A month ago we walked out in our wetland and saw a few inches of water collected in the deeper end where the cattails grow. The red-winged blackbirds with their liquid call were already in residence, and the marsh wrens (the reed canary grass chokes the stream beneath the berm offers them an easy nest) scolded, half-heartedly. But mainly we saw what wasn’t there—water. That, of course, has changed. The wet season has arrived in spades, as everyone along the Willamette knows. Just a few days ago we tried to reach a stranded friend in both pick-up and canoe to little avail—the Mary’s wandered convincingly—inspecting the lower lands south of Philomath. . . through stock barns, yards, under marooned cars, pooling in paddocks, collecting in tunnel houses, and of course, using the roads. There’s something both exhilarating and disquieting about seeing a lake where kale grew the day before, or produce trucks nose to tail like ships of the line in an inland sea you know is only knee deep. In an instant, everyone has a backyard wetland just where the swingsets stand.
The feeling of unnaturalness, of something truly out of whack, accompanies every flood. People flock to photograph, to witness. It’s not new, we all remember past floods. Even so, the disquiet is genuine. Ovid’s account from Metamorphoses captures the sense:
“One man seeks refuge on a hill, another rows in his curving boat where, just before, he’d plowed. . . through woodlands, dolphins roam; they bump against tall branches, dislodging acorns. . .”
Folks come out to photograph, muse, comment, and help. Suddenly, no one is a stranger. Water nourishes communities even as it threatens.
I didn’t see any dolphins (more’s the pity) in our oaks, but wading down a street towards a friend’s isolated house pulling a canoe was unsettling enough. Cars parked up to their axles in water, horses puzzled (well, maybe horses are always puzzled) at the transformation, fences quivering with the rush of river through their wires. A flood not only transforms the scene—it alters your thinking. It reminds you of what this place wants to be. And it should, well beyond the time when the rivers and creeks return to their banks and we get on with the clean-up.
Let’s get back to that notion that water builds communities. We all know that the towns along the Willamette grew because of it—the river wasn’t just a pleasant feature. This is no longer the case—we have road and rail to move the traffic the water once carried. So what do we do with the river? What about all those areas we never see? The riparian zones too wet for farming? Does it still have the power to define a community even when it isn’t colonizing our streets and lawns? I think so; you probably do too. Our friends Keith and Rachel (Provenance Farms) had a thousand chickens in mobile houses at the corner of Fern and Chapel, now a rising lake. But before you can text “chickens aren’t ducks”, they had people offering to help them move their flock. Offers from people they didn’t even think knew about them or their flock. So yes, this land we occupy together reveals high ground in more ways than one. The Greenbelt Land Trust and other organizations work toward keeping the river as river—which includes preserving what is feasible of those lands along its margins where, from time to time, it wanders. As a community, our task, it seems, is to preserve what the high water reveals. We live in a landscape of rivers—the only one we have
What does Greenbelt Land Trust do when it floods? Why, head outdoors and into the fields of course! Executive Director Michael Pope recalls how Staff and landowners spent flooded days touring properties inundated by the Willamette River …
On Friday, January 20th, I called landowner Steve Horning who indicated that the Willamette River had partially inundated the land covered by GLT’s conservation easements at Harkens Lake. Jessica and I jumped in the big white truck and drove down. We pulled on our big boots and walked to meet Steve and his energetic lab. The property was now a series of lakes with water filling many of the low lying swales and overflowing the banks of the sloughs and backchannels. We waded through a number of mini-lakes, taking in the immensity and power of the Willamette River running and roaring across the landscape. The next week, I drove to Ed Rust’s Little Willamette property (200 acres protected by GLT in 2009) just south of Bowers Rock State Park near Albany. Ed and I jumped in his small Santiam drift boat and rowed down an ash swale that connected to the old Little Willamette channel that cuts through part of Ed’s property. I touched the top of a wood duck nest box attached to a tree as we floated by….Ed mentioned that the box was about 11 feet about the ground during the summer. We rowed through the dried stalks of left-over summer corn, reaching the southwest corner of his property. We could have sat in that driftboat all day, remembering past floods and humbled by the power of this River and Mother Nature. – Michael Pope
