18 march 2025, @mariannewest's Freewrite Writing Prompt Day 2679: myth busting

Image by Joakim Roubert from Pixabay

“OK, so … goodbye, preciously held myth about my type of man in Lofton County of course being competent, rational, and concerned about everyone's well-being and just possibly naturally superior … not that I haven't known since five years old, really, since rational people don't kill folks in the street for just looking at them … but the entire world is now going to find out!”

Rarely had Thalia Ludlow seen her husband have an entire mental break – Robert Edward Ludlow Sr. was an exceptionally strong man, having seen things from five years old that no one should have to see, including a triple murder at five years old, 33 years of military service and burying what he thought were his two remaining children after 17 years of thinking his first wife had done away with herself and their younger two children.

But, someone had overlooked the captain's father's engineering instructions.

Edwin Ludlow had pretty much designed and built modern Lofton County, VA and modernized a lot of the rest, including the Veteran's Lodge, built in 1866, and the tracts around it that had slowly been picked up by the Lofton Trust to expand the Lodge almost up to the foothills of the Blue Ridge.

But not quite. Edwin Ludlow had made a note about tracts of land nobody should put houses on, because literally downstream, there were homes that could be put on but only if the stress of higher-up homes did not break the natural barrier that had caused an ancient creek to change course underground. So long as that creek stayed in its “new” 1870s-and-later course, one could build below its old range, and put down infrastructure for gas, water, and telephones as time passed.

The present problem had been delineated by the elder Ludlow.

“There are three ways to destroy everything here,” he had written in 1952. “One, skimp on infrastructure workmanship. Two, build upstream and put pressure on the wall formed by that underground rock fall and let the creek eat at the strain. Three, do both if you want to see, quickly, what either one will do slowly.”

Edwin Ludlow Jr. had repeated this warning until his death in 1990 – but a decade after that, everyone who remembered why the Ludlow father was important was out of power, and people did what they wanted to do, pleasing their friends in Lofton County's gentleman's agreement type of system. The upper tracts were developed, and money was “saved” on building costs on new infrastructure underground.

This led to three water main breaks, and the water main breaks had all flooded the old creek path. Result: the lower houses had their foundations washed out because they were not anchored to bedrock. A sinkhole took an entire lot from which a house had been moved because the trouble had been spotted. The hole was 150 feet deep, with bedrock still 75 feet deeper – the lot was gone and so was half the road.

Col. H.F. Lee, trustee for the Lofton Trust residing at the Veteran's Lodge, had gone out to take a look that day, and then ordered all the old plans and permits for all the nearby tracts pulled. He already knew the water main permitting process and the house-building process were jokes, but what he found staggered his imagination even before reading Edwin Ludlow's clear instructions on what NOT to do … all of which had been done between 1990 and 2020. A whole lot of people had made a whole lot of money building things that looked good, BUT...

“It's all coming down – that creek is going to break into its old path!”

Col. Lee was not a man who wasted time, so he called the head of the Lofton Trust, the head of the Veteran's Lodge, some old friends at the Army Corps of Engineers and his cousin, Donald Lee Garner Jr., the mayor in Big Loft, VA. Big Loft was the county seat, so Mayor Garner needed to be on the line for the biggest collective “Wait, what?” in Lofton County for at least half a century.

But then came the people who did not want things to change … developers, real estate investors and agents making good money buying and selling the newish homes, and their backers in county government … and it was the emergency supervisors' board meeting, available on Zoom, that had Capt. R.E. Ludlow, Edwin's fifth and last surviving son, just flipping out. Owing to the fact that Lofton County was loathe to change, everyone could see that pretty much everyone in power digging in their heels about evacuating said neighborhood was the traditional leadership, versus pretty much everyone else younger and more varied basically saying, “Are you daft – the Army Corps of Engineers has said we have two weeks at best!”

“Well, it's held up for all these years – what's the hurry?” the county board of supervisors said.

“That's basically what Admiral Solomon Slocum said in 1869,” Col. Lee commented, “ten days before his church and the hill it was on slid into what we know today as Slocum Slide – with him in it. I was not aware that y'all wanted something named after you quite that bad.”

16-year-old Tom Stepforth managed to ease into the meeting the Lofton County Free Voice wasn't supposed to know about … his paper started a “Countdown to Stupidity Slump” and re-posted all the old documents including copies of Edwin Ludlow's notes … making the Big Loft Bulletin be hours behind … but they would catch up.

The supervisors decided to table the matter until their next regular meeting! Capt. R.E. Ludlow found himself a pillow, went into the garage, got into the back of the car, shut the door, put his head in the pillow, and had a whole basso profondo blue fit about everything back to five years old that he had been told was true about his type of man. This was the worst myth busting day of his entire life.

“You look tired, Papa,” seven-year-old Amanda Ludlow said when her grandfather at last came back into the house. “I think you need snugglecouragement!”

“I'm trying to work out where we are going to get a nice 2-3 week vacation, Mandie,” he said while picking her up.

“Gracie next door was just saying that her Pop-Pop has some nice QuaranHomes – places that people go when they travel into the county and need to quarantine for a while – that are open because travel has slowed down a lot,” Amanda said. “I can find out if Mr. Stepforth has an extra one, because they and the Trents are planning a vacation too!”

The Trents and Stepforths, too, had seen the meeting.

“We gotta get out of here, and we gotta help our Ludlow cousins get out of here,” Col. Lee said to his wife Maggie when he got back to the cul-de-sac. “Not that the ground will open up this far, but when that underground rock wall breaks, the breakout of the creek is taking the whole water main with it, and that combination of water might get high enough to get inside our homes even back here, and there is no telling how high – we gotta go, soon!”

“Well,” Thomas Stepforth Sr, billionaire, founder of QuaranHomes, said, “it just so happens that I have three such homes next door to each other in Tinyville, VA, where I live, and none of them are booked for the rest of September.”

“See, Amanda,” Mr. Stepforth's eight-year-old granddaughter Gracie Trent said, “this is why we gotta have brown billionaires too, because they always have things like extra houses and stuff in their back pockets so we ain't gotta be separated on vacation.”

“We're actually going to an Insta-Resort with all our friends and I am here for it!” eight-year-old Edwina Ludlow said, and added, clapping with every word, “I. AM. HERE. FOR. IT!”

So, that Tuesday evening, the Ludlows, the Trents, and the Lees all made their temporary move to Tinyville, VA., being among the few people who voluntarily evacuated without a fuss. The eleven children involved under 12 thought they were on vacation – all happy as clams, and safe!

“Now, although this is a nightmare still, I can sleep,” the captain said. “I can sleep … I can sleep … in the real world … where all people are just people, and if anyone survives the foolishness, it is just the grace of God.”

“Don't sleep before your sleepytime snugglecouragement!” Amanda said, and with a running leap jumped and hugged and knocked her grandfather clear into his new bed.

“That was kinda fun, but gee, Papa, all that working out has your chest muscles kinda hard,” she said upon landing safely by him.

“We need to talk about low-speed snugglecouragement, Amanda,” he said gently.

“And not airborne,” Mrs. Ludlow added, with a smile.