By Dr. Bruce Smith ——Bio and Archives--October 7, 2024

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It's a late September Friday that seems like a Saturday but isn't.

So yesterday the remnants of Hurricane Helene approached us here in the heartland, marching through Georgia, up across Knoxville, and then into Kentucky. Rain was promised by the forecasters and also by the wind swinging around to the northeast. The glass fell rapidly through the night.

The preparations began. There was a bag of yellow eye beans that I bought in New Hampshire a while back that I rinsed two or three times last evening then put to soak overnight, just in case. Soup or chili when a storm’s coming is always a good thing. If the storm doesn’t show, oh, well.

The low pressure center came up rapidly from the southeast as we waited here in the Heartland along the old National Road. The remnants of tropical storms don’t always give us rain, then sometimes they wash us away. At a different spot along the National Road in 1980 I had 14 inches of rain in a week. All the creeks and rivers came out of their banks, including the one I backed up against. On a foggy morning, I went there to tend to chores and came very close to driving in to a river that was sixty feet out of its banks on both sides. In its normal state it was only twenty feed wide most places. That time I saw the muddy water just before I drove into it, backing up the hill to safety, shaking........

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