The brothers stumbled back to Tommy's house, blurted what they'd found, and at first their wives didn't believe them, told the men they must not have walked far enough down the hill. It wasn't until they walked the road themselves that they understood what the night's rain had done. At their feet was a dribble of creek transformed to thick brown river, deep and powerful. On the mountainsides around them, white scars gleamed in the strengthening sunlight, light-colored bedrock laid bare by avalanches. Every few minutes, the earth rumbled underfoot as another waterlogged slope peeled away from the rock and slid, woods and all, into the valley.
Bedrock is exposed by one of the many mudslides along Davis Creek.
Photo by Gene Ramsey. The ground had slipped at the old Huffman home place, too, where Tommy's mother lived with his younger brother, Jesse, and Jesse's family. It had spun the house around and brought its roof down. Tommy's mother suffered a deep cut on her leg, and Jesse clawed his way out of the streaming water on a guy wire that anchored a light pole. They found three of Jesse's kids under a piece of collapsed roof, not a scratch on them.