The coronavirus has hogged this space way too much over the past several weeks so it is time to talk about something different.
Prior to this past three weeks we had been getting a lot of rain. One of the things I have to do when it rains is to watch the level of the Strong River, where I have a cabin just north of Mendenhall. I get on my cell phone and google the depth of the river, which can rise and fall there as much as 20 feet in a day if we get a big rain. Normally it is between 4 and 6 feet at D’Lo. If you look on the west side of the bridge about half way on old 49 is a water gauge, a hydrograph that records the depth of the river and transmits it to the National Weather Service. Recently the water rose to 27 feet. To give you a comparison, the highest recorded depth was in April 2014 when it got to 34 feet. This is when the Strong closed Highway 49. My cabin is a little over 10 feet in the air, but in 2014 the water was still lapping at the floor joists. All of this river data is recorded on the hydrograph.
I knew I was going to have to move some stuff at the cabin because of the rising river this time, so the first thing was to park the tractor on the pond dam, which is the highest spot on the land.
Then I loaded two kayaks and my pirogue on a trailer to keep them from floating off. What I failed to think about was just how buoyant I had made the trailer. You are probably getting the picture about now. Instead of my kayaks floating off my trailer, the whole trailer floated off.
After the flood waters receded I was able to locate my trailer a hundred feet or so from where I had it to begin with.
I get a little pig headed, like most men, about asking for help so I figured I would retrieve everything myself. It was going pretty well until I got my tractor stuck and had to call my neighbor to pull me out.
That is kind of typical with my luck. I had set out a bunch of tulips only to have them all wash away during the same flood. We got about 40 inches of water, but it did no serious damage. We did get a new layer of sand across the entire place. Of course, we lost a few trees to the river but that is expected in the low lying land along this stretch.
When I built the cabin about seven years ago I had about 20 more feet of bank, and now it is slipping back to probably less than 10 feet.
I planted pine trees when I bought the place and there is now a pretty good stand of them. I like to head up there and piddle a bit. Nancy has even let me buy my second tractor. So now I have one to do some dirt work with and one to keep the place trimmed and looking good.
The cabin has been a site for some fun gatherings. It has given me a chance to get out and have some fun doing guy stuff, which also includes getting a lot of things stuck at the same time.
There are deer up there and I have watched them grow for the past seven years. We see the occasional turkey and waterfowl along the river.
My new dog, Fisher, really enjoys going up there and playing in the water.
I was hoping to have a real live hunting dog when I got him. He has all the natural instincts to hunt, but he is more of a spoiled child. That is really okay with me and Nancy, though. At least I think he has finally gotten over the puppy thing of chewing everything we own. Now when I get home, paper is no longer shredded all over the house. We have fewer pillows than we used to, but who needs all those pillows anyway?
Things don’t have to go perfectly. In fact, I think it’s all these little things that help us keep our sanity during these times. Until next week, happy quarantine!
