THE ROIL OF BROWN WATER stretched from almost the back door across to the pear orchard nearly half a mile away. I could hear the rumble and roar of the wild water as soon as I stepped outside the house. In summertime, the creek was usually bone dry, and even branch full it would be only a few feet across.

But now it had been raining for a week, a week of sullen, steady drizzling rain, and now that water had no place to go but down the creek. I’d never seen the creek so wide, and never any water so furious, as wild as this, and the excitement of the flood drew me to the water.

Suddenly there was no mud, no bottom, just the growling, howling beast of rushing water as it grabbed me, pulled me under...

I waded in just above the birch trees by the garden. Waded in through knee-deep mud, mud I could almost taste through my toes, it felt so good. Waded through the mud, into the first ebb of the flood. Waded out into the current.

Suddenly there was no mud, no bottom, just the growling, howling beast of rushing water as it grabbed me, pulled me under, threw me headlong into its maw. I came up choking full of water, trying to swim, trying to touch water, rolling topsy-turvy down the current. Seconds only, likely, fearsome seconds, two hundred, three hundred yards downstream, almost to the Big Tree, and then an elderberry thicket.

I hung there, scared now, scared now that I had time to be scared. Hung there and caught my breath. Hung there, caught my breath, waded out of the water, waded into the knee-deep mud, waded home.

Safe now from the flood.