The young December night brought tremendously heavy rains. 1.6 inches fell in just six hours, with an expected total of 2.5 inches by storm’s end.
Our little stream has transformed. Usually placid enough to cradle singing frogs and mirror firefly glow on warm summer nights. It now rushes like a writhing serpent, tumbling from the high ground to the wide river below, violent and frothing with mud.
This stirs a memory of a similar storm early this summer. Two inches of rain fell in two hours.
The shock of water was so great it nearly reached the house. The spot where I once sat on a now-vanished bench by the stream’s bank lay submerged ten feet underwater.
From behind windows that day, my son and I watched two-thirds of our green lawn become a river. The water swept railroad ties, mailboxes, firewood, and even whole uprooted trees across the backyard with the speed of a city bus.
Down the hill, the stream jumped its banks and flooded the road. Weekend travelers were caught off guard, and they attempted clumsy K-turns to find drier routes. But the hungry water washed out another section, trapping them on a shrinking island of asphalt.
Still unsatisfied, the stream tightened its grip. Water rushed around the cars, full of violence and debris.
One family – mother, father, grandmother, baby brother, and big sister – felt the rising threat of submersion. They made the desperate choice to abandon their car for higher ground. The father clutched the baby while mother and grandmother held big sister tight as they opened the car doors.
The fast-moving water instantly knocked them down, bludgeoning them with debris. Mother, grandmother, and big sister were swept over the road’s edge, battered against the rocks in the steep valley below. Broken and gasping, the anguished father lost his grip on baby brother as he clawed his own way to safety through the chaos.
That day, when the waters finally receded, five lives had been claimed. Both children were declared missing until the remains of one was found an uncanny distance downstream, floating gently in the dark water by an industrial dock on the Delaware River in Philadelphia.
And so, in the slow rhythm of that darkly bobbing little head, we begin the dance again: horror and beauty, compassion and gratitude, the transient nature of what is and the eternal oneness behind it all. Around and around we go.