Adventures of the Floyd River Gang

Last October, they'd put it up on the north side of the Puddle Jumper, a brush-y mess that left a corner of some guy's cornfield under water and turned a perfectly ordinary piece of ground into ducky wetland. On our daily constitutionals, we watched the water come up until one day--voila!--the whole ungainly mess was gone, wiped out.  Farmer John or Ed or Arie had taken his John Deere out and put the beavers out of work. You can't have a gang of rodents ruining harvest, for pity sake.

Okay, call it a selfie--see if I care. There I am, bottom right, snapping the picture from the bridge to show you exactly where the dam was when that toothy corps of engineers got sent packing. 

But they didn't leave. This spring, I didn't get a picture, but, mysteriously, on the other side of this bridge the water started to rise . There'd been no rain for weeks and no snow melt to speak of. Maybe a week or so it took, and a brand new engineering feat brought the water line up to the top of an ancient four-foot culvert where once upon a time some farmer wanted a path over the creek. The Floyd River Gang had created their own little swimming hole again, on the other side of the bridge, maybe 75 feet downstream. 

And then, once again, the south-side dam was history. Not only that, but the culvert got pulled like an rotting molar. There it sits now, some bleached gizmo in a grade B sci fi, while the creek runs along its merry way as joyfully as ever, unimpeded. It was a late winter/early spring job they'd been up to, but that one got destroyed too, putting the whole gang out of work once again. Look for yourself.

But, wait. Right there beneath the bridge--you can't miss the activity. They're not playing euchre and collecting unemployment. Their projects got blasted, but they're still around. They've not left for California either. They know about that drought.

The truth is, every last sapling within fifty yards of the bridge is gone. 

No chain saw took this one down. See those chips? That's sheer toothiness.

And look what's back on the north side of the bridge. 

They're at it again. Same time, same station. Just a hop, skip, and jump from where last fall's project once clogged things up royally. Their sleeves are rolled, teeth are sharp. 

They've got nothing against the farmer. It's plain silly to think of them as mobsters or something, the whole bunch mouthin' fat black cigars. They're just fat pests with extraordinary teeth, not criminals. Who knows?--maybe they've got the community in mind; after all, that little Floyd tributary could use a wading pool for steamy July afternoons. 

They're just the Floyd River Gang doing what they do best.

"It's what we do," they told me when I asked them about so much work down the drain. "Can't you numskulls see that?--it's what we do, dam it."

After everything they'd built was destroyed, they're still comedians too. I thought that was cool.