Hundred-Year's Flood

One-hundred Year’s Flood.

 

Sitting at anchor in Daniel’s Bay, Nuku Hiva, a somewhat ‘perfect’ anchorage—none but friends around—it started to rain in the early evening as Brian and I began a chess game.  The wind picked up slightly and I hadn’t really dogged down my portlights sufficiently, so I quit the game and rowed home.

The water kept on coming.  It was a down pour, sixteen hours worth.  Ever now and again someone would come on the VHF: “Did you see that landslide?” or “I can count 37 waterfalls!” 

37 waterfalls!  How?  Can you imagine?  The rain on the high bluffs above came spilling through the jungle in silver cascades down each and every ravine and wrinkle.  360 degrees of waterfalls.  The river was a torrent.

Perhaps we’ve all seen floods at some point, and this one was just the same.  The water went brown and trees and debris floated out past us.  I hoped the water would turn brackish enough to kill the algae on my hull.

 

There is a hike through a small village at the mouth of the river into Daniel’s Bay that leads to what I have heard is the third longest waterfall in the world.  Everyone had already gone up but me and I was thinking of going today. 

Paul said he’d like to go and search for artifacts that had been exposed by the flood.  So we rowed from the anchorage to the village where we’d park the dink and start our hike.  But as we rowed in we started already to notice devastation.  Cocoanut trees hung heads bowed into the fast flowing river.  The exposure of roots showed the massive erosion of the banks.  Since Paul had aleady been  here he could comment on the changes.

In the village everything except the houses had been washed away—there was nothing but mud and rock.  Whole nurseries of banana and young coconut trees had been completely washed away.

We met Daniel (hence Daniel’s Bay) in the village and he said that in his 78 years he had never known a flood like this.  At first we were shocked—the rain hadn’t seemed so fierce—but the farther we hiked the more we understood.

The village’s only road had been completely washed away in places.  There were new creeks, created by the numerous waterfalls, that had etched a fresh trail through the jungle to the river.  Great sand bars appeared seemingly at random.  At bends in the river were great barricades of coconut trees, the lifeblood of the village.

 

It needs to be noted somewhere that the scenery of the surrounding cliffs is some of the most striking visual artistry I’ve ever seen—so  tall and furrowed and deep and shadowed—impossible to convey, somewhere between Kauai and the Kali Gandaki gorge in Nepal.  Truly breathtaking landscape.  We crossed rivers and found an ancient village high in the hills, sitting quietly as it has for hundreds of years unchanged.  I’ve never taken more pictures in one day that I can remember.

The waterfall was itself spectacular as well.  It didn’t hurt that it was nearly at flood stage still.  But nothing touched me the way the destruction down below had.  I remembered Hurricane Huge and how we lost seventy per-cent of our pecan trees, how the river blew out the dikes on the Wateree and flooded the level and most of the fields past Bootsie’s Corner.

But I was young but I knew somehow that it would all be okay.  Crops could be replanted next year.  We wouldn’t starve.  And farms have insurance.  But what about this village?  They are mostly subsistence living.  What happens?  Do they have enough coconuts and papyas and breadfruit trees to get on for the next few years until new nurseries can mature?

When we talked with Daniel he never lost the smile on his face when talking about his loss.   He laughed once or twice.  I take this as both a sign of the strength of his character and a foreknowledge that “we shall perseviere….again.”