Today was a slightly different sort of Mother’s Day, in that our church service was canceled. Why would a church dismiss on Mother’s Day, you might ask? There is little choice it seems, when the road coming from either direction leading to the church-house is under water! Our church is the River Baptist Church, so named because it is located adjacent to the river, but today the church building was actually surrounded by the river!
We had fun checking it out, and I took some pictures. Our church is just to the left behind the trees. You can see the maroon church sign if you look closely:
The church is just a mile from Pure Water Hollow, so I am speaking of the same river that runs in front of our house. Normally, we can’t see the actual water unless we walk out to the road. It has been strange today to look out from our living room and see the current of the river rushing by, because the water is so high.
Our rain gauge has collected 6 inches of rain during the past week, and since all the surrounding areas up the river had similar amounts of rain, it was just too much water for the old river banks to handle all at once.
This phenomenon is not especially rare, but it is uncommon enough to be notable. This has only happened perhaps 5 or 6 times since we have lived here since 1993. The last time we remember the river being over the roads was February of 2006. And also in February of 2003 there was a crest of 37.67 feet at our county seat, which was the 16th highest on the NOAA list of historical crests for our area. During those times, we have been completely cut off here at Pure Water Hollow, unless we wanted to cross over the mountains on foot, or risk the whirlpools of the river by boat.
Our Mother’s Day flood today was destined to crest out at only 31.2 feet this afternoon, so it wasn’t really any big deal in the grand scheme of things. The NOAA site lists 28 feet as "Action Stage", 35 feet as "Flood Stage", 38 feet as "Moderate Flood Stage", and 42 feet as "Major Flood Stage". They say that 35 feet is when the streets are flooding in our county seat and parts of the county are cut off, and then at 38 feet houses are getting flooded in our county seat, and at 42 feet the businesses are getting flooded. I’m sure the measurements are probably a bit different out here where we are, but I think it’s a pretty good comparison.
Saturday morning I decided it would be prudent to clean up our riverbank, just in case the river continued to rise. At 9:00am the water was still below our big flat area where we try to have a garden and some peach trees. We had down there some chairs, milk crates, and many hundred feet of chicken wire that I had used last year to deter the rabbits and turtles from the veggies. I didn’t want to loose all that fence material and I thought it would at least get mangled if left down there in flood waters. We worked on it all morning, and by that afternoon the water was beginning to creep up on the riverbank and surround the trunks of the peach trees.
Fortunately, we have been behind in getting our garden sites ready and planted, so there was no time-investment or seed-investment lost with this flood. Our four peach trees were loaded with small peaches, and unfortunately, they may suffer some damage.
These peach trees are kind of special in regards to Mother’s Day. The children each presented Mom with a peach tree for Mother’s Day back in 2002 (I think that is the correct year). We planted them on the riverbank and they found themselves under water the very next February! The first tree you come to is a Belle of Georgia semi-dwarf, the next is called Sugar Princess, and then Diamond Princess, and lastly a JB Hale semi-dwarf.
The Belle of Georgia seemed to have the greatest early yield of baby peaches this year, and being in front, it had to take the brunt of the current from the river. And being a semi-dwarf, it is not quite as tall as the Sugar Princess and Diamond Princess. This being said, the Belle of Georgia only had about 6 inches of one limb left protruding above the floodwaters as the river crested this afternoon for several hours and the current pushed the tree at an angle! Some of the limbs from the other trees were also submerged, but the top halves of the Princess trees were still visible above the water, and some of the JB Hale. Just last week I was saying that I should have pruned the middle of those Princess trees so they wouldn’t be so tall! Once again, being too busy may have actually proved beneficial! Perhaps we will still be able to harvest some peaches from the riverbank. We will have to wait and see what they look like after the floodwaters recede.
Here is a picture of a couple of the peach trees before the river had crested. It got much higher than this. What you can’t tell is how strong the current is going by the trees.:
Well, the river continued to rise all through Saturday, Saturday night, and Sunday morning. I took a strange pleasure in checking the river level regularly. When I went to check at 7 am this morning, the road to church was already underwater. We placed stakes in the riverbank to mark the progress of the encroaching water. I guess we had about 8 sticks in the ground starting yesterday, but the early ones became submerged quickly. We could still see the stakes from midnight, 7 am, 9 am, and 11 am. The water level held steady until about 3 PM, and then it began to gradually go down. The weather service on the computer said that the river crested at 31.2 feet at 11:00 am.
Historically, the biggest river flood here was on January 31, 1957. The NOAA site says that the crest for that one was 45.92 feet! I wonder if the water was actually in our house during that flood? In the book Swimming Upriver, an earlier flood is described when the floodwater got up to the top of the cellar, stopping just short of coming into the house. If that flood was February 3rd, 1950 the NOAA site lists that crest at 38.88 ft, which was the 13th highest crest on record! (There is an excerpt from the book on the website about that flood if you would like to read about it. It is pretty good.)
A flood on Mother’s Day is not the best present for an incredible mom like Lisa, especially since it preoccupied my time yesterday instead of working on remodeling the bathroom! We did not have church today, but Lisa still had a nice Mother’s Day. The children presented Lisa with homemade cards and Erica fixed a wonderful brunch of biscuits and gravy, sausage and scrambled eggs, juicy bacon, and fried apples. It was a meal consisting of food that was all home raised here at Pure Water Hollow except for the grain for the biscuits!
After our family Bible reading we drove up the road to look at the floodwaters and walked out on the suspension bridge spanning the river. We then took a nice walk through our hills identifying various plants and trees, which is one of Lisa’s favorite activities. We found a plant that Lisa had never positively identified before. She was happy to discover that it was what she thought it might be; purslane. It can be used in salads or boiled as a green and is supposed to be high in vitamin C, vitamin A, calcium, and phosphorus. I bet we will try it sometime soon!
After our walk we relaxed and had a nice dinner of pork loin roast. Lisa read to the children until bedtime while I finished typing this post.
All in all, I thought it was a nice Mother’s Day, even with a flood. Of course, Lisa deserves so much more than we can ever do. She is the most wonderful wife and mother I could ever dream of. The love I feel for her is impossible to put into adequate words!
If my love for Lisa were changed into drops of water, my heart would quickly overflow. It would run into the river, but the river never would crest. It would flood not only the riverbank, but also our house as well, and the surrounding land, the county seat, and the whole state of Kentucky! The flood would continue until the peaks of the majestic Rocky Mountains would become victim as the great nation of the United States and the whole continent of North America and, yes, even the entire world became submerged by the water from my love for Lisa! But since God promised he would never again flood the entire world I’m quite certain that He would never turn my love for Lisa into drops of water. Every one reading this should now breathe a deep sigh of relief!
It has gotten late. If the preceding love analogy seemed corny to you, just chalk it up to my being sleepy. But even when I am sleepy, I am thankful and grateful to the mother of my children, and I do love her that much! I am even more thankful and grateful to my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ for saving me, for giving me such a Godly wife and mother for my children, and for blessing my home and family here at Pure Water Hollow!
Good night everyone, and God bless.
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