Trial By Water

Stranded in the spooky town
Stop lights are swaying and the phone lines are down
The floor is crackling cold
She took my heart...I think she took my soul
With the moon I run
Far from the carnage of the fiery sun
~ Kings Of Leon

The mountain tested me, in 1996.

It tossed out a blizzard AND a flood…within seven days of each other. Yes- I said SEVEN days apart.

Imagine this; a lovely mountain property, with a stone house set in the middle of four acres. Our property was on a fairly steep hill, and it was cleared for the most part except for a smattering of shrubbery on the property line between our house and our closest neighbor, and several apple trees. I loved those apple trees. There was a whole other world at work out there. One day I came home from town to find a huge Red Tailed Hawk sitting in one of the trees, just checking me out. Another time I discovered a grandfather groundhog out there, just stuffing his greedy guts groundhog self with as many apples as he could fit at once in his mouth. There were raccoons, opossums, snakes, lizards, birds, bears, mountain lions and bobcats…and the Deer. Let me just say that they still, to this day, occupy a very special place in my heart that’s reserved for those bittersweet and undefined things words can never seem to adequately describe…Mother’s day cards from the kids, hugs from my Grandma, sunrise over the Appalachians…and the deer of Berkeley Springs who visited me and brought their babies to my apple trees on wobbly legs at just days old…I remember Jess’s little boy voice, full of wonder- "Mama- your DEER are HERE!"

But that was another season, in another place, and that little brown haired brown eyed boy is taking his first steps into manhood…and his days don’t have much to do with me.

The day the blizzard came started out as a typical winter day in the mountains. The kids were excited with the promise of snow, and to tell the truth I was pretty psyched too. Visions of a roaring fire (not that we had a fireplace) and hot chocolate; kids and dogs and hubby and I firmly entrenched in our cozy stone home, maybe a few snowball battles and rosy cheeks. What ensued was anything BUT the Norman Rockwell I had pictured. For starters, remember how I said the house sat in the middle of the four acres? The driveway was essentially two acres up the hill as well, since it snaked around behind the back of the house. Being the mountain savvy mama I am, I knew exactly where to park that car; two acres up the hill, at the very top of the driveway, right behind the house.

SERIOUSLY?

That has GOT to be one of the dumbest decisions I have ever made…in hindsight- what the hell was I thinking? Upon waking the next morning, to a record snowfall no less of 38 inches STANDING snow, I realized that not only could I not see out of my windows due to the drifts that reached the roof (no kidding), there were two other vital things missing from the landscape.
The driveway- all those hundreds of feet of driveway- BURIED, and my car, also buried. It took a minute to sink in that this could well be a mistake of fatal proportions. I still remember that panic when I realized that 1) I couldn’t see out of my windows and 2) we couldn’t even leave the property and 3) we didn’t have enough food for all of us because we had not made it to the store before the snow started.

We shoveled snow for three days, all day long. On day three, with less than fifty feet to go to the road, we started to run out of food. Suffice it to say that things got pretty sketchy for a day and a half…someone who was going down the highway in a snow plow took pity on us and cleared the last twenty feet or so to the road. You’d have thought that dude was Superman the way we cheered him on! I was so achy and exhausted and cold…bone deep cold. I didn’t think I would ever be warm again. Did I mention the cold? That almost four feet of snow stayed right where it was, and the drifts that were fifteen feet tall in places; I thought it was going to last forever. I am almost positive, if memory serves correctly, that we burned about two hundred fifty dollars worth of propane that week. That cold was the killing kind, merciless in it’s extreme. It lasted exactly seven more days when on a fine West Virginia winter day a light morning rain fell and the temperature skyrocketed to a sweltering 70 degrees.

You know what happens to four acres of snow when the temperature hits seventy degrees? That’s right. It turned into a river- literally. A raging, freezing, torrent of water, and dirt, and leaves. A river that ran straight down the mountain, unchecked, until it hit it’s one and only obstacle.

The back door of our house.

How do you fight Mother Nature? You don’t. You open the back door, and welcome her in. I am a gracious loser, when I have to be…Then you open the front door, and shoo her out. I remember I called the fire department for help- its funny how our Universe really does revolve around ourselves. It never occurred to me until that moment that people all over town and down by the Potomac were being faced with the same crisis. When I got the FD on the line, I questioned whether or not they might send a fire truck to pump out some of the water in my house.

"How much water do you have, ma’am?"

"Uhm, I dunno- maybe about 10 inches of standing, swirling, freezing, water."

This is what civilized people do, right? In an emergency you call emergency responders…
"Sorry- there are people in town (at the lower elevation) who have fifteen inches of water in their homes- and it’s rising. We can’t come eight miles out of town to pump out 10 inches of water. Good luck, Ma’am." Huh? But wait…

SERIOUSLY?

I am, at my best (or worst) a resourceful gal. It’s part of my DNA (Thank you, Nans & Bert). I got the resourceful gene. Good thing, too. I rolled our big floor model T.V. down the hall into a bedroom and took EVERY quilt/throw/blanket we owned and the kids and I made a barricade across the hallway so that for a little while the water stayed contained to one half of the house. I remember Jesse was so tiny, we put him on the futon in the living room with the dogs- I was afraid they would all get swept out the front door and down the mountain. Five hours later (again exhausted- Jeez, does this place NEVER take a day off?) I said adios to an untold number of TONS of snow, and was down on my hands and knees cleaning silt and mountain dirt out of the grout of my ceramic tile floors. By three o’ clock that afternoon my ex had arrived home for the weekend and couldn’t understand why the panicked phone calls from me that morning. "place looks fine- what was all the drama for?"

SERIOUSLY?

I guess it was fitting, in a way. It was me who wanted to move there and orchestrated the whole adventure. It was me who stayed alone there with the kids (and the bears) while he worked two hours from home and only came home on the weekends…it wasn’t that there was anything lacking in him- it’s just that THAT mountain was always meant to be a part of me. It didn’t require anything from him. And it was me the mountain tested, over and over again. The blizzard of 1996 is real and this story isn’t fiction. My panic and fear were not unjustified. People died. Over eighty deaths were attributed to the weather, not to mention the thousands of dollars worth of personal and business property. As of late I am beginning to see how blessed I have always been.

The mountain tested and rewarded many times, in incomparable ways- but that time, she rewarded me with our lives.

Tracy Wilson on Facebook
Photos courtesy of morgue file