Quid De Cogitatione?
Glenn Rose
The topic of the day was last month’s invitation by the News-Gazette for folks to recall the “Election Day Flood of November, 1985.”
It’s sobering to realize that anyone under 45 years might have no memory of that day unless they suffered the trauma of the event. For them, the event is as distant as the end of World War II is for me.
My memories started late the week before. I was working at WREL. I was also running a canoe livery at the Coffee Pot on Rt. 60.
My ties to the canoe livery had led me to take up whitewater canoeing. When the rivers were too high to put customers on, there was the prospect of whitewater boating.
Balcony Falls on the James was always available, but Goshen Pass was always much more interesting when the Maury was high enough. When the Maury was too high to run safely, there were other streams, Irish Creek, the Bullpasture River, Buffalo Creek, and the Tye River, across the mountain from Irish. There were other streams in Virginia and West Virginia.
I was paddling in those days with a group of boaters mainly from Lynchburg and Roanoke. We were a mixed group of kayaks, open canoes, and c-boats. (A “c-boat” would appear to most observers as a kayak with a deck and spray skirt, but, like a canoe, it was knelt in and paddled with a single blade.)
We’d meet, most always on a weekend, at the Coffee Pot or the river we were counting on running that day. Since by Saturday it was apparent that the Maury would be too high to run safely, we headed off for a two-fer, Irish Creek and the Tye.
Irish was too high and, in places, in the bushes, so we headed off to the Tye with the idea that we might also see the South Fork of the Tye with enough water to run.
The ride over to the Tye took us along the South Fork of the Tye. Any thought that we could boat it was dashed by the realization that now, with enough water to run, there was no one in our group good enough to do so safely.
Our boating was stymied for the weekend. We didn’t know at the time that there would be more obstacles to our trips to Goshen Pass.
The rain continued for the next two days. Early Tuesday morning, election day, I got a call from a neighbor of the Coffee Pot that the river was up nearly to the road and only a few feet short of being in the parking lot.
I immediately went out, figuring that I’d better be moving what I could to higher ground.
The rain had stopped, and the sun was now out. I noted where the water had backed up through the culvert under Rt. 60 and was less than a foot from being in the lot.
However, with no more rain falling, the tap had been shut off. It was soon obvious that the river was dropping, sparing me a lot of work.
My attention now turned to the radio station. The staff would have to pitch in and report on what we could. I took Goshen Pass.
When I got up Rt. 39 just into the Pass and a bend, the road was washed out for a hundred yards with one island of road in between.
I’d now have to go out and up to Bratton’s Run to check out the upper Pass.
Route 39 going downriver through the upper Pass was intact until the first bend to the right, so I got out and took a tape recorder for my description of the road. The next bend, along a rapid boaters called “Roadside,” would reveal that there was no longer any road at all.
In later days, I walked upstream from the bottom of the Pass to the highest point that Rt. 39 was above the Maury, where the extended overlook now is. The entire northbound lane for perhaps forty yards had collapsed into the river, cut along the yellow line that separated the two lanes as if by design.
Our first paddling trip downriver weeks later would reveal a boulder the size and shape of a short school bus had been upended by the force of the river. It is still standing there today between Devil’s Kitchen rapid and the picnic ground.
That first trip, and subsequent trips, required a new scouting of how to run each rapid.
I don’t remember how long we spent running a 52 mile roundtrip shuttle to boat three miles of river.
I expect the citizens of Goshen remember the inconvenience, too.
Of course, there was a major cleanup to deal with. B uena V ista h ad b een fl ooded a s f ar from the Maury as Magnolia Avenue. Businesses along Sycamore Avenue were left with wet mud after several feet of river water had risen in several buildings.
Glasgow had flooding in the lower end of town.
Along South River houses had been inundated.
The water had left muddy detritus all along its path.
Sometime in the following weeks, when Buena Vista had cleaned up, the city celebrated a “Back From the Flood” event in the lot across Magnolia from the library.
Subsequently, the flood wall was built and ways to get the water off Elephant Mountain, et al, were channeled to safely to get runoff to the river.
Looking back on that day, my only loss was getting to the polls late and not being able to vote. The only time I missed that responsibility.
