After The Rain

It's so nice outside right now that it's hard to believe that just 24 hours ago, we were at the tail end of a hurricane. We are mostly okay in my neck of the woods -- we had some water in the basement, but we were expecting to, and we never lost power so we were able to stay on top of it as much as we could. Some of my co-workers who live near me still have power outages, as well as a whole mess of people closer to the city and near the shore (plus many people south of here), but if there is an upside to mass power outages, it is that this is happening when it isn't too terribly hot or too terribly cold, and the outages appear to be -- around here, anyway -- more of an inconvenience than anything. I have not heard of too many people who had to deal with massive amounts of water and power outages, although I'm sure their stories are floating around somewhere.

The other thing that has been so shocking to me is the speed at which the waters rose, and the speed at which they also appear to be receding. Yesterday we went to the park down the road around lunchtime, when the rain had mostly stopped except for a few short showers here and there. In the time that it took us to walk around the park, between the playground area and the parking lot at the far end, we watched a car get covered in water that had overflowed the flooded creek. The whole process took maybe 20-30 minutes, and at the end there was so much water covering the park that you couldn't even tell it was a park any more -- and this morning, when I drove by on my way into work, you couldn't even tell there had ever been flooding, except for all the barricades and police tape that are still up to keep people out of harm's way.

We did manage to get a few pictures of "familiar" landmarks while the flooding was still in progress, so you can see how bad it really got. I've linked back to previous blog posts so you can see the truly amazing differences.

This is the creek bank where Shae was wading just last Tuesday, after the earthquake. You can't tell it's a creek bank, of course, but that's sort of the point.

We often cross this bridge when we go for walks in the park. This picture wasn't even taken when the water was at its highest point; on our way back home from the other side of the park, the water was so high that you could not see daylight between the bridge and the water.

Normally we're on the park side of these trees when we feed the ducks -- this was taken from the street side, where there was actual dry land at this point. I can't even tell which trees are my beloved white birches.

These are the baseball fields where we like to run around and blow bubbles. I'm not good at distances, but I would guess that the bleachers are normally at least a quarter of a mile from the creek banks. I have no idea how deep the water actually was anywhere, but this is not very far from the parking lot where the car got swallowed up by water, so I am guessing it was pretty deep.

Even the poor playground was completely under water -- not the slides and the swings, but the ground. Of course Shae still wanted to give everything a try, make sure it still worked, but for a change we decided to be responsible parents and give a big HELL TO THE NO to that particular idea.