The Great Flood
The 4000th anniversary of the great flood will be in 2050 CE. Noah was there; I wasn’t. But I was around for the great flood of 1972. It was July and the remnants of Hurricane Agnus dumped about 12 inches of rain on us in about as many hours. It was more than the Allegany River could handle. The firemen came to our country farm house around 8 that Saturday morning and told us we had to evacuate by noon. We had never been flooded before, but 30 years earlier, the nearby town had. So they built 24 foot dikes along the river to protect the town. The result was that it pushed the water down through the surrounding valleys, flooding the countryside. Ironically, it only delayed the flooding of the town. The sirens went off and on-lookers described it as Niagara Falls when the water began pouring over the top of the dikes. We evacuated to our neighbor’s house across the road who was on slightly higher ground. Another neighbor came with his small aluminum outboard motor boat and tied it to their front steps. It was not an ark. Two of us decided to take a boat ride with the boat owner. I’ll call him Noah. Noah had a farm close to the river and wanted to see if there were any sign of his animals. We rode through the muddy flood waters with debris floating all around us toward the river. At one point, we had to duck down in the boat as we went under thirty foot high power lines. We passed a single wide trailer, wrapped around a tree. We passed over the tops of trees, some sticking out of the water. As we neared his barn, the rudder of the boat struck the top of a tree and stalled. The current was swift now and Noah said to us “Well guys, I think this is it.” This was not how I envisioned the great flood or our boat ride to end, or my life for that matter. We were pushed by the current toward the barn, reached out to it and held tight, until we finally got the engine re-started. We got out of there as quickly as we could. And Noah lost all of his animals.