Flood memories last four decades

I'd just gotten out of junior high (age 14) in June of 1964 and was ready to join my brother at Columbia Falls High School the following September.

I was attending a Rainbow Girls meeting at the Masonic Temple in Columbia Falls when we heard the water was rising in the river. Normal curiosity drove a bunch of us to the edge of the Old Red Bridge in Columbia Falls to watch the muddy waters rise. We saw dead cattle and wood debris floating along but were most amazed at the small building which crunched against the center piling.

When I arrived home (on the flat), Mom and Dad were having coffee with friends, talking about the river gauges and listening to the reporter on the radio. Several friends in the neighborhood were packing belongings into pickups and heading up the hill.

We discussed what we should do, finally settling on a "wait and see" approach, when activity became more frenzied in the neighborhood.

I remember seeing an explosion in Kecks' house a block away before Dad (who worked at Pacific Power & Light) decided he needed to cut the electricity to our house. He did it by standing in waist-deep water while most of the neighbors stood talking on the road about the floodline to see what would happen if it kept rising. We got out of the house with the transistor radio and our puppy.

Temporary living arrangements were at Ted and LaRue Rogers' home across from the old Plum Creek mill at the end of Fourth Avenue. We slept on the floor in their living room and listened to the grownups talk about the gauges reading higher water each hour. I think it crested in the wee hours of the morning.

My folks scrambled around for a rental house and worked all week. As soon as we knew the river was receding we borrowed a canoe to inspect the house. Mike, my older brother, and friend Randy Sprunger and I paddled to the house to check out the damage. We tied the canoe to the porch post and opened the screen and wooden doors while Mel Ruder from the Hungry Horse News clicked picture after picture. (Mel got less sleep than any of us on his way to the first Pulitzer prize in Montana for the flood coverage).

As we entered the house we found Mom and Dad's coffee cups on the floating table, just as they'd left them. We also noticed that the water was moving everything to the open door, which we quickly closed. Further inspection wasn't needed. When there's three feet of water in your house you don't need to look further.

We returned to the canoe through the cold, brown water and spotted our chest freezer in the "L" of Teen Grigg's house a half block away. We retrieved it and tied it to the porch. We thought we'd saved the day but eventually knew that all the food and freezer itself would have to be thrown away because of the diseases a flooded river brings with it (especially with all the cows floating down from the Dalimata ranch near Essex).

A few days later the water was gone but the landscape was brown, icky mud. Your boots would be sucked off by the vacuum created when you tried to move through it. That's when the real work began.

My folks borrowed an old wringer washer which Mike, Loree, my younger sister, and I used for days to remove the biggest chunks of mud from our recovered clothing. After a couple of washes and rinses we took them to the laundromat for the final wash. I think those business owners made a lot of money in the summer of '64 but probably had to clean out their pipes several times because of families like ours.

We ripped the carpets out of the house thinking we could flop them over the basketball poles and rinse them out with clean water. We gave up on that lost cause and went to work on things we could change - washing walls, cleaning vents, scrubbing floors and scrubbing floors and scrubbing ….

Dad and Mom's lack of knowledge in sheetrock construction actually saved us some time during this process since neighbors had to rip theirs out and replace it. We washed down our tongue and groove wooden walls and were good to go, though the mud surfaced in different nooks for years.

I don't remember a lot about what was happening to other people because we were all so busy ourselves. The mud was soon replaced with quackgrass and we began our lives anew, moving on but never forgetting June of '64.

Retired educator Dee Brown and her husband, Steve, own and operate Canyon RV and Campground, located a mile east of Hungry Horse. She grew up in Columbia Falls and has been a lifelong resident of Northwest Montana. She was a Republican legislator in the Montana House of Representatives for six years.