Tuesday, August 19, 1969. The day before hurricane Camille struck Nelson County.
This car was probably sitting in somebodys driveway, shiny and new.
[click the photo to see it large ]
“That evening, when I came home, I had a garden here on the creek, a pretty garden, and I had a batch of okra just starting to come in, and I went out to spray them, to keep the worms out of the top of them. And just about that time I got through, it comes a little sprinkle of rain right across the mountain. Just a light shower. But I stopped. I looked over at the mountain where that little shower was coming over, and something or another made me take a notice to it.
“Those clouds … most of the time, you know, they just come right on over the mountain, one solid cloud. But this time, it looked like that from every angle that you looked, that these clouds were rolling, just in a roll, and that they were coming to a peak right in the top of the sky, just like a hornet’s nest.
“I came over to the house and I think mentioned to my wife something about it,that I’d never before seen clouds roll together like that. Then I went back out and I watched them again, and they were still doing the same thing — just gradually building up and getting bigger. Of course, it was just about dark, and I never paid no more attention to it.” — Ivanhoe Stevens from the book Torn Land [ Ivanhoe, who passed away about ten years ago, was a dear friend to me when I moved to Nelson County eighteen years ago.]
By the next morning, more than thirty inches of rain had fallen on Nelson County in a six hour period. In the resulting flooding and debris flows, there would be eighty-four identified dead, thirty-three never found, and eight found but never identified. Most of the victims were asleep when the flooding occurred.
The green car sits in one of the creeks below my house. I did not live in the county at that time (I was in Charlottesville, about thirty miles away). But when hurricane Fran passed through the county a few years back, I stood on my driveway about a hundred feet from the creek (which runs on bedrock, thanks to Camille). The ground shook from the force of the roaring water and suspended boulders and there was the most astonishing deep roar – from a fraction of the amount of water that came down the mountain in Camille. It scared the living daylights out of me. Primal fear.
-Julie
