At any rate, the cat-eating bears of 1999 were just a blip in Grafton’s ongoing bad year. June’s drought and July’s heat wave were quickly forgotten in September, when deadly Hurricane Floyd ripped through the region, disrupting power lines, peeling shingles from roofs, and uprooting trees. Over the course of a few days, the town went from parched to inundated. Soon, five-hundred-year-high floodwaters had gouged washouts up to eight feet deep into Grafton’s dirt roads and completely isolated some of its residents from the larger world.
