Flood: Day two
Twenty four hours later, the rain has stopped
and the flood waters have begun to recede. Every plant in the
floodplain has been swept so that it faces downstream and a thin layer
of sediment is being left behind to fertilize the ground. The
salamander tadpoles I found a few weeks ago have been washed to new
puddles and I find them in unexpected places, making me take more care
where I place my feet.
Our driveway crisscrosses three sections of the "alligator swamp" ---
areas we call "baby fords" --- before it reaches the creek
proper. One of these baby fords is a drainage ditch which
previous farmers dug in an attempt to farm the floodplain, but the
other two are actually the original bed of the creek. At some
time in the last fifty years since our area's topo map was creat
ed, the farmers got together
and dug a new, straight channel to make more dry land for their fields
on either side. I can't help wondering if the channelizing of the
creek is one of the causes of its frequent floods.
Yesterday, I could only reach baby ford number one before the flood
waters turned me back. This morning, I made it all the way to
baby ford number three, just barely out of sight of the
footbridge. Maybe by this evening, we'll know if the footbridge
survived the flood.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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