Toddville Tidewaters' Welcome - Part IV

Note: If you haven’t read Toddville Tidewaters Welcome parts I, II, & III, you may want to read those first to make sense of what this final installment means.

After cracking open my beer, I stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. As I lit my cigarette, my neighbor across the street pulled up. As he got out of his truck, he yelled over, “So how do you like living here now?”

“It’s an adventure, but fun!” I walked to the middle of the road and struck up a conversation with him. It was my first meeting with our one and only neighbor.

Mr. Dawson turned out to be an elderly man, but I couldn’t tell you how old. I’ve since learned that life on the Eastern Shore must be hard on the natives like Mr. Dawson. Everyone looks a good fifteen years or so older than they really are. Must be from a lifetime of working in the sun as a fisherman or crabber.

We did talk for about a half an hour as a light rain continued to fall in the strong breezes. As we talked, we heard a tree fall behind Mr. Dawson’s house. I reckon the breezes were stronger than I thought, but compared to earlier in the day, I don’t feel right saying it was windy.

From him, I learned that the wind speed from this storm was clocked at 99 mph only a couple of miles from where we stood. And like a typical down-home, Eastern Shoreman, he complained about all the intruders – city folk moving to the countryside.

“I was born and raised down here,” he said, “and even I had trouble knowing where the roads were. All these people move down here and mow all the grass right up to the road to make their yard look nice. Without the grass poking through, how are you supposed to see the road?”

I mostly listened figuring I could learn a lot about the area from him.

The conversation turned to hurricane Isabel a couple of years ago. Where we were standing, Mr. Dawson explained, the water was a good four feet high. He pointed to my house and said the waters were up to the bottom of my windows.

“Looks like we lucked out on this one,” I said.

He agreed.

“Well, I’m getting cold and I’m soaked. I better get on inside.”

I went in and changed clothes. I told Keith all that Mr. Dawson had to say. We reassured each other that most likely, we wouldn’t have much to worry about. Isabel was a record-breaking storm. Even downtown Baltimore got flooded out on that one. The odds of getting another Isabel type storm would be slim, we reasoned, and, besides, we obviously caught the brunt of Ernesto and the floodwaters were way down the road away from our house.

We didn’t have anything to worry about.

I opened another beer and began to unpack. About a half hour after talking to Mr. Dawson, I called Thistle to go outside with me so I could smoke another cigarette. (Ok, no lectures here. Yes, I know – I need to quit smoking.)

I opened the side door and stepped off the step into water above my ankles. Instinctively, I pulled my foot back. “Shit, Keith! We’re in trouble.”

Keith ran to the door. Water completely surrounded our house and was half way up the tires of Keith’s car. I went to the front of the house. The water was up to the top of the porch, and the road where I had been talking to Mr. Dawson a half hour earlier now looked like a river.

The tidewaters found us and came knocking on our door to welcome us.

I checked all around the house to see if any water was coming in. One spot, behind our couch, was damp as if someone spilled a glass of water. Otherwise, there was no water coming in.

I stepped out on our porch and watched the water. I couldn’t tell if it was still rising or not. I needed to know because if it rose only a few more inches, we would have a serious water problem in the house.

Fortunately, Keith likes wine and we had plenty of corks available. I tacked a piece of string to a cork, floated it in the water, and tacked the string taught to the doorjamb.

“There,” I said as I showed Keith my marvel of engineering, “if the water is rising, the string will get loose. If it is falling, the cork will start to slant on end.”

“What good is that? It won’t stop the water from coming in the house. And what about my car?”

He had a point, but it was too late to sandbag the house or move the car. I just needed to know what the water was doing.

Twenty minutes later, I checked the cork. I breathed a sigh of relief. It started slanting downwards – the water level was falling.

We went to bed knowing that for now, we weathered the storm just fine. When we awoke the next morning, the water had disappeared. The tide did run high for the next couple of days, but none of it came close to flooding our house or flooding the roads as badly as the initial storm surge.

For the first time, I had serious doubts about how wise it was to buy this house at such a great deal.


© 2006
Mark Darien
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