This morning the thunder boomed me out of the bed at 0400. Winds shook the house and the lightning strobed like a Halloween haunted house. This is not the sort of weather that gives me the urge to sleep, ha, so the coffee was brewing by 0405. It usually gets noisy when it rains in the Ozarks, whether it’s the thunder or the roar of water rushing down hills.

Right now it’s really green outside. The leaves are all fresh and new. And in the interim, while the rain is pausing while it gears up for another round this afternoon, I went out to take some video of the waterfall in the gully beside the house. Then I went down the driveway to take some more video of where it exits onto the driveway. Right now it’s not so bad. But I’ve seen times when the water is coming out of the waterfall end so hard and high that it would go through the truck window if I tried to drive past it. And in 2015 it rained harder and more volume than I’d ever seen out here before. That’s the night our landslide started, and the night my parents got the fright of their lives. They were in their camper which was parked down past the waterfall exit. A flash flood on our little creek came up suddenly and nearly knocked their camper off the jacks.

This morning’s rains and flooding were not so severe, thankfully.

When it Rains in the Ozarks

We have lots of hollers and hills, and oftentimes at the bottom of a holler there’s a creek. If the creek doesn’t have springs feeding it, then most of the time it’s dry. The gullies running down the hills serve as rocky, boulder-strewn runoff conduits for when it rains.

The little gully next to our house usually keeps a small trickle of water all year. But when it rains, it rushes. Most of the time, we can’t see the water from the porch. But when it rains, it’s easy to spot the white water churning over the rocks. You can hear it even from inside the house on days like this, because it roars. And, when that happens, it usually means the bridges near our house are already flooded.

Here’s a short video of the gully waterfall and the creeks near our house, taken after this morning’s rain.