While the big rain fell last Tuesday I stood in the creek and felt the current pulling at my boots. Our little stream is usually a low talker with a soothing voice that invites you to stretch a hammock between two saplings and rest in the shade, but today it was singing a bawdy sea shanty on its way to the Gulf of Mexico.
It’s a perennial task, this wading in the creek during a deluge, looking for a hole as deep as the top of my boots, checking the spillway by the frog pond to make sure it isn’t blocked by debris. This is serious business if anyone asks, but the truth is closer to a kid playing in the water, and I look forward to it like a schoolboy hoping for a snow day.
There are other jobs for a big kid in a big rain. The raised beds hosting my winter greens must be properly drained. Not wintergreen – we grow that too – but turnip greens thriving in the milder winter and unconcerned about climate predictions. The drainage ditch around the back of the house must also be maintained for a proper flow to carry water from the downspouts, away from the foundation and into the blueberry patch.
My father dug that ditch by hand when the house was built, 150 feet long, expertly graded with a practiced eye and not even a hand level to check his work. He was almost 70 when he moved enough earth with a shovel and a hoe to stymie most modern men half that age. Tracey helps maintain that flow now in her own private ceremony to remember Floyd, and she has decorated his memory with lilies and liriope.
Once upon a time the list of rainy day chores was longer. Before the road was paved, a healthy dose of manual labor drained the puddles and maintained a proper crown. The county helped by scraping the unpaved roads periodically, but occasionally an inexperienced operator would leave a mess that had to be repaired by hand. I didn’t mind. It was another good excuse to play in the rain.
Before the great paving, a big rain often rewarded the agile and the determined with an unexpected treasure. The creek crossed the road twice on our property. Bedrock of granite, gneiss, and amphibolite kept the roadbed from washing away, and in the nooks and crannies a sharp eye could sometimes glimpse a garnet or amethyst tumbled downstream by the flood. I miss finding those treasures, the satisfying splash of tires crossing the water, and the ausement of watching strangers and loafers slow down in fear of the crossing.
Alas, some of our land was squeezed through the grasping hands of developers on its way to resting in our care. The gravel road was paved, the washes dug out and replaced with culverts. Progress requires acceleration, and the travelers of today speed along oblivious to the histories and other treasures beneath the asphalt.
Far from the road and beyond the fears, fashions, and foibles of modernity, the recent rains have built a waterpark for anyone willing to get their boots dirty. Bold springs, as the old-timers named them, bubble and boil, jubilant, gleeful, and wet-weather springs appear wherever gravity invites them to flow. The sound of moving water fills the air. There is a sweetness in that air, freshly washed, and without any prompting your lungs reach for it like a fish out of water, to take it deep and hold it tightly, purging all thoughts of progress, pavement, even pixels.
You emerge from the impromptu rainforest cleansed, invigorated. Oxygen sings in your blood and there is a spring, a wet-weather spring, in your step. Soon enough it will be time to hit the road again, but cushioned by memories of water flowing, the pavement doesn’t seem quite so harsh.
Outside The Box 