10,000 cubic yard canyon across from us, it is 30 feet deep, 85 | The road in front of our driveway (good for kayaks).

feet wide and 200 feet long. (See our house in the background). | Randolph is part of the federal disaster area!

We have the largest washout in town!

Here's an article on the flood from this week's newspaper (July 2, 1998, The Herald, Randolph, Vt):

South Randolph Road as Metaphor

By
Ann S. Brandon

After a lovely dinner in Warren on Friday night, my husband and I drove through torrential rains down South Randolph Road to our home. We were asleep by 11. Around 12:30 a.m., people in Warren were climbing trees to escape Mad River as their mobile homes washed away. Our dirt road had become a five-foot deep river, rushing into a field that, by Saturday afternoon, was a 30-foot deep, 85-foot wide, 200-foot long canyon.

I am surrounded by men who are useful in an emergency. My husband can measure things by looking at them. He reported that the field and road had lost about 10,000-20,000 cubic yards of dirt. My neighbor is a retired fireman, and has the uniform necessary for fighting water and rocks. I can't drive a backhoe. But I can think about the metaphor.

Flash floods are part of life. A woman goes to bed whole, wakes up, takes a shower, and discovers a lump in her breast. A man sees blood in his urine. The road to a familiar life transforms into a deep and tumultuous river of oncologists, radiologists, and visiting priests. Your body has 30 feet of topsoil, your surgeon tells you, which he has to remove.

People can be flash floods by walking into or out of your life. They can be borne or die. They can come to work for you or you for them. As your secure hayfield erodes under the pressure, you realize that there's no foundation under the love or business. You have been depending on shaky ground.

Actually, the ground isn't as shaky as the floods are strong. The new ravine besides South Randolph Road shows us how the Green Mountains were formed. Mormons from Utah happened to be in the neighborhood this weekend to dedicate a new campground. They visited the site, as has most of Orange County. They told us we have a good start on our own Grand Canyon.

Flow is powerful if you go with it. Some people I know, myself included, are now ravines. They waste life and breath regretting that they are no longer hayfields. They like to feed deer not fish. They prefer to be flat rather than filled with steep banks, deep pools, and undulating waterfalls. They still think of themselves as private and cannot except that the gradations of their excesses and mistakes in life are now for all to see and analyze. In the ravine, the floods exposed the layers of sediment formed by a delta when South Randolph Road was a glacier lake. They come from the Pleistocene Era; yours might come from the womb.

Should we embrace the flash floods of life? Do we have a choice? South Randolph Road's new landscape illustrates that dirt cannot come between rain and where it wants to flow. After all, the word Earth is a misnomer; we should have named our planet Water.