Shaped by waters

All of life is shaped by water. Understanding the waters of the place where one lives is part of understanding life itself. My childhood was formed, in part, by the Boulder River. The Boulder starts as the slow drip, drip, drip of snow melt in the Absaroka Mountains. In the high country there used to be a glacier that sat on the divide between Slew Creek and the Boulder drainage. Little rivulets of snow melt combine to form brooks that become creeks and combine to form rivers. Slew Creek eventually makes its way into the Yellowstone River and flows around the mountains and down by the town of Livingston before turning east and flowing by Big Timber. The Boulder flows down the valley and joins the Yellowstone two miles downstream from where our place is located. The Boulder has been designated as a “Wild and Scenic” River which gives it some protection from development and affects decisions about the amount of water that is taken from the river for irrigation. The Yellowstone flows from Yellowstone Lake in Yellowstone National Park to its confluence with the Missouri River near the Montana-North Dakota Border without any dams.

My college town, Billings, is also on the Yellowstone River and the river continued to grow with the addition of additional creeks and streams as it headed across eastern Montana.

For four years we lived in Chicago, where the Chicago River is so highly managed and manipulated that it can literally flow in both directions, depending on the diversions and dams that are opened and closed. Our Chicago experience was marked by regular visits to Lake Michigan. Chicago is a huge city and I had no urban experience prior to living there, so finding a bit of natural wildness was essential to my health. Lake Michigan is huge compared to any body of water with which I had prior experience. We’d walk alongside the shore and watch the sunrise.

Much of my adult life has taken place in areas where the lack of water is remarkable. In North Dakota the drainage was into Cedar Creek, a tiny stream that joined the Cannonball River before flowing into the Missouri. Even seeing the creek involved a trip in the car.

Boise, Idaho, is even drier than Southwest North Dakota, but the Boise River is a major tributary of the Snake River. Boise’s climate and livelihood is shaped by irrigation. Halfway across southern Idaho from Boise is Twin Falls, on the Snake River. In Twin Falls there is a federal court house that is dedicated to resolving irrigation disputes and claims. The battle over control of water is deemed to be perpetual in that region. Generations of attorneys will spend their entire careers arguing about water rights and who is allowed to use water for what purposes. It is part of life in the high desert.

From Boise, we moved to Rapid City and you can’t tell the story of Rapid City without telling the story of how Rapid Creek became a raging wall of water that destroyed homes and property and claimed the lives of 238 people in 1972. Flash flooding is a natural feature of the Black Hills. In our time of living there, on of the joys of my life was paddling my canoe on various lakes in the Black Hills. I knew, however, that there are no natural lakes in the hills. All of the places I loved to paddle are reservoirs, the creations of engineers who devised methods of storing water for extended use by creating lakes with dams.

And now I find myself not far from where Terrell Creek meets Birch Bay. The places where rivers run down to the sea have been places of human habitation for millennia. Terrell Creek flows out of coastal marshes and makes its way into the Bay. It runs parallel to the marine shoreline before it enters the Bay itself. The creek is tidal. Twice each day high water from the rising ocean flows back up the creek bringing salt water and the associated plants and animals into the creek. Then, at low tide, the flow of the creek is reversed and water from upstream marshes empties into the bay.

Terrell Creek is tiny compared to the Skagit River, near where we lived for our first year in Washington.

Yesterday we were back in the town of Mount Vernon to meet with our landlord for our year of living there and do a walk through of their house after we moved out. After the meeting, we took a walk along the Skagit River in the rain. In the year that we lived there we saw the river depth on the Division Street Bridge as low as 8 feet and as high as 21 feet. That is a lot of variation in the flow. The Skagit River is a big river. Unlike the mountain streams where I grew up that reach peak flow in the late spring as the snow melts from the mountains, the Skagit reaches it peak flows in the winter when water that falls as rain is deposited on the Cascade Mountains. Some of it falls as snow in the high country and is stored until spring melt and runoff, but a larger amount of water falls as rain and causes the river to fill with muddy water.

As we walked yesterday, the river was very muddy and the level of the river was 9 feet above where it was flowing the last time we had walked along its shore just a little over a week earlier. The gravel bars where salmon fishers stood are under water. The river banks can take a lot more before reaching full flood stage, but the weather forecast contains a flood advisory warning of high waters and minor flooding of the creeks and rivers that run to the sea in Sakgit and Whatcom Counties. The coming of winter is the coming of flood season here.

We are safe from flooding. There are extensive flood maps that have guided the development of housing areas and are used by potential property owners to guide their decisions. We intentionally stayed away from flood-prone areas when shopping for home. As such, we have the luxury of watching the waters in our new home and learning about how those waters have supported life throughout history.

And, as an added bonus, we have learned not to stay inside, but to take our walks in the rain.

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