lsanderson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lsanderson) wrote2009-03-25 08:11 am
lsanderson) wrote2009-03-25 08:11 am
There is some futility
On building towns in the bottom of dry lake beds beside rivers that flow north in the northern hemisphere. In another age, the Red River Valley blocked in the frozen north by massive glaciers, was a huge lake, larger than California but smaller than the Yukon Territories. It drained, at various times, into the Gulf of Mexico, through the Great Lakes into the Atlantic, and some times into the Pacific. A few small ponds -- Lake Winnipeg, Lake Winnipegosis, Lake Manitoba, and Lake of the Woods -- remain, and the tiny Red River of the North drains north trying to push ice and water on top of ice as it thaws from the bottom to the top.
When I was in college, we had one big flood. All the schools closed. The city was sandbagged. You'd drive past dikes of sandbags that towered many feet over a car and laugh at the piles of sandbags that almost were not high enough. I went and sandbagged a little that year. You stood in a long line and passed bags of sand to the mostly rich owners of houses along the river bank. They provided beer kegs and food. Their long backyards were swirling muddy water and ice floes. The projected crest that year was above the elevation of Fargo. It didn't make that high crest, but water still spreads wide and houses sit surrounded by sandbags and the ghost memories of an old lake that likes to put on her finest and dance in little dark waves to the warming sun of spring.
When I was in college, we had one big flood. All the schools closed. The city was sandbagged. You'd drive past dikes of sandbags that towered many feet over a car and laugh at the piles of sandbags that almost were not high enough. I went and sandbagged a little that year. You stood in a long line and passed bags of sand to the mostly rich owners of houses along the river bank. They provided beer kegs and food. Their long backyards were swirling muddy water and ice floes. The projected crest that year was above the elevation of Fargo. It didn't make that high crest, but water still spreads wide and houses sit surrounded by sandbags and the ghost memories of an old lake that likes to put on her finest and dance in little dark waves to the warming sun of spring.