The bottom land soil was good old West Virginia red clay. The kindthat sticks to your boots when it ‘s wet and makes you get taller with every step. The stuff that you scrape off as best you can before going inside or getting in the car. The kind that swallows up pickups in ever growing mud holes. The kind that makes you wish you had remembered to lock the hubs in before you got stuck in that knee deep mud hole. The kind that swallows up the tractor you were using to pull out the VW that was already in there. The kind that makes for red stained wash and arguments about who tracked that stuff in.

We were hauling sawmill lumber up to the house site way up on top

of the hill and had to cross the creek to get to the road up. The crossing angled down into the creek going a little downstream and then climbed back out of the creek angling back up stream. This makes sense when you think about the wear and tear of creek water on the road bed. It makes for a little less silt build up in the tracks.
So, we’d been making a lot of trips but the rain had been holding back and the creek staying low. The banks were about 5 feet high and the creek probably less than a foot deep where we crossed. It was getting a little slick on the far side where the creek water carried up with the tractor tires, but not too bad. There were only a few more loads to go.

Then it started to rain. I don’t know where it came from, but the clouds moved in, blotted out the sun and it was coming down. Hard. We couldn’t see weather coming in that far, with all the hills so close by, and hadn’t been listening to any radio. It took us almost an hour to load the trailer and get it cinched down tight for the steep climb up the hill. We really wanted to get all the lumber up to the house site now , and not have to wait for the ground to dry out again, so when we finally got the trailer loaded back up with the last of it, we started across the bottom and down into the creek. It had been raining hard the whole time we were loading and the creek was starting to rise just a little.

Bunnells Run is a long creek and drains a huge area and comes through the town of Pennsboro first. There are a lot of roofs, parking lots and paved streets in town that send all the rainwater straight into the creek. It moves fast with nothing to slow it down. This creek rises fast. It depends on the sort of rain you get, and how ready the earth is to absorb it, just how fast. The ground was not taking it in. It was all running off. As the tractor got down into the creek the water came up to the rear axle and the trailer started to slip sideways off the gravel bed at the crossing. We kept it moving though and managed to pull it out the other side. I rode on the side fender up to the top of the hill and we dropped the trailer and headed back down as quick as we could on the narrow steep grade.

When we got back to the crossing, the water was even higher, but at least we weren’t pulling the trailer anymore. We headed down into it and realized too late just how deep it was, and how fast it was moving. The water came over the air intake and stalled the motor out. We could not get it started again. We climbed out over the front of the tractor and jumped off on the other bank and went to get the pickup and a chain to pull it out. No go. The truck wouldn’t start. We stole the battery from the VW bug and tried again. The water was rising and really muddy with red clay, looking like mashed bean and bacon soup. I ran and got the wooden pry poles from the shed and Eck climbed down into the water and started prying from the back of the tractor while I tried to pull with the truck, but we couldn’t get any traction on the wet slope.

The neighbors heard us down in there shouting and three teenage boys came running out to help. They jumped right down into the muddy water and started pushing on the back wheels. I hooked up the pony with his log pulling harness to see if we could do any good with that. Daniel was pulling and all four guys were in the water with pry poles and pushing. It was scary. The water was almost up to their armpits and I was afraid they would get washed away but they just kept on sticking those poles under, prying up and the tractor slowly started to move. The pony was pulling, the four guys were pushing from behind and hollering, and the wheels slowly started to turn. Another brother finally showed up with his huge four wheel drive truck that had a winch on it and he hooked up and started reeling it in. The red mud tried to hold it back but we won in the end. Whew.

Everybody climbed out, covered in muddy water and looking like drowned rats. They pulled the tractor to higher ground and our friends headed off home, sopping wet, covered in red mud and freezing cold. You can’t get better neighbors than that. They totally saved our tractor. We will have to work hard to repay them.
The rain kept on coming down for another three days. The creek continued to rise and went from being about eight feet wide and a foot deep to being two hundred feet wide and about eight feet deep. It covered the entire bottom. Nobody could drive in or out for over a week, but most folks had foot bridges that they could get to when the water started coming down a little. All the crossings had to be dug out and reworked before anybody could use them though. We were grateful that no one was hurt and the tractor was not ruined.

The flood waters never came over the furthest creek bank, the second flood bank further back. According to the neighbors, the only time it has done that was in the flood of fifty, something I hope to never see. It got houses that time. This time it just got hay land, and almost, our tractor. We learned a little bit more about respecting the creek and what good neighbors we had.

-Wendy lee, October 24, 2015 writing at, https://www.edgewisewoods.com