Late in September the boats reappeared on the river, and the people gathered at the dock to watch. It was a cold, rainy day; already frosts had turned the landscape bleak, and fog over the river obscured everything until the boats were very close. A meeting party set out to help bring in the exhausted people, and when they were all docked and the tally taken, the realization that nine people had been lost wreathed the homecoming in gloom.

The following night they held the Ceremony for the Lost, and the survivors told their story haltingly. They had brought back five boats, one under tow most of the way. One boat had been swept away at the mouth of the Shenandoah; they had found it smashed and broken up, with no survivors, its load of surgical equipment lost to the river. The second damaged boat had been run aground by a sudden storm that overturned it and ruined its load of maps, directories, warehouse lists—bales and bales of papers that would have proven useful.

The shelter at the falls had been started; the canal had proven disastrous, impossible to dig as proposed. The river flooded in from below and washed it out repeatedly, and all they had succeeded in doing was to make a swampy area that flooded in high water and was a muddy bog when the river fell. And the worst part, they agreed, had been the cold. As soon as they had reached the Potomac the cold had plagued them. There had been frosts; leaves had fallen prematurely, and the river was numbing. Much of the vegetation was dead; only the hardiest plants were surviving. The cold had persisted in Washington, had made the canal digging a hellish task.

The snow came to the valley early that year, on the first of October. It remained on the ground for a week before the wind shifted and warm southerly breezes melted it. On the infrequent clear days when the sun shone brightly and no mist hid the tops of the surrounding hills and mountains, the snow could still be seen on the high ridges.

Later Barry would be able to look back on that winter and know it had been crucial, but at the time it seemed just one more in the endless string of seasons.