TERLINGUA PAGE 4

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For those of you guys not familiar with arroyo, let me introduce you. It is a Spanish word. It actually means stream. However, an "arroyo" can be a dry gulch with no water. However, when you have a down pour the water in the desert has to go somewhere so it usually congregates in low lying areas which are usually between two hill tops as you can see in the previous page when looking at Kemp Road. The bottom of those small hills are arroyos. When when I was out there we had a serious down pour. I decided to photograph the gathering storm headed my way. The below photo is of this storm that produced a flood of water flowing through the arroyos. That white light is not the sun trying to peak through the clouds, it is a flash of lightning. I did a 5 second exposure. Then had to run in because the storm was advancing extremely fast. Note, this is about 10 at night.

While the storm raged, I was safe inside my adobe. No problems. Well, during this time there was a person who was driving around in the storm and decided to go down Kemp Road. Which means you also have to go through the arroyo's at the bottom of each hill. He did this during the height of the storm with maximum water flow. It did not end well, but he is still alive. The water swept his new vehicle (still had the temporary tags on it) down stream about 500 feet. Totally trashed the car and the fellow was lucky he escaped with his life. See photos. We have an expression here in Texas. "Turn around, don't drown". How simple can that be? You can't fix stupid. Below is the results.

Just to make sure what an arroyo is, the bottom two photos will demonstrate my point. If there is water flowing through these things: STOP and TURN AROUND.

The end result of not using your head can be seen below. They said the car was less than 2 weeks old and there it sits. I can get you a good deal. You could sell it for scrap, maybe, after you clean out all the mud!

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