By: Keith Kappes
Columnist
Carter County Times
I normally don’t think of myself as a flood survivor, but the death and destruction brought to the Southeast U. S. by Hurricane Helene brought back a rush of memories.
Our family home was in what used to be called the “Blue Camps” neighborhood on KY 773 in Hitchins. It flooded at least three times while I was growing up there with my parents, brother and sister.
Later, it flooded twice more while our widowed mother lived there alone. In fact, my late brother, Dave, and I paddled a canoe through the house in about five feet of water during the last major flood a few years before Mom died in 1986.
At the time, we again pleaded with her to move away but that old house was the only place she had lived as a wife, mother and grandmother and there were just too many memories to leave behind.
The original houses in that subdivision were built with solid wood walls rather than drywall so cleaning up was mainly a matter of shoveling and hosing out the mud, scrubbing all exposed surfaces with bleach water and then drying the walls and floors.
I vividly remember my grandmother Minnie using roaring fireplaces and coal-fired stoves to heat the house so much that sap oozed from the old flooring.
Family and friends whose homes escaped the flood came to help as we cleaned and tried to reclaim damaged belongings like childhood photographs.
But each time I get a whiff of dried creek mud I flash back to those childhood hours anxiously watching muddy water creep closer and closer until we had to move to higher ground.
It saddens me to realize that today, more than six decades later, other little children and their families have been reliving those same scary, stinky experiences and, sadly, more than 200 persons have perished with many others missing.
Please join me in giving donations to the Red Cross or other relief groups working in Georgia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida and elsewhere.
Contact Keith at keithkappes@gmail.com
