First came the rumble, a dark vibration in our feet. A churning so foreign it conjured sweat-dream visions. Stan Wynn, the short line's conductor, pictured a red-lining locomotive lost in the honeycombed mine shafts; the children imagined a circus elephant stampede, the aged vets clattering tanks. Dan Erickson's the one who first cried "Flood!" right before the frothing avalanche claimed him. FLOOD! and down rushed the water, the creek branches that meet up on the hollow swelled by a three-day rain, the coal company's slag dam, the one the Charleston engineers swore would hold their artificial lake, finally crumbling and fulfilling the hill dwellers' generations-old prophecy. FLOOD! and out went the lights, the TVs and radios struck dumb, and beyond the rumbling, an unearthly silence, no car horns, no factory whistles, not even the dogs barking, all of us holding our breath and for once not chuckling at the thought of Rev. Kistler's doomsday brimstone. Bob Davies, safely nestled in his hillside treestand, later said the water danced a drunk's staggering path through the valley, said the trucks and railroad hoppers and telephone poles bobbed like bath toys on a crazy tide that raced toward one neighborhood only to veer at the last second and wipe out another. Gas tanks exploded, fiery exclamation points pinpointing their destruction, and carried here and there on the water were the world-turned-upside-down visions of whole houses simultaneously flooded and engulfed in flames.

isbn 1-882983-52-1
36 pages/$6