By Paula Day

An insistent pounding woke Beverly from a deep sleep that Friday morning. It was 4 a.m. Feb. 16 and it had been raining all night.

John Saundero, a neighbor, shouted over an ominous roar, “Get out. It’s bad.”

“Give me 10 minutes,” Mrs. Wesling called back as she woke up her husband, Bill. The water from the raging Hemptown Creek that flowed a few feet from their Blue Ridge home was beginning to seep under the door. She rushed to gather what she could; in a few minutes the torrent was up to her knees.

The Weslings were able to save a watch that belonged to Beverly’s grandfather and some of Bell Wesling’s original paintings. Later they found their white cat, Annie, sitting mud-soaked on their water-damaged computer. Wesling’s priceless collection of wildlife prints, the result of a lifetime of work as a professional naturalist-artist, was ruined, as was all their furniture except two chairs.

“Those were only possessions,” Mrs. Wesling observed a week later. “We’re all alive, including Annie. The good Lord still looks out for you.

A few days later, her husband, who has leukemia suffered a slight stroke, and was hospitalized in Atlanta’s Veterans’ Administration Hospital.

The Weslings’ two married daughters, Carol Hart and Chris George, came immediately from their Florida homes to help their parents, and a friend offered the family a place to stay.

“My dirty linen is all over Blue Ridge,” Mrs. Wesling explained wryly since parishioners from St. Anthony’s Church had divided up whatever could be laundered. “At least Annie was able to clean herself,” she added with a laugh.

The Weslings came to Fannin County, located in northern-most Georgia, in 1986 and Bill Wesling continued his profession as a painter of wildlife. The couple were part of a group from the archdiocese who traveled to Rome in the summer of 1988 to be present when Archbishop Eugene A. Marino received the pallium from Pope John Paul II. Now Beverly Wesling is wondering if the couple will be able to stay in Georgia.

Hemptown Creek flows into the Toccoa River. The heavy rains that fell the night of Feb. 16 were added to what remained after an unusually wet January and first two weeks of February. Rivers and creeks were brimming, mountain pastures and forest waterlogged.

The Oconee River, which forms the boundary between Tennessee and Georgia, broke from the banks that fateful morning. At least two thirds of the stores in McCaysville, Ga. And Copperhill, Tenn., twin towns separated by the river, were flooded. In McCaysville, seven miles north of Blue Ridge, an estimated 125 homes were seriously damaged.