The Waterman: A Novel of the Chesapeake Bay by Tim Junkin

Author:Tim Junkin [Junkin, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Suspense, General, Action & Adventure, Historical, Men's Adventure
ISBN: 9781565122307
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 1999-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

14

When Clay reached the top of the hill and emerged from the woods, he saw a man he made out to be Jim Lawlor running from the front door of his house to his Jeep Wagoneer. Stumbling down to the edge of the driveway, Clay managed to place himself in the beams of its headlights as the Jeep started to swing around the drive toward the lane. Lawlor’s eyes widened in disbelief. He opened the door and Clay climbed in.

“My God, son, you look like a drowned ghost. How the hell’d you get here, and what the hell are you doing out in this?”

“Trying to save my pots, sir. And my boat.”

“Your boat! Jesus! You were out there?”

“Yes, sir. I got delayed some. Figured you got one of the best hurricane holes around.”

Jim Lawlor owned several farms in the county, and acres of riverfront property. He had been a hunting partner of Pappy’s. He told Clay that he had already moved his family into his cousin’s house in town and was heading there himself. “Just in case,” he explained. He asked Clay about his boat and how he had secured it and nodded thoughtfully on hearing the explanation. He asked about the river and kept shaking his head as Clay described it. “Of course I will take you home with me,” he insisted. “You need some dry clothes, son. Don’t say a word. Don’t try to argue. Don’t even mention it.”

The brunt of Agnes hit that night. Winds in Easton were clocked at near a hundred miles per hour, shredding foliage and knocking over trees, but it was the rain that was like never before, flying laterally in sheets for hours in the howling dark, battering the Lawlors’ frame house, pounding the windows, and sending flash floods cascading down the street. Clay, having showered and changed into some clothes the Lawlors had found for him, sat in the kitchen drinking coffee, watching the windows, and listening to the sounds of the storm for most of the night. The phones were down, so he couldn’t call Bertha or Byron. Jim Lawlor had made a bed for him on the sofa, but it wasn’t until first light that he lay down and fell asleep.

As Clay slept, Hurricane Agnes continued to rampage across the Mid-Atlantic seaboard before veering northeast, pouring more rain into the Susquehanna and the other tributaries of the Bay than ever before in recorded history, and causing the worst flooding in its huge watershed in two centuries. Some five inches of rain fell over the watershed in just four hours, the news reported. The Bay’s saline levels would become inverted. South of the raging Susquehanna, the floodwaters, of the Sassafras, the Gunpowder, the Patapsco, the Chester, the West, the South, the Severn, the Choptank, the Patuxent, and the Potomac had begun their carnage, carrying mud, silt, topsoil, fertilizers, pesticides, and debris from the Blue Ridge to the Bay and wreaking environmental havoc throughout the huge estuary.

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