The Year of the Big Flood

The year of 1940 is one I'll never forget, as I am sure many others won't either. This was the year we had the big flood. It was September and we had been in school but a week or two when one day we really had a cloudburst. It was so dark in the schoolroom, even though there were four windows on each side of the one room school building, we could hardly see to do our lessons.

I don't remember who noticed the flood first, coming out of the west canyon, but it was a big one. We could see boulders as large as cars rolling down. We saw the big cottonwood trees rooted up and come rolling down with the water. We were scared. The schoolhouse was upon the hill, but we thought for sure the flood would come up and wash us away too. Not only was a flood coming out of the canyon, but a large flood came down off the Flat Rocks, down through the meadow and gardens west and north of the school house.

My sister Jennie and her family lived in a small, one roomed house with

a lean-to for a bed room. It was right in the way of the flood. As the flood came down, the men ran down to Jennie's house to help them get out. After they were out and up to our house, Mama came to school to get me to go home and take care of Jennie's Stan and Rolin. The flood was still getting larger, so I took the boys and went up to Uncle Sterlings because his house was on the same hill as the schoolhouse. The folks thought the flood would come as high as our house, but it didn't, thank goodness. Everyone was saying prayers that day.

The flood completely covered Daddy's land. It filled the barn, covered the alfalfa fields, the apple orchard, on down through another alfalfa patch and the corn fields, across the road and on to some of Uncle Gilberts, Uncle Sterlings, and Uncle Chris' fields, going on to the Two Mile Wash and on to the Colorado River.

The next day, a group of men from Kanab and Fredonia went to Moccasin to help dig out from the flood. It had left two or three feet of sand everywhere. While the men were there, it clouded up and rained again. Another large flood, not quite as large as the first, came. The third day another one came, smaller than the second. After the third day of flooding, Parv Church said if he were Charlie Heaton, he would curse the Lord and move out, but Daddy went straight to work to clean it all up and start planting again. The apples got ripe faster that year and start­ed to fall off, so we were all busy picking and taking care of apples that year.

The first day of the flood, Daddy lost a pig or two and a few chickens in the water, but no other animals. He had opened the corral gate and let the horses and cows go to higher ground,

There have been a number of floods since that day in 1940, and I suppose there will be more to come, but we always refer to it now as the time we had the big flood. The next year, Daddy hitched up the old workhorse, old Nig, to a plow and started plowing a ditch along the south of our land at the foot of the hill. He would then run water down it to wash it out more, then dig and blast the rock to make it deeper. When the next flood came, which was much smaller, the wash held most of it and also cut the wash deeper. From then on the wash held the floods that came down, except for one fall when trash came down, plugged up the bridge and ran over flooding Leonard's and Pinkie's houses, filling their basements with sand.

The one thing the floods accomplished was to wash up springs of water in the flood wash, so I guess there was some good came from it all.

- Lavina Heaton Meeks