Rivers

It's been a week of clear skies, for the most part, very welcome as so many towns were watching water finally recede from their roads and houses. The interstate highway has finally reopened. We're used to flash flooding around here; it's like a tornado in that you barely see it coming, and it's gone in a few moments. But the kind of flooding that happens long after the rains stop, after water has had days and weeks to gather and rise in unimaginable volume in the big rivers, is less familiar. Blue skies, water rising up from below. The locks on the tributary river here have been closed because they don't want any more of the Mississippi to wash backwards up the rivers and cause more flooding. That means the port is closed and barge traffic is stopped, but that's only an economic concern. What gives me pause is the thought that everything we do to protect ourselves here has consequences for the folks downriver. If we don't get the water, they do. And then they have to make choices: farmland or city? This neighborhood or that neighborhood?

It's a problem precipitated by Nature, but caused by us: where we choose to build, the ways we try to change and control a river that can never really be tamed.


Receding river, mud