Nature is Never Spent

Still raining. Bring it on, I say. Periodically the rain stops and you catch the reflection of the sky in a puddle.

A bit late, but merry Solstice! I went to the river to watch the sunset and as well as having a few lovely moments with the sky and water, I discovered buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), which has really interesting spherical clusters of blooms.


( Sunset under the cut )

It was even before that day that I picked and ate my first wild blackberries. I have to check my records, but I know that last year, the blackberries were ripe a lot earlier. We had an early spring that year and a late one this year.

A little update from a few days after my last post about the acorns: I found several white oak acorns in the mud, sprouted. It had been unseasonably warm, and over that week we had torrential rains. I guess that was all these guys needed. I don't know if acorns that germinate before winter will keep growing, but since I knew they were viable, I took them up to my balcony to see what will happen. They're now snuggled in a big pot with a little soil, some leaves and mulch over them. I hope they stay safe! Before I added the mulch, my dog tried to steal one, so I don't think they'd be hard for squirrels to find. On the other hand, there are a lot of other acorns for the squirrels to feast on, so maybe there's safety in numbers.



The rain was really quite impressive, and more than one week, we had disruptive flash flooding. Weather dork that I am, I looked up the rainfall totals for every month this year so I could compare. In that first week, we got 6 inches of rain in about 18 hours, and for November, we had over 13 inches. That's more than we got in June, July, August, September and October combined. So despite the mild flooding and how much of the water probably just ran off, the rain was really good news. It should actually have a measurable effect on the drought.

The best news to me personally was that back at the farm, the pond is finally filling up again. It's still quite shallow, but much broader, and the livestock can drink from it again. You can see the ring of plants that were growing in the mud around the puddle that was left in summer, and now that ring is in the middle of the water.





In the second picture, I put an arrow by a staff that I stuck in the mud back in summer. I had gone out in my rubber boots to put a marker at the edge of the water, so we could watch and see if the water was receding more or filling up. But I couldn't even made it to the edge of the water, because the mud was so thick. I got stuck! If my brother hadn't been there to haul me out, I would have had to abandon my boots. :) Anyway, now you can see how far that staff is surrounded by water now. It's a happy thing.

I'm back at the farm. I knew the drought in this part of the state was becoming severe, but driving here through the hills almost made me gasp with how obviously bad things have become. I'll probably write more on the general situation later, but this morning I walked down to the pond and saw something I've never witnessed before: our spring-fed pond is almost completely dried up. The spring bubbles out of the ground nearby and flows into the pond, oxygenating and cycling the water before it flows out into a little creek at the other side. Or it has done with basically no human interference for the 29 years we've lived on this place, but now the spring has disappeared. The sight of the cracked mud and stranded lilies and the pathetic, murky pool that remain were a bit of a shock, even though I was prepared.

It's nothing like this lake in Texas or this one in Florida, but the condition of our little pond is a very personal illustration for me of how this disaster affects natural systems.

( Images of a dry pond )

Even though it was an unpleasant surprise to see how things have changed so quickly, it was interesting how some things are still hanging on and taking advantage as well as they can. Bless the frogs and dragonflies and raccoons and birds and waterbugs and anything that can live in green mud.

Our river is down to normal levels, finally. The flooding now is up north, where their spring storms occur later and they also have winter snow melt to contend with.



When I went down to look at the fishing dock and the jetty a few days ago, I was able to stand in a spot where my head would have been several feet under water during the flood stage. The wooden dock was covered with water, and only a couple of feet of the metal railing and steps above it were visible. It's amazing, the difference in just a few weeks.

Still, there's an incredible amount of fresh water flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, and I heard a radio program recently about the resulting expected increase in the "dead zone" because of it. This is an area of water in the Gulf that has such a low oxygen content that nothing can live there. (It's "hypoxic.") As I understand it, one of the main problems is that the river water has an especially high nitrogen and phosphorus content due mostly to agricultural and landscaping fertilizers. The nitrogen causes increased algae growth in the Gulf, which depletes the oxygen. You know, with all the focus on the effects of flooding along the rivers, I never thought of how it would affect the final outlet.


Meanwhile, we're back to drought up here. The sun is relentless. It has rained once in the past month, and it kind of feels like it will be this way forever.

After the water rose and the rain fell, and the rain fell and fell and the water kept rising, and people escaped in boats and moved into gymnasiums, schools closed and parks were inundated and the rain kept falling -- after all that when a space cleared to show part of the morning, the sheet of clouds was reaching out long thin fingers across the southern sky, elbows and toes in the north, and the sun shot through a hole in the clouds to the east.



I visited the park by the river, and the cottonwood cotton is really flying now. Walking through the park is like flying through a starfield, with bits of white floating past your face and on behind. The cotton gathers on the standing water and looks like slushy snow, or in fluffy piles at the edge of the grass.

Out in the middle of the river, the water is still so fast you can hear it rushing from shore, a couple of hundred yards away.

I frequently check on the goldfish in the fountain pool outside my office, always with a tiny bit of trepidation after the weather has been wild. On Friday when the campus was briefly open after the snow, I saw that the whole pool had frozen over. The ice was cloudy, almost white, as if it was composed of slush that piled up on the surface of the water, then froze overnight. Someone had broken out a corner of the ice, and through the chunks I could see... blotches of bright orange. They were fine. There are at least nine still there now, with the ice all melted and the water warmed up in the springlike weather that followed. I salute your hardiness, goldfish!

Since the tornadoes blew through on New Year's Eve, the nights have been colder. The outdoor animals' water freezes, and the ponds have crystals forming around the edges. A few places on the shady dirt road where water is continually trickling across, the pebbles have a crust of ice.

I went walking yesterday with my dad and the dogs, and we explored a little behind the cabin at the top of the hill. There's a terraced area that looks like it might have once been used for hill-gardening, and it leads down to a pretty little pond.



The air was still and bright and the water reflected the trees perfectly.

We've gone from gold and bright yesterday to dark and cold today. I was underdressed -- not ready for winter yet, though not for lack of anticipation. The fall flowers and leaves are just as pretty in water as they are in sun.

On my way to the farm today, I stopped for a few minutes at a little state highway rest area. It's just a bit of space cleared between the road and the edge of the woods, with a picnic table and a poorly maintained outhouse. The charm is that it's along a lovely little creek and it's not "groomed" in any way. If a tree falls across the creek, as happened last year in a tornado, it stays there as a natural footbridge until the fungus and rot eventually eat it away. The ground is covered with moss in the spring, and when the weather is damp, there are a few trees with lush beards of resurrection fern.



Today when I approached the water, finger-sized gray-green fish flicked away into the shadows on the other side of the creek. One of the little moving creatures flapped backwards over toward a big stone, so that was a crawdad. A larger version of the photo is here. Can you see him?