Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Rain, rain, go away. Come again some distant day.

Joe blogged a photo of the floods remaining after last week's rains. He can post about his adventure driving to early Sunday meetings. As for me, Sunday afternoon it fell to me to drive out to Joe's place to spend the night and get the kids off to school and Grandma's house on Monday morning. On the ride out I passed several flooding streams, including one near Melissa, TX where the half-mile wide floodplain was a solid sheet of flowing water. The freeway is elevated above that floodplain, but the frontage roads disappear into the muddy water. As it got dark, Joe and I set out to clear the land of those pesky rabbits, but finding none decided to walk up the road a ways to view the destruction. There is a spot on the road where it washed away in the rains, leaving a 5-6 foot wide gash in the road, about 4 feet deep. There was still a fair amount of water flowing through the gash, but since the rain stopped some 12-15 hours earlier, it wasn't such an impressive amount of water. What was impressive was how abrupt the sides of the washout were, how much compacted, gravel roadbed was washed away, and how many crawfish were crawling around in the muddy water. You would guess that thousands had already washed past by then, but that racing water was alive with crawdads! A few were good size, but the bulk of them were smallish, perhaps 2 inches long. It was a contrast between destruction vs. overflowing, abundant, burgeoning life.

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