Still in Louisville, where the temperature is pleasant, but the rain will creep back into my world by nightfall. I feel for the people who live a few hours from here, beleaguered too long by rain.
To get here we drove through eastern Missouri, where some of the worst flooding is, and finally realized how bad it was. I have never before now seen a farmhouse and silo in the middle of a field of water, like an abandoned watch-tower in the middle of a resevoir. Water a couple feet up the door. Or a stilted house of some kind still above the water, but with the basketball net in the driveway poking up like a periscope. We drove over highways and overpasses where the water line stopped only inches below the bridges. And stranger still, to look at the farm next door or across the street, dry and green. And you couldn’t even see the main water source that was overflowing. It seemed like the ground sealed itself up and left the water to sit on top. Miniscule creeks and drainage ditches turned into opaque brown tributaries.
So, all our time in Missouri we’d been worrying about flood waters and sure enough we saw some evidence here and there that waters were high and had recently been higher. However – it wasn’t until we got into western Illinois and Indiana that we really saw vast expanses of forest and farmland underwater, silos, oil wells and farmhouses standing sad and broken in the middle of mud-soured lakes. A
I miss Christmas. Sigh. Long haul betwixt now and the 25th of December. AGAIN!
The bridge into Kentucky from Indiana is like driving beneath a long, metal centipede.
I wonder how long it will take for it to seep away or evaporate off. I read something today that said there were floods in the past that left places along the Mississippi River submerged for more than 200 days, ones where more than 1,000 of the 1,300 levees at that time along the river failed, or when flood waters crested only two feet below the St. Louis flood wall edge.
I’ve always lived near somewhere with water, and I feel strange when I am too far from it. I’m not a big beach swimmer, but I find the sound of the waves and the rhythm and the environment the most calming thing ever. Still, when we stayed this time at Cooper’s Landing, right on the Missouri River, I shuddered every late night driving home in the dark. The gravel road ahead only lit by my headlights, and the dusty, jagged edge of the steep drop-off into the fast river looking like someone had torn off the world like a piece of paper. And past that tear, there was just the inkiest black nothingness I’d ever seen, that I only knew to be the river because I’d seen it in daylight. I’m fascinated … but water is a scary force of nature, and the idea of taking that first semi-solid inhale has always made me shudder.
I could never be a mermaid.
