We were awakened in the early hours this morning with the season's first thunderstorm. And driving to work I saw an extraordinary flash of lightning streak across the sky horizontally as far as I could see, branching out in all directions. I have always enjoyed thunderstorms, and sooner or later at family gatherings, the 1972 flood at Cushing comes up.
My dad and his two sisters owned 80 acres of woods in Cushing, MN. We spent almost every weekend camping there while I was growing up. We started with tents, eventually built a 10x10' storage shed on the property, and later built a geodesic dome for our cabin. But the flood happened before the dome was built. My parents were staying in one tent, and we four kids were in another tent with my grandmother. I always thought it was cool that my grandma went camping with us--I didn't know anyone else whose grandma camped.
It started raining that evening and just didn't let up. We finally went to bed but didn't sleep much with the heavy rain and thunder. And the tent was starting to leak. Somewhere in the middle of the night I remember waking up and seeing a tennis shoe floating in a low spot inside the tent. At one point my sister said she needed to go to the bathroom. My grandma had her take a rain coat, and my sister stepped out of the tent. Only she never came back. After some time of waiting, we started calling for her but we couldn't hear anything over the rain and we certainly couldn't see her anywhere--not even during the flashes of lightning. The rain was coming down so hard and fast, it was almost impossible to see more than a foot ahead. My grandma finally let me step outside to look for her. It was only once I was outside that I realized there was a light coming from the storage shed.
It turned out my parents' tent had collapsed under the weight of the rain and so they took refuge in the shed and had lit the lantern in there. My sister had seen the light and gone into the shed as well. The water was overflowing the gutters on the shed and cascading down the inside of the walls. My parents had moved things away from the shed walls and made make-shift beds on lawn chairs. I decided to join them, went back to the tent long enough to tell my grandma, and then back to the shed where I slept on a table. At least I was dry.
The next day we packed it all in to head home. Only we couldn't get home. Roads were washed out and we found out we'd had 14" of rain in 24 hours. We ended up driving in the opposite direction to the church camp where my aunt, uncle, and cousins were working for the summer. They took us in, dried us out, and made more make-shift beds to accommodate everyone. The kids all thought it was a great adventure and I do remember my grandma making a lot of jokes about the situation. She was like that with us kids. We finally did get home, but I remember it taking a long time and seeing entire fields under water. To this day though, I absolutely love the rain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP_MDIYhPH0
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