The Ides of March

What we are learning, by way of one trying experience after another, is that no two Floyd River floods are alike. This week's extravaganza crept up as menacingly as the last one, lapped a bit at our backyard, almost to the rocks. But the debris this time is unique. My word, behind our place we've got an ice garden the likes of which we've never seen, nor may again (D.V., as the church bulletin used to say).

The video up top was Thursday night. This one was shot on Friday morning--sunny sky, but, voila!, a junkyard, hundreds, thousands, of ice chunks, some of them big as a roof. 

Weird. Unique really, a phenomenon created by a set of factors that may well not be replicated (we hope). Six weeks or more of temperatures that never inched a degree above freezing put down a pavement of ice that could have held a tank. Look at the thickness of these backyard chunks.

Wednesday we got rain. Not that much really, maybe four inches or so, enough to take out the considerable snow depth all around. Combine the rain and snow melt over permafrost ground, and all that water had to go somewhere. So it went where it always does, downhill, and ended up swelling up the Floyd to record limits once again--third time in eight months--and breaking all that ice into huge chunks.

But there's more. In the wake of the precip and all that melting came fifty-mph winds sweeping down from somewhere north of Santa. Mega-winds tore over Lake Floyd and scrunched a thousand ice bergs up into our backyard acre.  My word! do we have ice. 

Look at 'em. Literally tons, a used car lot of Floyd River icebergs.  

This one in the foreground is twenty feet long. Looks like a chunk of a gym floor. Plenty of others too. Take your pick. U-haul. No charge. 

Here's the scene at sundown last night. 

It may well have been the Ides of March, but this flood is the spawn of a winter deep freeze. Amazingly, what we had this week was an anomaly, an actual winter flood that may not happen again. (That'd be nice.)

There are people hurting, I know throughout the Midwest. Thankfully, the river's icy wreckage left us pretty much alone. There'll be a mess out back, but then nature has a way of repairing itself. 

It's a mess. Still, I can't help thinking that in all that junked tonnage, there's a unique magnificence too, an awesome icy train wreck just out back right now.