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The rains have not come. I count nine or ten months since we’ve been at normal water levels. Or longer. I wish they’d come. A pious man might pray for them, another might do a dance, a third might’ve offered a sacrifice.
The Flute Reed River is now just a silent brook, a dry drainage, of stagnant shallow pools and slow drips over the freestones. The creek has been at summer low-water lows since springtime. The spring rains never really came. The snow was light last winter too, maybe sixteen inches give or take down near the big lake. And not significantly heavy up over the ridge around Tom and Moosehorn (the headwaters of the Flute Reed).
I imagine it is a borderline existence for the young steelhead – the fry from this year’s spawning, the fingerlings from last year’s, the jacks from two years ago. The water temperature has climbed over 75°F (marginal temperatures for rainbows; warm water holds less oxygen). I skinny-dip in what depth I can find and it doesn’t take my breath away – or baptize me – like a trout stream should. The warmer temperatures and slower flow allow green slime to overtake the pools. Aquatic vegetation can be good habitat, but green slime saps an even greater amount of oxygen from the water.
A lack of rain, a lot of hot weather, and not much snow melt this past spring has left small creeks running on empty, much to the peril of the fish that live in them. Photo courtesy of James Egan
So, I have sympathy for the trapped rainbows gasping with their gills for oxygen in the Hovland muck. Otherwise, the Universe is indifferent.
The lilacs are still developing but they won’t blossom without rain. The raspberries and tomatoes and dogwood won’t produce much fruit. The radishes were rind-y and brownish. The baby spinach went to seed before it leafed out. For all my work at gardening in the spring I take the lack of rain personally. Which is a foolish way to feel.
Funny how in the same week I was reading
Douglas Smith’s fully comprehensive 2016 biography of Grigori Rasputin (pre-revolutionary Russia’s holy fool, or unholy preacher) that I, first, read a commentary (which I do only rarely and very carefully) in which the author seemed to purport uncontested knowledge of history, definitive interpretation of old secular and scriptural texts, and prescience of the future; and, second, that I had a conversation with an individual claiming spiritual insight and Good Book understanding meant for the world, and possessing knowledge of a Change that is to come– and to come about with help from and the message of this individual.
What I want to say is this: Take what I say with salt. What I say about the past with a dash of table salt sprinkled in the body cavity of a freshly caught and gutted rainbow trout. What I say about the future with a pound of canning and pickling salt rubbed on the pink hide of a freshly skun coon. What I say about myself with a salt lick – apple-flavored maybe – tabled up for the does and fawns. That’ll learn me to take myself less seriously, my words more seriously, and my actions very much more responsibly.
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