“So, I'm really glad that our Lee cousins moved down here so fast, but how do you just get a house and move it like that?”
Eleven-year-old Eleanor Ludlow had been pondering this question for a few days, but finally posed it to her grandmother, Mrs. Thalia Ludlow.
“Timing,” Mrs. Ludlow said. “The house had to be moved, and the people living there didn't want to take on the expense, so they did a quick sale to your Cousin Harry and he moved it over here.”
“But why?” Eleanor said.
“There was a sinkhole growing under that lot, and eventually … .”
Eventually happened just as Mrs. Ludlow was saying it, and even half a mile away from that eventually, the Ludlow home started shaking.
Capt. R.E. Ludlow came into the living room, snatching up his two littlest grandchildren and shouting a single order ---
“Out of the house – toward the ridge!”
They did not know it was not a rare but potentially deadly – because unlike in Mrs. Ludlow's native California, Virginia did not build with major earthquakes as a regular reality in mind – Appalachian earthquake.
The Trents and Stepforths next door and the Lees across the cul-de-sac were on the move in the same direction – the most solid ground possible was the foothills of the Blue Ridge, although not too close because of the potential of rock slides.
But, it was over almost as quickly as it began, and Col. H.F. Lee had the answer.
“They said that whole lot was going to fall in, and ...”
The colonel called it in, and sure enough, the entire lot his present home had been sitting on had crashed in.
“So, what happened was that someone didn't check the topological maps about 75 years ago, and then all those water main breaks this summer haven't helped,” he explained to everyone when they all got back to their own cul-de-sac.
“What's a topological map?” six-year-old Grayson Ludlow asked.
“I'm just trying to figure out what that is so Papa will pick us up and run again, because, see, that was fun!” Grayson's baby brother Lil' Robett said.
“It's a map where you can see the features of the landscape – hills, valleys, watersheds – basically, us copying God's blueprints,” Col. Lee said.
“Oh,” Grayson said. “I need to start looking at those, because if my blueprints work with His blueprints, my stuff will stay up.”
“And that's why … oh, snap,” Sgt. Vincent Trent said.
“Not everyone has Grayson's good sense – aren't the headwaters to the big creek that feeds half of Fruitland Memorial Park with water not far from here?” Mrs. Velma Stepforth said.
“Yes,” Col. Lee said, “and one of the feeder creeks runs underground a half-mile from here and changed course sometime in the last century – but General Lofton did not buy up Old Fruitland this far, realizing the danger, and then Major Lofton, when he built the Veteran's Lodge, left clear instructions that if the Lodge were to expand, it was to expand no further than this block where the bedrock comes to an end. He realized that other developers were going to buy up the land he did not want at the moment, but that half of it does not have ridge rock directly underneath it. That whole area is just a sluice way for mud and rocks running off the ridge in this area … settled into roughly flat over time, and of course nicely leveled off by the developers, but subject to being undermined.”
“Yikes,” nine-year-old George Ludlow said. “It would take something earth-shattering to get me out of being grounded, but being safe in my room on bedrock is actually sounding kinda good right now.”
“Be thankful,” nine-year-old Milton Trent said to his friend George, “because the real earth-shattering event is happening Monday. Grandma Jubilee is coming back to stay for a while.”
“Oh, we all are going to have to get our lives together!” George said.
“What we need to do is build a time machine and send all of our grandparents back to 1945 and have them ask the people that put houses on that stuff how much self-breakage baddagement does anybody really need?” eight-year-old Edwina Ludlow said. “It's like they were left a map, and still messed up!”
“I'm just trying to consider how people just lived with that sinking feeling, every day,” ten-year-old Andrew Ludlow said, “and how people could even sell houses over there knowing what could happen.”
“Good sense isn't common,” Mr. Thomas Stepforth said. “My father turned down working on those houses in 1946 because he said they were basically on quicksand, and it almost cost him his life in Lofton County to do that – big colored man messing up the money for the developers with his big mouth. But the man with the big mouth also had gotten copies of the map and had just casually let big newspapers know that if anything happened to him, check the maps and the paperwork. He called their bluff, and lived!”
“Gutsy move,” Col. Lee said. “We hear all the way up into the Blue Ridge that Theodore Stepforth was no joke.”
“Not at all,” Mr. Stepforth said.
“Somebody just sent me some pics – that lot and half the road are gone, and that sinkhole must be at least 50 feet deep or more,” Capt. Ludlow said.
“Andrew has a point, though,” eleven-year-old Velma Trent said. “That didn't just happen overnight.”
“Ain't it the truth,” Velma's eight-year-old sister Gracie said. “When you are on a sinking ship, but the ship is your house, that's gotta be kinda rough.”
“Which answers my question of how y'all saved this house by bringing it over here, and why that other family was so ready to sell,” Eleanor said. “This wasn't the answer we wanted, or even the answer we needed, but, really, the way the world is, the answer we deserved.”
Capt. Ludlow looked at his granddaughter in a mingling of emotions … she was right. Edwin Ludlow, his father, her great-grandfather, had signed off on that development in 1945, because he had checked: the underground creek was no longer flowing in that direction. But owing to the water main breaks leading to massive amounts of water running again underground by the same path, it had not made any difference. Thus a set of 75-year-old collective bad decisions had paid off in just three months.
But, grace and mercy were real … just a lot, not a house, not any people … so the Ludlows, Trents, Stepforths, and Lees all went home.
Capt. Ludlow, when tucking Grayson in, said this to him.
“You are on the right track, my grandson, knowing things your father, your grandfather, and your great-grandfather did not know until too late in life to not have a lot of things collapse. I will get you topological maps next week, and you keep paying attention on Sundays to the lesson and when we have lessons here from the Bible. Build your blueprints in accordance with God's blueprints, and your stuff will stand. You're on the right track, Grayson.”
“But are we going to run some more, because that was fun!” Lil' Robert said, and was delighted when his grandfather came over to his bed, threw him up in the air a few times, and then tucked him in.
