Sign of Shade: High Waters On Wartrace

#fa> SignofShade ¿fa I .............!j High Waters On Wartrace :: :.t by Jack Turner Floods had come to be major social occasions in Wartrace. The people of Wartrace lived on bottom land halfcircled by Toller Creek. In the years when Toller had been farming country, only a cloud burst could threaten the long bottom. When Jason was a boy, though, growing up in Wartrace, floods were a continuing feature of life there. There was mining going on upstream . The water was often black from the washing of coal and there was timbering; a slow rain could turn Toller swift. When it rained hard upstream , the water would turn a bright yellow and flood would threaten the town. It flooded often and the water seemed always to get higher. As the flood waters rose ever higher , year after succeeding year, the people of Wartrace began to raise their frame houses on poles to keep them above water. Frame houses could be raised without too much damage. Wood blocks with jacks would be set around underneath a house and then the house would start up, with posts being added and blocks and jacks being reset until the proper height had been reached. After a while the whole town was on stilts, but the water kept on coming up. The schoolhouse couldn't be raisedit was built of brick. When the rains came long enough and the water turned yellow and began to cut Toller's banks, Wartrace became a bustling, hurrying town, pregnant with excitement and fear. Families whose houses were low lying and more likely to be flooded made arrangements to move in with families on higher ground; household goods were packed up to be carried to the second floor of the schoolhouse, and furniture was stacked on end tables and boxes high above the floors of the stilted houses. Refrigerators were cleaned out 56 and food that would spoil cooked up. There would be the need of a great deal of ready food. The water might stay up for days and the electricity would be off and refrigerators and cook-stoves would be useless until they could be cleaned out and the wiring dried. The women of the town fried and baked and worried and packed while the children ran from door to door chattering excitedly about how fast the water was rising. The children took their cues from the men. The men were in charge of watching the water. They hammered wooden markers into the ground and into the water so they could tell how fast the water was rising. Hourly predictions followed as to when the water would come over the banks and race through the town. When dark fell the men built fires near their markers and told tales of previous floods. "You ain't seen a flood until you've seen a flood like twentyseven ," Banjer Combs would say, and then a spate of flood tales would follow. After a while the tales would grind down and expeditions to Kanada would begin. The water at Kanada was two hours ahead of the water at Wartrace. Cars would run the Kanada road with flood reports until the water came over the road at Banner. Within a halfhour ofthe flood's blocking ofthe road at Banner, the water would be over the banks at Wartrace. As the water raced into the town, the people would withdraw uncertainly into their stilt houses to wait out the flood. There was no known limit to the amount of water that might come down that narrow mountain valley into Wartrace. Alta Thompson, who lived with her fatherin -law, Alec, in the lower part oftown, liked to tell how they had found that out in their first Wartrace flood. Alec Thompson was a first-class carpenter. He had bought a lot in Wartrace and put up a new house well above the previous all-time high water mark. The very next flood ran a foot and a half of mud and creek water into his new house. In the morning of the flood, when the water was still low in Wartrace, Alec had gone up town in a boat. He had come back at...