It was early in June. She was walking through a wooded glade, her boots squelching in the rain soaked ground.  She heard the roar of the creek, swollen to three times its normal size, before it came into view.

She stood still, regarding the flooded vista, twenty feet below her position on the cliff edge. The water was a wonderful ochre shade.  An angry, fierce, boiling yellow,rushing loudly over the rocks, flowing over its banks, a foot and a halfdeep over the flood plains.  She moved carefully back from the edge,blinking in fascination as the section she had been standing on, slipped down, slowly, to plunk loudly into the angry roar, swirling away in the powerful current. Awe overtook her as felled trees whipped by in the boiling yellow flood.

She turned her face skyward at the sullen growl of thunder and blinked at a jagged flash of lightening. She adjusted the collar on her rain slicker and checked the brim of her rainhat as the drizzle picked up its pace into a mighty deluge.

Time to head back.

Lydia Martin frowned darkly as she retraced her steps.  The spring run off should have eased by now. Weather man said these unusually heavy rains should pass by the end of the week.  That's what he said last month.

The news she receivedwas filled with grim reports of flooding.  Power outages were frequent. Lydia was glad of the generator her late husband had insisted upon when they made their move fifteen years ago to the mountains.  'Phone lines had been down more often than not.

Lydia worried about her children, long grown.  Sam lived on the east coast and Marilyn . . . Marilyn . . . was off, God knows where, doing research for that Environmental Group she'd got herself caught up in.  She had spoken with Sam a month ago, if anyone could find Marilyn, Sam could.

Lydia stopped in the relative shelter of a stand of pines along the path and lit a cigarette.  For Marilyn's sake she was trying to quit.  Had it down to five a day .. . 'til recently.    Lydia tried to console herself.

There were always Doomsdayers.  Whenever mother nature threw her most prominent species a curve, people had a penchant for evil portents.  Marilyn said the ice caps were melting at an alarming rate, due to Global warming and the thinning of the Ozone layer. Greenhouse Effect causing weather patterns to change.

Lydia snorted and ground her cigarette butt under her muddy boot heel.  No longer were people caught up in Biblical reasons for natural disasters.  Now, it was popular to blame the off shoots of development and the use of earth's natural resources.  Man's sins against nature.  Lydia smiled as she continued along the path to the house she had helped her Philip build.

Her smile faded as the rain continued to fall like a grey curtain over the waterlogged ground, dulling the deep green of the foliage.  Marilyn's words from her visit at Christmas came back, hauntingly:

"We've been raping, polluting and using this earth as if it's our right.  Someday, nature may simply decide to wash the troublesome species of homo sapiens off the face of the planet.  It happened before.  There's enough documented proof of a world wide flood, though I doubt it took only forty days and forty nights as the Bible insists.  Nature may decide to use rain to purify her surface once more.  I can't say I blame her.

Dad knew something.  Maybe, he moved to the mountains for more than just the outstanding scenery."