House for Sale: Water View

Beachland Avenue in Bayview Beach resembles the Venetian shores in Italy.

But residents -- including one who has his house on the market -- just go with the flow.  They say it's life as usual at high tide or a full moon near a saltwater marsh.

"This is not a flood. This is high tide," Duarte Cabral, 68, said as he skirted around the ankle-deep with his wife toward their house.

"It comes from the wetlands," his wife, Jean Cabral, 57, said, "Nothing you could do about it."

Once inside, she grabbed a yellowing newspaper dated 1992, and pointed to the front-page photo, where men were wading in water up to their waists.

"This is a flood," she said.

The water rises naturally about 50 times a year, said their neighbor, Gary Gray, who has his three-bedroom house on the market for $215,900.  He says he's filled in the land on his property five times to keep the driveway high and dry since buying the structure more than a decade ago. The house has no basement.

He pointed to the center of the street like it was the deep end of a swimming pool.

"If you actually went back there," he said, "you would find this is actually knee-high at some point." 

Some residents remember petitioning the city to dredge the marshland to no avail. Others recall a flood gate years ago, but said it had been removed so Mother Nature could cleanse the marsh naturally.

Beachland Avenue is in all likelihood a flood zone, as are many other areas of Milford, which boasts 17 miles of coastline, police said. A Fire Department spokesman couldn't be reached.

When the water rises, the residents either park their cars on nearby Buckingham Avenue and walk to their homes -- or drive their cars like motorboats through the salt water, which is corrosive and therefore not recommended.

"You've got to know driving through this eats your brakes," Gray said.

Besides a wet street,  the neighbors have something else in common: a good sense of humor. That's how they keep their spirits afloat.

They joke about how they have two water views when Mother Nature cooperates: one of the Long Island Sound to the side of their houses, and an occasional one out front.

"I'm telling you, you could fish from your deck," Gray said with a smile.

And as he miraculously made his way from the flooded front of his house to the drier side, he quipped, "I'm walking on water."