to the sea

I guess that you could call it the great Christmas Eve flood of 2015.

It rained hard the day before Christmas….harder than I’ve ever seen it rain around here.

Of course, I was delivering the mail that day….and inbetween trying to keep the mail reasonably dry and keep my Jeep on the road, I probably wasn’t thinking about if it was really the worst rain that I’d ever seen.

It was a crazy heavy rain, though.

Jenny and three of the four children were sick with strep, too….so we were in survival mode….recovery mode….and didn’t get out too much over the early part of my break…. except to go to the doctor’s office.

Yesterday, Jenny was feeling better….so, after going into town to get another antibiotic to try to get her well again, we finally stopped over at the piece of property we bought a year or so ago….no, that’s not right…a year and a half ago.P1030300

I went down to the pond and heard a new sound….the stream must be rushing hard (?)….and when I got all the way to where the edge of the water used to be, saw that the pond wasn’t there anymore.

The dam had broken.

All the fish were gone….downstream somewhere….carried away in what must have been a pretty dramatic rush of water.

There was a problem with the overflow….the old pipe was plugged…so when it rained like it did, I guess that the old earth dam couldn’t take the new pressure….and the water pouring over it took the dam out.

The pond joined our property, but because it wasn’t ours I never tried to do any repair work to it.

Shucks.

I kind of liked that pond….liked going down to look at the fish…liked seeing how the grass carp we bought and put into the pond were keeping it cleaned out.

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I can’t imagine how half an acre of pond must have looked pouring out where the dam used to be.

The trees at the dam end of the pond are uprooted and laying down….no dirt to hold them anymore.

There’s still a lot of water flowing through where the pond used to be…so I suppose that it could be a pond again if someone wanted to rebuild the dam.

(Funny about that dam, though….it looked like it was made of sand! I don’t know where you even find soil like that around here….soil so soft and granular…so weak. I’m surprise that the pond lasted as long as it did when you see what the dam was made out  of…)

It might be a good time to clean it all out and get it back up to something like a pond. It’s easier to get all the stumps and downed trees out when there’s no water in it.

Who has the money to do that, though?

Pond.

RIP.

(and….where’d my fish go?)

About Peter Rorvig

I'm a non-practicing artist, a mailman, a husband, a father...not listed in order of importance. I believe that things can always get better....and that things are usually better than we think.

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