Record flooding hit Western Washington yesterday. Those usually not susceptable to flooding have been evacuated. We in the regularly flooding Snoqualmie Valley stayed home, our houses built to be above the 100 year flood. Of course this flood set us on edge as the waters reached epic proportions, coming to the very brink of disaster, water in the house. The second floor decks around our house seem to float raft-like just inches above the monstrously widened river, lolling in murky gray eddies and currents on all sides.
Sadie, our black lab surveys the flood waters. "Nowhere to 'go'."
This soup of silt and septic over flow, garbage and carnage covers our land 10 feet deep from one end to 6 feet at the road. It is hard to think of this dirty water as washing. I remember seeing the bathers on the Ganges a few years ago, stepping into what looked to me like an open sewer to do their ablutions, and horror of horrors, brush their teeth. I wouldn’t step into these waters but there is a certain and undefinable sense of blessing that comes with these waters. A sense of cleansing. If you look at the graph on floodzilla.com which charts the movement of the waters, the flood appears to be a big slow wave sweeping away anything and everything except the fast rooted trees, our houses, the birds which fly among the exposed branches as if nothing has happened at all. Their strange sense of ease seems infectious. I’m sure I won’t feel the same in a few days when we enter the drained basement and survey the damages. But today there is no where to go, no work. I have nothing but time to look through the deluge of seed catalogues piling up on the table.
