Most places, the seasons come and go. Some places, they never change. There are winter towns. There are summer towns. There are towns called Falmouth.
The picturesque seaside community of Falmouth, Mass., is a different town come summertime. The population quadruples. You can look right across the water and see Martha's Vineyard.
The golf courses are great, the schools highly regarded, the research top-drawer. It was a guy at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute who discovered where the Titanic rests on the ocean floor.
Falmouth, Mass., has little in common with Falmouth, Ky. Except for the seasons.
The population of Falmouth, Ky., also changes drastically with the calendar. This year, in the dead of winter, there were exactly zero people left living in Falmouth proper. Most had cleared out. Some had died.
The town, like the Titanic, lay underwater.
Can't go home again
The rains came, the river exploded, and before anybody knew what was happening, March 1997 had settled in forever in Falmouth. The longest winter had come. Spring won't be following. There's no tomorrow for the Falmouth we knew. That place is dead.
When the town comes back from the devastation, it will be as a different Falmouth. The destruction was so great, they'll have to rebuild someplace else. A new town. Nearby, but someplace else.
Geography can be confusing. The kids in Gordon Starr's fourth grade class at Teaticket Elementary School in Falmouth, Mass., just this month learned where Falmouth, Ky., was. But, of course, the town no longer was there even as they were pointing to it on the map.
It's haunting, the mystery of water. Life and death, tide and time.
Sometimes, at high tide, the ocean at Falmouth, Mass., rises 12 feet. But 55 feet? The kids at Teaticket couldn't even imagine what was happening in Kentucky. Then they watched the videotape of Dan Rather. Look! There! A Falmouth in Kentucky!
''I'm not sure we even would have heard of it if what's-his-name hadn't gone there,'' Mr. Starr said. ''Not Clinton.''
''Gore? I offered.
''Yes,'' Mr. Starr said.
The vice president, of course, got no closer than the airport. Bad weather prevented him from going to Falmouth. But his visit helped focus attention on the community's plight.
Some names you forget. Some you don't. The good people of the town of Falmouth, Mass., have been fixated on Falmouth, Ky., ever since they discovered through news accounts of the flood that there's a town of the same name 900 miles away in the Bluegrass State.
Town to town
A real estate agent named David Oshman started a campaign on the local cable channel and in the local newspaper to get help for Falmouth, Ky. ''Falmouth to Falmouth,'' they call it.
They've started an account at a bank so residents of Falmouth, Ky., might have money to replace all they lost. They're filling a tractor-trailer, donated by the Marine Lodge Masons, with blankets, sheets, towels and diapers.
Pete's Mobil is donating the gas for the drive to Kentucky on April 15.
Falmouth, Mass., schools got into the act when Mr. Starr and another fourth-grade teacher, Donna Mattison-Earls at Mullen-Hall Elementary, took it on as a class project. They'll raise money with yard sales and popcorn sales. They'll collect toothbrushes and clothes.
Falmouth, Mass., is no stranger to natural disasters. The town, home of Kathy Lee Bates, who wrote ''America the Beautiful,'' is easy on the eyes. But it was a wreck four years ago. One name no one around here has forgotten is Bob. That's the hurricane that knocked down buildings and trees here in 1993.
Then, when Falmouth, Mass., needed help, a church group from Kentucky came to town to help with the cleanup. They spent a month living at the high school.
''These people helped us out last time,'' Mr. Starr said. ''Now it's our turn to help them.''