Strange as This Weather Has Been Read Online Free

roadblock, he just plowed right up on it, the loose tools in the bed rolling and crashing down at the tailgate, and he rammed over, pow. “Hwoo,” Jimmy said to himself.
    Then the sediment ponds. I’d seen these before in other hollows, clear back to when me and Grandma were running the woods. They were put in by the company to catch the runoff, but I saw that Lace was right, Lyon Energy wasn’t keeping them up. They were jammed with stuff, and you could see pretty quick how the sides of some were tore through by the flood. I knew Jimmy Make believed it was these busted ponds that had caused the flood, and I saw what he meant. He said the flood came because of the ponds and from the hollow sides being scraped, and I saw that, too. The sides of the hollow, as we got further in, more naked and scalped, more trees coming down, and up above, mostly just scraggly weeds, the ground deep-ribbed with erosion, and I told myself, yes, this is where the floods come from. From the busted ponds and the confused new shape of the land. From how the land has forgot where the water should go, so the water is just running off every which way. That’s all it is, I told myself, Lace is stretching things again. But after what I’d seen three weeks ago in May, I wondered if it wasn’t as bad as Lace thought.

    I hadn’t been home when the cloudburst hit. I’d been on the ridge above Left Fork, and I wasn’t far from a good rock overhang Grandma’d always called the Push-in Place, and I holed up there until it stopped. The rain didn’t last long, although the half hour it did, it came heavy, but pretty soon, I was skidding on down the mountain towards the Ricker Run, thinking nothing of it. The run was moving high and muddy, like it should be after a quick hard storm like that, but it hadn’t left its banks. It had nothing to do with what happened to Yellowroot Creek because, I understood later, the mountaintop removal mine wasn’t draining into the Ricker Run yet. But as I got closer to where the trees opened into the clearing before Yellowroot Creek and then our house, I started hearing something, and for a minute, I couldn’t figure what it was. Then I started running.
    Before I even got out of the woods, I saw the footbridge was gone, and how many years of cloudbursts like that one had the footbridge gone through and never washed out? my mind moving fast and blurry, but then I was out of the trees, into the open where I could see, and then I thought, Tommy. Corey. Dane. Mom. “Mom!” I shouted. By then the creek was blasting through our yard, torrenting against the house underpinning, terrible bright brown with white chops raging in it, and down its rapids torpedoed trash and metal and logs, logs, logs, them crashing into the upstream end of the house, careening off and spinning around, and as I watched, one tree batter-rammed the fiberglass skirting and just jammed itself stuck, the loose end whip-tailing in current. “Mom!” I screamed, and I was racing up and down my side of the bank like a penned dog, looking for a place to jump across, looking for her or my little brothers in the blank house windows, and how long would the house hold? until, at the downstream end, I slipped in the mud, slammed down on one knee, looked across the creek, and saw Lace.

    The water boiled right above her knees, her sopped work uniform clinging to her, and I yelled, but she couldn’t hear me, her plunging her arm under water to the shoulder, and I realized she was looking for something. Only later would I know it was the weedeater, she’d already got the lawnmower up on the porch before the current had gotten this bad, the weedeater and lawnmower were the only work Jimmy Make had now. And I saw a muddy log boring straight down on her, and I screamed, and she could not hear but ducked it anyway.
    Then she gave up looking and started fighting current towards the front door, crouched over, her arms spread for balance, the debris barreling at