The Infamous Flood
Running along the property line between our house and Torrance’s was a creek. Not a huge running torrent it appeared from under the highway via two large culverts, one a decrepit wooden stave structure, the other a larger concrete tube of the more modern variety. Once splashed out of the culvert it meandered along the property line to exit into the Straits in a wide fan.
The culverts were of special interest to us, allowing quick exits from the property when Mother was looking for someone to lug the laundry baskets to the wash line. Once on the other side of the highway it was a few short steps into the forest or quick sneak down the ditch to Clay’s and beyond.
The older culvert smelled of creosote and bowed slightly in the middle, like it was ready to drop a few hundred tons of asphalt onto your head. It was also just big enough for a 10 year old to crawl through. The larger smelled of mould with an ever present 4 inches of green slime at the bottom.
On the opposite of the highway someone had been piling cut logs, no doubt for the winter fireplace. These were far too tempting to us and from time to time we would send our ‘pine boats’ sailing down the creek and through the culverts. I bet you know where this is going?
In the Spring the snowpack runoff from the mountains would torrent down the creek, raising it from a few inches to several feet in just a few days. At this point my Father would warn us all to stay away from the bank in case we ended up on the beach ready for a body bag! At this time both culverts would be full and roaring madly.
One of the design flaws in our house was a floor drain in the basement. Meant to take water off the basement floor and shunt it out into the creek, when the creek was flooding the outlet pipe would be less than a foot from the crest of the creek. We would see what the reverse flow looked like a bit later on.
Being a weekend, Clay and I had headed for the woods, the wood pile to be precise. What fun to send our pine boats through the culverts at full flood! We tossed one in and it disappeared into the culvert, emerging in the creek on the other side and flying towards the beach. We tossed in another. What fun!
In short order we had tossed quite a percentage of the wood pile into the creek. Then a funny thing happened, the chunks of wood stopped appearing in the creek on our side of the road! We looked at each other, then the culverts, then crossed the road and checked the culverts on the other side. Ut oh, the stream exiting the culverts had slowed to a near trickle.
Using some long branches we found in the woods we poked the upstream opening of the culverts. After a bit the stream and chunks of wood began to reappear. Satisfied we went off for a snack.
Sometime in the middle of the night the flow through the culverts came to another halt. This time, the water having no place to go, rose until it breeched the ditch, then the road, then with a roar it spewed several hundred tons of gravel and asphalt into my Father’s garden! Not content to ruin the garden the flow then crossed the yard and down the basement stairs!
Meanwhile the dam in the culverts having exploded the pent up water rushed down the creek just fast and high enough to create Old Faithful in the basement floor drain! Quickly my Father and all the menfolk in the community set to work clearing the culverts and diverting the flow away from other properties. Awoken by all the noise I peered out the hall window at the carnage in the garden and hid.
In the basement my brother Dick had his bedroom, originally built for my oldest sister, he had inherited it when she went off to university. Now my brother was quite a sound sleeper. Awoken by all the noise he rolled over and SPLASH! fell into 3 feet of glacier cold water! His bed had literally floated around the room in the flood with him happily snoozing!
Eventually the flood subsided, the basement was pumped out and save the furnace pump being the worse for wear and in need of replacing all came back to normal. The freezer floated happily in the bilge so we towed it back to its pedestal before draining the basement. My Father found me about noon time and in his usual manner did not say a word. Instead I was sentenced to many hours of wheeling gravel from the garden to the beach.