Morning Thanks--things from trees

"Nebraska," wrote Willa Cather in 1924, ". . .is watered by slow-flowing, muddy rivers, which run full in the spring, often cutting into the farm lands along their banks; but by midsummer they lie low and shrunken, their current split by glistening white sand-bars half overgrown with scrub willows."

We are similarly watered here, just an hour northeast of the Nebraska border. She could well have been speaking of the Floyd.

I walk down to the river occasionally. I park the car up along the blacktop south of town and hike about a mile or so down a spot where, just a few months ago, a gigantic flood left refuse all around, bushes like this one festooned with detritus, with scree, the trash high waters swept up from a thousand acres it otherwise leaves alone. 

Right now, the river is high for late December. There's very little ice, except where its depth is almost incidental. If that bush in the picture were a monster, his right hand--he's facing me--stands a six feet above the ground, on something of a dune which, a river bank that's another six feet above water itself. Thus, this flood rubble reminds anyone who takes the time to look just how high the water rose in August. It's a warning.

Look at this.

There are a couple of saplings on the right bank, far upper corner. Little beards of detritus still hang from its branches. Those leavings didn't grow there, fifteen feet above the river. The flood's madcap flow painted them on.

Or this:

The branches of this cottonwood are still decorated from the flood, a dozen feet up from the water. 

Rivers like this carry away our sins, but leave them somewhere else. I like to sit here on the bank and watch and listen to water running reverently beneath. Even though the river is a beauty here--at least I think so--I wouldn't drink it. We've left our mark too. It's just not visible.

Once upon a time, the first white settlers dug homes out of prairie earth all around. But once they had something to keep them from wind and rain and snow, they cut paths to the rivers because rivers were their guides, highways of the time. Once they carried traffic, not just refuse. Once they were maps, reminding those first white men where they lived.

Today, December 27, the National Weather Service has posted a flood warning for the Floyd, if you can believe it. Rain is falling now, and we're expecting lots more. We've been through two huge floods in the last six months. Even though it's unimaginable to think of yet another--in winter, just like the trees and bushes here on its banks, we've not forgotten.

This morning I'm thankful for rivers, for our neighbor, the Floyd--but that thanks requires an asterisk or footnote because should yet another flood come up, I will renege. 

We could control is cleanliness if we wanted to; but we can't control rainfall. It comes whether or not we're happy with its arrival or amount. 

The biblical injunction to "subdue the earth" is still there in Genesis, still reads the same; but it's good to have to remember--even if it's occasionally painful--that we haven't whipped the earth or its rivers, that sometimes the Floyd still proves a bully, thereby reminding us we aren't as smart as we like to think.

 This morning I'm taking a deep breath, but still thankful for the artless debris hanging from trees all around, a reminder of who we are and who we aren't.