Weekend in Asheville
We had an astounding three
day weekend in Asheville, meeting great friends (hi, Everett and Missy!),
exploring established forest gardens (thank you, Alice and Dudley!),
and learning about mushrooms, mushrooms, mushrooms (and a few other
things) at the Organic Grower's School. I'll regale you with our
gleanings over the next few days, once my brain makes sense of all of
that new information.
As we drove home, we
looked down over the hill...and saw our creek
spreading out across the whole valley. I've never been able to
see our creek from that road before, so I knew we were in for a hard
walk home. We followed Mark's path across
the fallen tree (me
crawling to protect the electronics I wasn't willing to leave in the
car), then walked up the floodplain as dusk fell.
Two thirds of the way
home, we discovered the flaw in our plan --- the
alligator swamp was flooded just like the creek, and we either had to
climb up and around the slippery hillside or push our way through the
cold water. The former option is the slower, drier way, but we
opted to strip from the waist down and just plug on through. That
water was cold on our bare legs, but soon we were home to a fire in the
wood stove and a couple of lap cats. Quite a difference between
our farm and the big city, but I have to admit that I like it better
here...even during frigid floods.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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That's pretty hardcore guys. We were flooded too when we got home, but luckily the water was below the bridge so we didn't have to strip down and swamp it. I wonder how many of the people in your class this weekend have ever had to wade through above-the-knee water in 30 degree, rainy weather.
Bear Grylls called: He wants to send you his camera crew: http://wildernesssurvivalskills.org/images/bear-grylls-walks-into-mordor.jpg
I know --- we really fell down on the job by not providing photos of our adventure. I guess when the going gets really tough, we do finally forget the camera.
I'm glad your homecoming was less wet than ours! Missy shouldn't drop that kid in the flooded creek until after he's born.
Why not keep an inflatable boat in the car, with a pump?
Alternatively, you should check out what is causing the insufficient drainage. It there is a blockage that can be removed without causing extreme erosion downstream...
Do you have access to state or county survey maps of your property? That might yield interesting information.
We actually have kayaks that we could take across in a pinch. But when the creek is up high, it's raging, and a boat is a bad idea. It would be far too easy to get swept downstream.
The creek goes down into a sinkhole about half a mile past our property, and the entrance to the sinkhole is only so big. When the water's going faster down the creek than it can go into the sinkhole, it backs up into the valley. We don't own the sinkhole, but even if we did, I don't think I'd mess with it. Floods are a good dose of natural fertility to the floodplain.
The truth is, though, that I like our floods.
When Shannon was here, he installed the beginnings of a zipline, but we haven't finished it up yet, mostly because I just like letting the weather dictate sometimes.
Take a zip-line, fix it to a boat or raft, and you've got a cable ferry.