Free Range Photography

Having lived by the river for the better part of 52 years I have come to know its ups and downs pretty well. The technology we had for communicating dangerous river levels when I was a teenager was a battery-powered radio reception, usually during power outages, to hear a static-obscured monotone voice, fading in and out, reading through river levels of all the local streams, along with predicted rises, times of anticipated cresting, etc. The emotionless voice conveyed neither fear nor hope, and nights were punctuated with checking by flashlight how fast the water was rising.

Living in a house that had 2 feet of water in it in 1964 gave me a healthy respect for the potential destruction.

In 73-74 there were two floods a few months apart. A junior high classmate and her brother tragically died in one of those, swept off the bank when they got too close to the raging water.

Now with all the supposedly more sophisticated information gathering and sharing devices, the river’s predictability has not improved much. Despite terms like “bomb cyclone” and “atmospheric river”, there was no real warning about rivers getting to flood stage in Ferndale or warning stage here just outside of Garberville until it was actually starting to look inevitable last night. The NOAA graph showing predicted rises had the water cresting well below monitor stage just 36 hours ago.

When it got light this morning, after a night of tossing and turning through gusts of wind that rearranged our yard and dropped branches, flung from trees who knows how far upwind, I was relieved the water was still outside the perimeter of our fenced in dog yard, but duly impressed by the volume and power of the South Fork of the Eel, carrying huge downed trees, scraped up from banks not scoured like this for many years, bobbing along like toothpicks in the foamy current.

The sun broke through briefly, as though smiling down on the event with a rainbow.

May everyone be safe. Check your neighbors, Sit back and enjoy the show if you can, we are reminded again that nature bats last.