Big Rain!

Yesterday around noon I did something cowardly prudent. Though it turns out it wouldn’t have made any difference if I hadn’t done it, I’m still not sorry.

In contrast to Tam’s complaints about the weather, we’ve had rain pretty much every day this month. Yesterday was a masterpiece. Saw it rolling in during the late morning, and it was clear that whoever this storm broke on was going to be unable to ignore it. Once it was PRECISELY overhead, it announced itself with a flash and bang that sent Little Bear skittering away from the door with poop on his butt.

I thought, “I’m kinda bored anyway, maybe I’ll just sit this one out at Landlady’s house. She’s got movies on a hard drive.” See, the Secret Lair is located on bottom land, just below a complicated ridge with a gully that’s aimed like a cannon at the rear of the cabin. I’ve gone to considerable effort to make sure the water from that gully stays in its channel and turns away from the cabin, but those efforts have never been put to a complete test. When you’re not completely confident of your disaster countermeasures, it’s best to watch the results from a respectful distance. If this storm fulfilled its promise, there was about to be substantial water damage.

Oh, it did. We got to Landlady’s house just before the water really started coming down and from her snug harbor I watched the most torrential rain I’ve seen in years. While the water was still slamming the ground I got a call from my neighbor D. “Is your wash running yet?” He laughed over the noise. “I dunno,” I said. “I ran to Landlady’s house and can’t see it from here.”

“Well,” he replied, “Where we are it’s about three feet high and rising. It’s got these big waves where it crosses the road, and J&H are trapped on the other side.”

D&L are up on a ridge downstream from where two big washes come together and the south wash has already run about five times this season, so they’re a lot more likely to see flash floods than we are. But yesterday the east wash going through our territory did finally cut loose. Up near the source as we are the flood wasn’t that impressive and I was able to cross it about three hours later but the south wash shredded every road crossing for miles. On our meandering roads you’ve got to cross that wash four times to get out. At the first crossing, the south wash tore out several feet of road bed and deposited some impressive boulders. Then it carried all that mud down about a mile and dumped it all at the second crossing, where J&H were maybe fifteen minutes too late getting home. Trapped between floods, there was nothing for them to do but sit in their truck, eating chips and watching the best flood in years.

As for the Lair’s gully, I’m happy to report that my deepening and berming of its flood channel worked very nicely. Water ran hard all around the cabin but not under or through it, just like it was supposed to. I was interested to see what would happen when the flood overwhelmed the channel’s 3-inch drainage pipe, and the answer is I’ve got some new pipe-burying to do because the water tried creditably to dig it up. But that’s the only damage and it wasn’t unexpected.