Spoken by Willie Gughan
Christmas Eve, 1897
Constantia, N.Y.
A vast amount of rain had we in July, '
97 , a moist and constant water
change between the earth and heaven; for
what went up came down again,
and ten times more beside, And Scriba
Creek did soon become, an ocean
wild and wide.
Now Scriba Creek is a gentle stream and
generally glides along. In a
harmless route, at a harmless gait, and
singing a harmless song: but a creek is a creek and it's nothing else.
And it wasn't designed to be a strong right
arm of the Mexican Gulf or the Mediteranean
Sea.
And so when it rained and rained and rained,
and the waters came down
in a chunk, Old Scriba Creek to a river
grew and it moved like a river drunk.
For it rose and it rose to Gayville, and
it rose and it rose down here, and it
rose in about 4 minutes, enough for a
good long year.
And the bridges wewre knocked to pieces
and the bulkheads were knocked
ker-slam. And it didn't care for the sawmill
and it didn't care for the dam;
but it rose and it rose and spread and
spread. It cut and it wore and tore. It
mopped up the dirt in the highways, it
carried away the floor.
It roared with a bull like fury. It plunged
with a hull like wrath. It didn't
have any location, it didn't have any
path. It was here, it was there, it was
everywhere. It conquered wherever it went.
It scooped up thousands of
dollars and never gave back one cent.
And the logs came down and trees came down.
The rocks they were lived
along. With sawmills and barns and acres
of farms, and banks that were
ancient and strong. And everything went
before it that couldn't get outof the
way. And it crumbled to dust and distruction
like the " wonderful one hoss
shay "
If the rain hadn't come like a deluge,
if the dam up at Gayville had held, if
the dam up at Carter's had stood there,
if the volume of wet hadn't swelled :
in short, if the flood hadn't flooded,
there wouldn't have been any flood, and
half the town of Constantia had
never been covered in mud.
The moral of all this confusion is lost
in confusion as great, you can charge
it all up to a cloud burst, gravitiation,
poor timber or fate; but this much is
certainly certain, whatever solid or weak,
on that day that Constantia was
flooded, the Universe sprang a leak.