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Flood
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
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The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it, and flood the parched uplands; even this may be the eventful year, which will drown out all our muskrats. It was not always dry land where we dwell. henry david thoreau, Walden Flood Our first December in the house the air was so warm it felt more like spring had somehow slipped the latch and walked in before winter even got started. It was unsettling. A front had moved in from the gulf, and warm rain fell ceaselessly. The creek filled up like Noah’s flood. Out back I could see the clay-colored water of the creek claiming Tommy’s broad reach of bottomland through the trees. The flooded creek was four times as wide, the current pressing to the inside of the big sweeping bend behind our house. After a full day of rain, I stood on our back deck in the dark and listened to the current sloshing over dry winter grass along our lower trail, which was high and dry most of the year. The storm had parked on top of us. Next day the warm rain finally stopped in the afternoon. When Rob came home from school at 4 o’clock, he was manic with excitement. He’d heard the creek first from the driveway and then caught a glimpse of it from the wide windows in the 44 kitchen. He walked out on the deck and saw the creek flooding out of its banks, saw it was visiting our back yard. “We’ve got to paddle,” he said. Without thinking, I agreed, and we grabbed Russell, got our gear and boats out of the basement, and headed down to Glendale Shoals. We only had an hour and a half before we lost the light: just enough time for the lower section of Lawson’s Fork if—famous last words— everything went according to our plan. We called from the cell phone and left a message for Betsy—meet us at the Goldmine Road Bridge at 5:30. Then we parked my truck below the Glendale dam. I glanced down the hill. The creek was very high and mighty—a roiling red flush of current roaring past like a southbound train. We geared up quickly. There wasn’t a moment of light to lose. We locked the truck and dragged our boats—Russell’s yellow Riot, Rob’s blue Liquid Logic, my orange Piranha—into a patch of kudzu and a backwash of litter at the edge of the SPACE preserve’s field. The boys were focused on the creek brawling past. I gave them one last safety talk mostly about strainers (trees down across the stream), how we had to stay vigilant about these obstructions and talk to each other about the best ways around, how to lean into a log if you get sideways. I said we had to move fast but safely downstream, one by one, to keep the light. We snapped our spray skirts into place and peeled out onto the muddy lake that would usually be dry land. When we reached the edge of what would most days be the calm channel the flow took each of us, like catching a ride on a watery conveyer belt. I led the way, followed by Rob, then Russell. Usually there were rocks through this narrow hallway of creek below the lower shoals, but in a flood even the rocks disappear, swallowed by the current. Floods are always significant natural events and often pose problems for humans. Kayakers rate rapids I to VI Flood ° 45 [34.201.37.128] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:05 GMT) according to difficulty, but floods are random events figured in terms of probability—a yearly flood, a ten-year flood, a hundred-year flood. A “flood of record” in a ten-year period suggests that sometime during the next ten years a similarly sized flood will occur. People die in rising water, and sometimes it’s people like the three of us who have simply suffered a failure of judgment. That day we put on Lawson’s Fork my worst failure of judgment was leaving too late. But I knew we could beat that if nothing unforeseen happened. Every true kayaker knows what’s best, but most will also ignore it at some point when the river calls. When things go...