Flood Stage

I went out for a Sunday ride and found a 100 year flood, the worst since 1937 in these parts. Back then my father's family was rescued from the second story of their house on the farm down by the river. After that they moved into town. My uncles went off to the war and saw exotic parts of the world. Malien to the South Pacific, Howard to France. My dad then went to college and climbed the small town social ladder. I was born into a totally different life than my forebears. All because of a 100 year flood.

Now I am 100 years old. I didn't even notice a flood as bad as the one that brought my family out of rural poverty, and I'm supposed to be some kind of documentary photographer. I no longer watch or read any local news, so know very little about what's going on in the society around me. I just happened to go for a Sunday ride after working all weekend, both at the day job and in the yard.

I've always hated work, or at least working for other people. I hate it now more than ever, but I'm also putting in more hours than ever. It sucks, but I need stuff for when I finally quit my job and start on my next big project, which will be soon, baby soon. But lawdy knows, not soon enough.

In the meantime, I've finally gotten old. It came as a surprise. Of course I knew I was getting old, but somehow I didn't expect to actually get there. The first clue was that I started liking classical music. I've periodically tried to like classical music for as long as I can remember, but could never find the way. I understood that since all the highly cultured people liked it that it must be good, but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't find it in me to actually like it. At some point I started joking that it was something I'd like when I got old. And so it came to pass. Thankfully, I still don't like most of the powdered wig shit. But I do very much like a lot of the more modern evolutions of the genre.

Another symptom of old age is that I suddenly like yard work. That's one I never saw coming. On this particular weekend, I'd done more yard work than I'd ever done in my life, at least when I wasn't getting paid to work on someone else's yard.

It's not entirely accurate to say I like yard work. Mostly I like having a beautiful yard and I've found out the hard way that having a beautiful yard requires quite a bit of work. But in the end I get to sit in the sun, or the shade depending on the time of day, and do nothing but soak in nature and the outdoors. I feel like Marlon Brando in his tomato garden in the Godfather, though our yard is infinitely nicer.

Lola has been working on the yard for years now, so most of the credit goes to her. Up until now, I've mostly enjoyed watching her work in the garden. Or I should say gardens, as she has many separate ones on all four sides of the house.

Lola's gardens are not at all typical. She eschews the order and rigidity of the more typical American and European style gardens, though the front yard is presentable in that context. The back yard, however, is pretty wild. Mowing the grassy parts takes a lot of effort because there's so much stuff that has to be moved. I'm working on the very back of the yard. I'm putting in native plants that attract a lot of pollinators and other life. Until Lola's gardens really took off in the past several years I'd never given much thought to life in the gardens, but when done right, that's probably the best thing about them.

On Saturday I got up at 5 am and worked in the yard until I went to the day job at 1 pm and did 8 hours of overtime. Then I got up at 5 am on Sunday morning and worked in the yard until nearly 3 pm when I was about to fall over from fatigue. I took a long hot shower and 20 mg of cannabis gummies and then took the mobility scooter out for a Sunday drive in the country.

But the country was flooded and most of the roads were impassable. Who knew?

My first instinct is to kick myself for missing a great opportunity to do some timely journalism. But it seems I'm to the point where I'd rather spend time in the yard or fart around in the country on the mobility scooter than do timely journalism.

This is more or less what I'll be doing on the next big project, which is tentatively titled "The 95 project." Though instead of sitting in the yard admiring Lola's garden I'll be sitting at my camp admiring the beautiful desert, mountains, or forests and exploring those places on the mobility scooter. Some big city and international stuff will be included as well.

I picture it much like this weekend, still haphazard, only quite a bit more focused on the writing and photography. There are stories I want to tell.

I don't know if it was a combination of the fatigue and the weed, or if I've gotten to a place where I can more reliably interact with people, but I was good at it on this particular day. When I got to the end of the road I found a family whose house and business were flooded. They were mostly just hanging out on the highway next to their flooded property. This was in rural Kentucky and they were blue collar country folk, the type who are normally very suspicious of outsiders, and often hostile, but I was in the zone and wearing my camo and had nice chats with a few of them while taking some of these photos.

You may recall that I was followed around by suspicious locals when I went to the inauguration and stopped in a small town in Kentucky, raising their suspicions even though I was dressed like a factory worker. Looking back on that, I noted that just about everyone there was wearing camouflage and since then I've been changing my appearance to blend in, or one could say, to camouflage myself to become invisible. It seems to be working. The mobility scooter helps a lot. Country and blue collar people respect motorized off-road vehicles and the nut cases that ride around on them.

Again, I'm tempted to feel like I should kick myself for the missed photo opportunities. They would have let me take their photographs had I asked, or I just could have done it without asking like I did with the woman and the dogs and at worst they would have asked me to stop. And those would have been good photos in the traditional documentary photography sense. But nowadays I mostly think it's not worth bothering people for good photos. And I got one anyway, without really trying. The kid with the fish captures something deeper than the flood. Go back to the top and contemplate it for a few minutes. You'll see what I mean.