The Flood Garden

The rain has been falling for days now. Springs rush from hillsides where no one knew there were springs. Hillsides rush to the roads, in slow, tumbling falls of mud and rock. The major roads that lead in and out of my region were blocked for days, open for hours, blocked again. Wet and disconsolate tourists wander through my shop, happy for something to entertain them, anxious to have news of when the highways will again open fully.
I don't tell them that some years the closures lasted a week or more; why depress them?
And the power goes on, goes off. On now, and folks from the hills have rushed to town for supplies and mail, sharing stories: Firecreek is blocked, China Creek fell in, Salmon Creek is impassable...

And the flood garden has flooded twice already.

When I first came to this region it was for a week long stay with a friend I'd worked with in a city library system--it was the job that got me through college, and to Europe. After a few years of wandering and adventure I had returned to California, intending to travel further north, beyond state boundaries, to a possible job in another library in Oregon.

Sally had just retired and bought a place outside a town I'd never heard of, though I was able to locate it on a large map. With her teenaged kids she'd made the move. While I was still in England, pondering my next steps, she wrote: come visit me a bit.

The Greyhound Bus ran in those days right to the three block main street of her new town.

I arrived in the summer, with a migraine, my boyfriend of the era, a backpack, and Sally's phone number. Dust blew down the street; the place looked shabby and grim.

What happened next stunned me. As I stumbled off the bus and looked around, an inner voice said "this is where you should be". I thought "great, I'm going crazy". The voice repeated; I shrugged it off.

Sally had a little, extra cabin close to the river, the little guest cabin where my boyfriend and I were to spend that week. During the big floods of the decade before the cabin had been half destroyed. The silt from that river's onslaught was piled just beyond the cabin steps.

It was there, when I decided, with Sally's encouragement, to turn my life around and stay, that I planted the first garden. We called it the flood garden, and in years to come I would see it under water more than once. I still remember the joy I felt, carrying stones from the river bed, tucking in herbs and flowers, planting trees--a hawthorne and a deep rose flowered crabapple.
They are still there--the rosemary having grown into a vast and tangled hedge, through which roses press. Boyfriend of the era went on to his academic career, writing books, living in grand cities, writing me about his new loves. I got a job at a local motel, and then at a local bookstore. When my firstborn was tiny he learned plant names in the flood garden, and wandered the bend of the river with me, looking for shiny stones and watching the white egrets fly up into the tall fir trees that grow along the river's edge.

Sally spent her last years living in that little cabin--her daughter and partner and grandson live these days in the big house. She added dozens of roses to the flood garden, and a white bench on which you could sit and look out towards the river and the hills. Her daughter tells me the bench went journeying this week, bobbing along the flood swollen river, but the trees are holding firm.

This morning, standing in line at the post office, I chanced into conversation with a guy who lives up from Sally's old place. We shared news of the river levels. He said, "yes, the flood garden was covered again--do you know where that is?" I told him a bit of my history. "So you knew Sally?" Yes, I said, she was how I came to be here in this remote area; how I reached the tiny dot on a map. We shared our appreciation of the beauty of the river. "The storm has changed it again" he said "it's cutting a new channel behind the island." "Yes, the first winter I was here it did that--the water came to the porch."

Things change, he said. And then he said something that brought tears to my eyes. "You know, there were all the paths where she'd walk with her dog" Yes, I said, remembering how she'd delighted in her energetic last dog, Lucy. "No one walks there now. The paths have grown over."