It’s here, it’s here, it’s finally here; warm weather, leaves on the trees and the feeling like we can thaw out has arrived just in time for May long weekend!
Wow, has it been a slow and long time coming this year and I know so many people are celebrating that we can finally get in our gardens and take off our winter coats.
In 14 years this is the latest I have ever put in a garden and cut the grass for the first time but I am hoping this will mean a later summer that runs warmth into late September in exchange for a few extra months of cold weather this Spring.
However, while many of us are thrilled to feel the warmth finally, local experts are getting more and more nervous about the incredible snow load on the mountains still. In fact, our creek is so low right now it’s as if we have had hot dry weather for months. This I am told by the older experts is because nothing has melted on the mountains yet which makes the next few months particularly worrisome they say. Some have told me that this year is shaping up quite similar to the year of the big floods in 1978 that took out bridges and ruined homes on the flood plains. Now that is not to say that if the weather stayed cool and slowly warmed up we wouldn’t be okay but if it was to get hot like last weekend and then rain like this week and then get hot again, well lets just hope we aren’t kayaking through ‘Ksan again! I had to laugh though when one particular long time resident just laughed at the group of us and said, well you can predict all you want and worry all you want to but none of you can do anything to help or hinder the outcome so you best just get back to living life instead of questioning it. How brilliantly put and there is no arguing with that logic. Yet, I still feel conflicted as I really want the warm weather but don’t want people to suffer from high water.
Which means for now, I am going back to gardening in the warmth and listening to the beautiful mountain I love living under rock and roll as rocks and avalanches start to crash down the faces of her snow covered walls. I often wonder if living under such a great mountain is the safest place in the world but then again, as our friend put it beautifully this week, worrying isn’t going to change the outcome so I will go enjoy life in the meantime.
Shannon Hurst writes the weekly My Town and is the Three Rivers Report correspondent.