emotionally it was like recovering from an abusive personal violation. That was only the start. The rest of the yard remained under water for over another week.

I never found out that some of the building material I had stacked in the font yard suffered damaged until the next spring. The water had soaked the aluminum roof panels and some chemical in the blown on insulation was caustic enough to eat away at the aluminum. When I finally went to use the roofing, the panels were weakened by the pinholes caused by the acid reaction devouring the metal. I also found my ceiling fans that Carl had put under some of the lumber. By that time all the parts had rusted into a metal wad.

When the place finally dried out we burned what was ruined. It seemed to me what belongings the Houston fire in 1987 didn’t burn the flood got in 1994. In the end they went up in flames too. My oil paintings were a crinkled mass of canvas and sodden cardboard. I burned them in a special ceremony and released them to the Universe. I found that a little harder just to let go of than the trailer in Houston was. There was nothing left of them to salvage. It was a mess. So, I bid them good-bye.

The only thing that was a silver lining to all this chaos was the fact the whole country was declared a disaster area. FEMA was taking applications for disaster relief. We waited for about a month, but when the adjuster came he allowed us enough to replace some personal goods and re-build our living area. With that little boon in our pockets we got on with life, replacing what we could and purchasing a couple more trailers to expand the living space.

I didn’t add any pictures to this section, too ghastly to look at.

To read more on that in the next section of the book you are going to have to purchase it.

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