May 06 2011
The Deluge
Here in Vermont, the deluge is all over the news. Lake Champlain has just set a new high at 103 feet above sea level. That’s three feet higher than it usually is this time of year, flooding shoreline camps, homes and roads. The Islands are especially hard hit and the main artery to it, Route 2, is down to one lane. Heavy snowfall this past winter has melted fast during the past couple weeks, adding more water to rivers and streams already swollen with seven inches of April precipitation. And the rain just keeps on coming.
Last weekend Judy and I went down to the town park on Saint Albans Bay and walked the water’s edge. It was strewn with driftwood and other debris. The seawall was under water along with the beach. The park trees have wet feet now, and the shore road is closed. We watched some teenage boys use nets to catch the carp swimming about the flooded baseball diamond. You don’t see something like that every day. Yessir, this is a flood of historic proportions.
It’s amazing how great a role weather still plays in our lives. Most of us live and work indoors most of the time, but walls do not insulate us from the impact that the wild has upon our world. Hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires, blizzards, earthquakes, tsunamis, and floods – when Mother Nature is on the rampage, you’d better get out of her way… if that’s at all possible.
Mother Nature is on the rampage a lot. In fact, that’s pretty much the way she rolls. Changes that we call cataclysmic are business as usual to her. Mountain ranges are great seas of rock rising and falling on a geologic timescale. Wind and water wear down all solid things, given enough years. And everything burns, as the stars remind us nightly. In a face-off between civilization and the wild, it’s a safe bet that the wild will prevail on anything other than a human timescale. We sapient creatures aren’t really very sapient at all if think we can defeat Mother Nature. At best, all we can do is piss her off and make life miserable for ourselves. Oh yeah, that and maybe wipe out a million species of plants and animals in the process. But Mother Nature doesn’t care. There are plenty more life forms where those came from.
When most people experience Nature’s wrath, they think: “This is the end of the world!” But it is only the end of our complacency, of our false belief that we have the world in a box. I love natural disasters for the way they humiliate humankind. That said, I dread the prospect of going into my basement to assess the water damage down there. I’m no dummy. I know when I’m outclassed.
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