My Life on the River

My Life on the River

 I purchased the five acres and structures in 2007. As fate would have it, in June 2008, the river flooded and rose to twenty feet ten inches, eight feet, and ten inches above flood stage, two-inches shy of the hundred-year flood mark set in 1913. At the time, I lived and worked further north and thankfully wasn’t at the cabin during the flood of 2008. I did, however, have a friend take me back to the cabin in his boat. When we arrived, he throttled the boat slowly. I wanted to cry.

The water was halfway up the garage, storage building, and the back cabin. There are seven buildings on the property. The big cabin, little cabin, back cabin, garage, shelter house, storage building, and the garden shed. A man named Roy and his wife lived in the little cabin while they built the big cabin. Little is where I write. Sadly, Roy died a few months after construction was complete. I purchased the property from his widow. That is not to say that Roy isn’t still around; more to come on that later.

“The Shelter House” is a screened-in structure for family and friend gatherings. It resides to the left of the big cabin. The garage sits to the right, built with rough sawn lumber, and has weathered to a dark shade of gray. The tool shed I constructed myself to store gardening tools and supplies close to the garden sites. Lastly, Roy’s fishing buddy built the back cabin. It is also made with rough sawn lumber and is primitive.

As we trolled, I observed the electric transformer that sits on the ground behind the little cabin with apprehension. It was underwater. Seventy-two hundred volts of electricity resides in the transformer. I later learned the utility company had shut it off before any danger. There were four inches of water in the shelter house. The furniture had pushed together, piling up in the corner. The grill was toppled and lying in the water. The anxiety overwhelmed me, thinking I had made the most significant financial mistake of my life. Not until my friend pointed out that the water did not enter the big cabin; did I have hope. Amazing to me, the water only rose high enough under the big cabin to wash out the heating ductwork. The little cabin remained dry. Roy built the structures in the early eighties. He studied the land and river habits several years before construction and located the property’s highest point. He knew exactly where to build to keep it dry in the worst of floods. The back cabin and storage building are two-foot above ground. That was not high enough to survive the flood of 2008. Both buildings had twelve inches of water in them.

That is the way river life began for me. I still had ten years to work and never spent a moment on the property when flooded. In the beginning, when a flood came, I’d work and worry, concentration was tough, and sleep difficult. Several times I drove the two hours after work to look at the property from a distance. I used binoculars to observe the water near the property, specifically the buildings. Thinking indeed there was something that could help me track river levels. I turned to your friend and mine the internet. Loading the search engine with various words and phrases and scrolling for a long hour, I became frustrated and ready to quit, and low and behold, here it was like the sun rising. “The national weather service:” water.weather.gov

The advanced hydrologic prediction service predicts river levels across the United States based on the weather forecast and adjusts accordingly. It measures and predicts at different points on the river, usually near a town. Capturing first the flood stage, it provides a graph indicating the river level in real-time and tracks the level up and down by date. You can see when your area will be flooded and by how much and when you can expect it to fall. I found it to be nearly one hundred percent accurate; it is incredible. The graph identifies floods as action, minor, moderate, major, and get the hell out of Dodge. Of course, the last reference is mine, referring to the flood of 2008. After moving to the cabin full time, I’ve experienced four eighteen-foot floods and two nineteen. Apprehension reached its peak, and I slowly began to feel comfortable. The river rises and falls, and you learn to live with it. You hope and pray it never surpasses the flood of 2008. More to come on river life later.