While everybody and her brother was writing all summer about our lack of rain, I declined to do a column on how the drought affected nature in the Piedmont. But since we were blessed two weeks ago with more than our share of precipitation, I feel obligated to mention what nine inches of rainfall in one night did to the small pond on our property near York.

Hilton Pond isn't all that big--it normally covers less than three acres--and it got increasingly smaller in July and August as we went day after day without rain. By two Sundays ago, it had lost nearly an acre of surface, and its banks widened as water evaporated and wasn't replaced by run-off from summer showers. Just before the recent deluges, even my wood duck boxes stood completely out of water, as did several stumps that had been submerged since the dam was built in the 1950s. By my measure, the pond was down about three feet.

I had looked on the drought as an opportunity to make some observations about animal behavior, and was hoping for a shorebird influx during fall migration. I've seen few shorebirds at Hilton Pond--just Greater Yellowlegs and Spotted Sandpipers--but I thought some migrants might show up and feed at the new six-foot wide mud banks.

As the pond shrank and its banks grew wider, plant succession quickly began to occur. Grasses and herbaceous flora sprouted where there had been only submerged aquatic plants. Expanses of algae took over the shallows, and I remembered reading about ponds eventually filling in to become bogs. Somehow "Hilton Bog" doesn't have quite the right ring to it, but I certainly couldn't overcome a major drought in progress.

All this drought thinking stopped pretty abruptly a week ago last Tuesday when "The Storm" inundated much of York County. I measured more than four inches of rain in the first hour of downpour, after which precipitation tapered off for a few hours. A second cloudburst about 11 p.m. dumped another four inches on already saturated soil, and that's when things really began to happen.

During the evening I had been under the house numerous times to check on our furnace room sump pump, which each minute was spitting out 25 gallons of water. A nearby hole in the wall was letting in what looked like 24.9 gallons a minute, so the pump obviously wasn't making much headway.

By midnight, most of the rain had abated, but water continued to pour in under the house, and there was still substantial thunder and lightning not far away. Rather than sit around watching the sump pump do its thing, I made the risky decision to tour Hilton Pond with a flashlight to see what was happening. I've been on the nature trails so many times in the dark I didn't really need the lamp--especially since frequent lightning flashes provided more than adequate candlepower--but I took it along anyway.

The first big lightning bolt didn't shock me electrically, but it certainly jolted my senses by revealing what had happened to Hilton Pond after just four hours of heavy rains. Amazingly, wood duck boxes that had been high and dry that afternoon were in danger of being swamped, giving me a quick reckoning that the water was already up at least three feet!

Walking further around the pond, I found that a wooden footbridge that spanned dry pond edge all summer was under water, as were several parts of a path that follows the banks. Not until I reached the earthen dam, however, did the full impact of the storm really hit home.

As the trail sloped down to the dam's north end, I was startled to find the pond overflowing so rapidly that water was up to my knees. With the flashlight beam I could see large masses of pondweed and small silvery fish rushing past. Two foot-long water snakes slithered with the current, and I wondered how they would like their new homes downstream. Normally, an iron standpipe handles the overflow when Hilton Pond gets deeper than 12 feet, but there was no way that little six-inch tube could cope

The next morning I arose at dawn to check on the sump pump and the dam. I was pleased and relieved to find both had withstood the sky's onslaught, but I wanted to survey overall damage in the daylight. I retraced my steps from the night before and found the footbridge floating free from its moorings; this meant the water rose at least another half foot after I had crossed it at midnight.

Slogging across the shaking bridge, I noted that a huge dead willow had toppled into the pond. Since its death three years ago the snag had been a perch for swallows, kingfishers, hawks, and herons; now it will provide sanctuary for a variety of aquatic creatures as it slowly rots away.

When I finally got to the dam, the overflow was "only" ankle deep, and I saw piles of pondweed and algae matted into the shrubbery. In tiny puddles there were thousands of small fishes--mostly fingerling bream and large-mouth bass. There also were hundreds of those little Mosquito Fish that made my summer nights more pleasant as they ate their namesakes, and a variety of daces, minnows, and shiners wriggled in the grass. Several watersnakes were still there--three of them nearly too fat to move after a night of gorging on helpless fish.

I felt pretty helpless myself. All those fish were gasping and flip-flopping around as floodwaters receded, and I was unable to do much to help. I hurriedly grabbed handfuls of bream and threw them back into Hilton Pond, but most of them just spun around and gulped air at the surface. These stranded fish were already dying.

With that knowledge in mind, I tried to be more objective. I admitted that small ponds in the Piedmont have been flooding over their banks for untold years, and that small fishes have been perishing for the same length of time. Flooding is a natural occurrence, and as long as it doesn't endanger human lives, personal property, or unique habitats, we probably should worry about it far less than we do.

Just the same, we must be careful not to alter the landscape so severely that ecosystems can't deal with flood waters naturally. When we develop land and cut down erosion-stopping vegetation, we need to remember that flood-causing rains aren't that uncommon.

As I stood knee-deep in rushing waters during our recent deluge, I kept hearing the words of pond experts who told me I absolutely HAD to remove every tree and shrub from my dam lest their roots tear it apart. I have no doubt that, had I taken their advice, the erosion from that one storm would have been far worse. Perhaps all the water from the Hilton Pond would have broken through and drained into the Atlantic Ocean by now.

Maybe I'll regret it later, but now I'm really glad I let those alder shrubs and sweetgums take over the dam. Otherwise, I might be writing this column from "Hilton Mudflat."