Nature – Journey Home

Flooding 140th Street — 140th Street, June 2

BIG GROVE TOWNSHIP— When we were children, our parents used to take us out for a Sunday afternoon drive. A typical trip might include visiting Weed Park in Muscatine, friends of my parents in Blue Grass, or to the Niabi Zoo near Coal Valley, Ill. Today’s Sunday afternoon drive was not as much fun. I drove to 140th Street NE near Ely Road to see the progress of the flooding.

That is, not as much fun unless one is a fisher. When I arrived at the edge of the water, about half a dozen motor boats were out. Click on the thumbnail above, and the boats can be seen as small specks toward where the road rises out of the water. Word is out that striped bass, catfish and carp are biting. The reason I know is a neighbor mentioned it while I was working in the ditch in the front yard after the drive.

140th Street May 31 — 140th Street, May 31

The water has risen about four feet since Friday. Compare the two photos to see how the building is being submerged. If you would like, take a look. For me, I would not like. It is wearying to deal with the consequences of climate that changed when we should be advocating to change how society interacts with so-called nature turned into an owned and built environment.

Like this flooding, changing climate is hitting us where we live. In the water we use, the air we breathe, and the weather we experience. This weekend politicians sought photo opportunities to post on social media: of them helping sandbag buildings to protect them; of them inspecting the damage. What they should be doing is actual networking with their colleagues in government to find common ground and take concrete action to solve the climate crisis.

Some may not notice the climate crisis because they are so busy cleaning up in its wake, or in this case, trying to catch the limit of striped bass. Maybe they are taking a much needed Sunday afternoon nap. Eventually the frequency of these hundred year floods, at a rate of three in 20 years, will be noticed. It is not too late to solve the climate crisis, but we don’t know for how long.

LAKE MACBRIDE— The pelican migration is underway, and flocks of the white and black birds fly lazily— above our lakes and river— back and forth in a pattern I recognize, but can’t adequately describe. Pelicans appear here twice a year. I stopped during a trip to North Liberty to watch them fly near the construction site for Mehaffey Bridge.

I am leading a new life with my beater of a car. The radio has six preset buttons, of which four are set. I haven’t tested the cassette and CD players and listen mostly to a country station in Cedar Rapids owned by Cumulus Media. The music fits my new lifestyle, or seems to.

Country music on Cumulus gets me thinking. It is imbued with a certain familiar life, and while on a trip to work or to market, it is easy to suspend disbelief and listen. The songs are places where I don’t have to be me until Monday, people cope with loss as they drive your truck, and where “I found Jesus” rhymes with “I wrecked my first car. I tore it all to pieces.” Whether one likes the new country music or not, the snippets of reality are tangible, visceral the way manual labor is— stripping away the intellectual aspect of our lives. That may be the point of my predilection to hit number four on the presets most often— sometimes it is good to just stop thinking.

Consider the cranes. Man-made with engineering specifications that enable a reach four stories above the roadway to build the new bridge. They are built to fit the task, work from floating barges, and reach heights limited by design. Our lives today tend to be more like cranes than pelicans. Near these man-made lakes, we lean toward believing Bill McKibben, that we are at the end of nature. Except no one told the pelicans.

Beyond the fixed world of my used Subaru, with its country music tuner and enough life to keep me going for a while, are the flocks of pelicans, doing what pelicans do— part of which is inspiring us to believe there is more to life than what we find on main traveled roads needing an overhaul.