Flood of the Century

      When we moved to Bartlesville, Oklahoma in 1986, we were in a rented house on Nowata Street – that was the road to the city of Nowata a few miles east. The location was convenient to everything, but we were not really comfortable in the house, and looking around, we quickly discovered we could well afford to buy a place. Housing costs were low due to layoffs at Phillips 66 and people moving out of town and wanting to get rid of their houses as quickly as possible. 

      Did we worry that Phillips was letting so many of its workers go at the same time that my husband was coming on board? Well he was joining the biotechnology department which was fairly new and was allegedly going to be the future – and the future of Phillips 66. We weren't feeling cocky about the new position, but we were not going to be overly hesitant about it either.

      So we started looking for a house. Bartlesville was filled with subdivisions with huge edifices on teensy tiny plots – and so we decided to look out of town. The place we found was on a dead end street with about 10 houses – our house was second to last from the dead end on the left, with two and one half acres! Both the house and the yard were huge – the backyard dipped down a little before rising back up again ending at the railroad tracks. Oh it was lovely. We decided to put a bid on it – and that was when our realtor began to advise against our getting the house.

      Did she think our offer was so low that it would insult the sellers? No. The realtor's concern was that the school system had a poor reputation. Well, the memory of the young man who wrote ricords on our box of record albums came to mind and I said to the realtor, “the schools have a bad reputation compared to what? The rest of Oklahoma?” No matter where we moved in the Bartlesville area I was convinced the schools would not be good enough for my kids, and we would supplement somehow in the subject areas where we thought public education might be weak. So why should we let a school's poor reputation keep us from a lovely house?

      We bought it and were settled in by early September – moving everything ourselves! And shortly after that, and not long after the story of the owls mentioned in an earlier blog – 2yr old Sarah kept asking me to unpack the owls one day when I was trying to get the kitchen stuff out of boxes and put away, my husband went out of town on a business trip.

      And then it started to rain.

      The rain came down a lot. In the six years we were married at that point, we only had a washer, not a dryer. Clothes were outside on the line when the rain began, and stayed there until the rain stopped, days later.

      The Caney River overflowed from the rain. Downtown Bartlesville began to flood. Then the rest of the town began to flood.

      The dip in our backyard filled up with water, and the water flowed across the yard to the next yard, and then all the way to the end of our street – the former dip was like a huge flowing ditch. Sarah and I watched the backyard, but the water never began to creep toward the house.

      One day, while it was still raining, we went out in the car and drove to the end of the street and then the end of the next street which met the major road to Bartlesville. A nice policeman stopped me there and said all the roads were closed – I needed to turn around and go back home.

      It was the Flood of the Century! How about that! If you google Bartlesville Flood of the Century, what will come up is 1986 – pictures, articles, weather reports – and we were there!

      A couple of days later when it was apparent that the worst was past, one of the neighbors stopped by and pointed to my seven months pregnant belly and said, “I bet you thought that baby would be wanting to come out during the middle of the flood!”

      I told her that the notion had crossed my mind.

      “Well, don't worry about it anymore! The eighteen year old daughter of the folks that live next door to you was helicoptered out of here yesterday – she had her baby!”

       Oh my gosh! – that was the family between us and the dead end. They had horses in the yard that Sarah enjoyed seeing and talking to and feeding grass to through the fence; and they had two girls and I think three boys, all much older than Sarah. We did not see them much, so I guess it was easy to miss that someone was pregnant.

        Don't know how I missed the helicopter, though.

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