WHEN WATER RAGES
Rex Burress
To go down by the riverside when it's flowing normally is a thing of joy for those who in the love of nature take delight in her visible forms. There is no refreshing like a river's, even though it murmurs similar songs over and over again, for it takes the mind into nature.
It's a different tune though, when a hurricane roars ashore with tons of rain water, such as happened with the coming of 2018 Hurricane Florence on the East Coast, and then Hurricane Michael! Then it's headlines like “Flooding fears surge as rivers rise.” With Wilmington, North Carolina under water on 9-17-18, the question becomes, “What is worse, wind or water?”
After the initial landfall on the N.C. Coast, Florence burst inland with over 30 inches of rain to dump on the ravaged communities, as so vividly reported in the headlines. Most of the Carolina's were flooded as rivers crested eleven days after the hurricane struck, closing roads and evacuating tens of thousands, especially along the rivers. Imagine, with all that water, people depended on bottled water to drink, since the flood output was largely polluted by striped sewers and garbage.
Wildlife in America has taken an inconceivable destructive hit in 2018. Floods on one side of the continent and fires on the other has destroyed inhabitants and their habitats to such a degree one wonders if some species can maintain their existence.
Fire is most thorough in scorching land to near total annihilation, or at least near total loss right down to spiders and various insects even in super-heated soil, and anything that is furry, feathered, or fibrous becomes a fiery target. “Fly fast away from the flames for anything with wings!” Fire is a set-back for most species, but some plants and plant seeds can actually be stimulated by a fire! Given rain, grasses and various wildflowers will bounce back next year with renewed energy. Such is the wonder of water--both a life-giver and a life-taker, just as heat from the sun or a fireplace can be a life-giver, or heat from a wildfire a life-taker! Those are ironies of life and death.
Most animals can swim, and suffer less loss in water than fire victims, but habitat displacement shuffles environmental populations and it takes a few years for recovery--maybe a hundred years for reforestation. Nature can take the time, after all, it took about 200 million years for dinosaurs to appear on earth after life began on land some 400 mya, and dinos lived on earth about 180 million until 65 mya when dinosaurs disappeared and mammals appeared. Degrees of water have played a part in those transformations.
One unexpected result of flooding over roadways in N.C. was the stranding of large fish on the freeways that had to be hosed. Fish instinctively go nosing into overflow, searching for food and new habitats, especially catfish and carp, where they often become trapped when waters recede. When Uncle Frank's farm pond overflowed, I picked up buckets of bullheads below the spillway. I wonder what went over in Lake Oroville's spill of 2017? Snakes are among the displaced.
When I lived on a farm in Missouri, a great flood came in 1947, and little No Creek overflowed onto the bottomlands, stranding cattle and displacing wildlife. All dry pools and puddles were restocked. Other than crossing the swift current on a horse to rescue cows, Dad and I hunted the edges with gigs where carp and buffalo fish were splashing in the shallows. Dad got two carp with one throw on a three-pronged gig! Such were our flood frolics and fun since our house was safe high on a hill! There were no evacuations since people knew better than to build on a flood plain. “Learn from History!”
“People shouldn't be living in certain places—on earthquake faults, or on flood plains. But they do and there are consequences.” --Vaclav Smil
“Slander cannot destroy an honest man, when the flood recedes the rock is there.”