The Night Before My 17th Wedding Anniversary

The Night before my 17^th  Wedding Anniversary

 

     I will never forget the night before my 17^th wedding Anniversary this year.  My Anniversary was last Saturday, June 20^th.  I arrived home from work Thursday night and had to get straight to bed, I was scheduled to go back to work at 6:00 a.m. the next morning. 

     We had been under a flash flood warning since 7:00 p.m. and wasn’t suppose to be lifted till 11:00 a.m. the next day.  Well my husband, Jackson, comes rushing into our bedroom around 2:30 a.m. saying “Your not going to make it to work, you need to call in now.”  I wasn’t fully awake and was really wondering what he was talking about. 

     So I got up to walk out on my front deck to see that our yard looked like an island in the middle of Tablerock Lake.  I live in Reeds Springs, little did I know this town is rhetorical for flooding. 

     My husband and oldest son, Roger, was all dressed up in there rain coat, boots, and hats.  We had to move our vehicles as far up in the yard as possible for the flood waters were literally rushing.  My husband tried to break the drainage pipes across the yard free, but the currents were so strong he could hardly stand.

     Waves were crashing like the ocean in my drive, rocks the size of basketballs rushing down the hill across the drives like balloons in the wind, logs floating down the road, It was the most crazy thing I’d have even seen.  I had never seen a “flash flood”, well know I can say I have.

      My husband and son traveled the waters, that were by now waist deep, to check on our neighbor at the end of our road, her poor little dog was tied up, holding his little neck just paddling away trying to survive.  My son freed the dog, and my husband was saving turtles.  I told my husband turtles can swim, he said to me “Not when there flipping end over end at 30 miles per hour.”

     Finally around 5:00 a.m. the rains let up and we decided to try and call it a night.  When we awoke on Saturday morning, we discovered the real disaster.  Our driveway and our private road was washed out.  We had a 20 foot around by about 5 feet deep sink hole to the side of our drive where the waters had completely washed the road away.  A two foot trench lined the backside of our drive, our road was under approximately 3 feet of water.  Our drive rocks washed down the road.  Thankfully my father-in-law has a little tractor and leveled our drive, however it took three days to do so.

 

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