Her eyes follow me as I row toward the boat ramp, and a ghost-like feeling from years ago creeps up my spine, icy and tentacle-like. It’s like when Billy died. No, it’s not that bad. Can’t be. I couldn’t take it if it were.
Gone are the native plants, the animals and fish that once thrived here. Denied water, the river’s bed of sand has grown lifeless, its banks fallen in. The near horizon opens on barren fields. Fields where food was once grown, irrigated by arterial acequias.
They thought it was probably going to start dropping soon. The river was already higher than any flood since the gauges went in back in the ’20s, so the safe bet for forecasters was to say it had just about peaked. “Highest water ever recorded” would be a fair statement.
There are maybe a dozen of us, sitting on folding chairs at the center of three empty acres of old cracked concrete, listening to a young man and the wind play on a long wooden flute, and watching a dancer courting the concrete. She lies on it, slithers along it, lays her cheek on it. [...]
Despite my grown-up age, I’m suffering a premature case of panic at the thought of what lies ahead. Call it existential dread, a kind of pre-terror before the real thing arrives and wraps me in a stomach-churning, middle-of-the-night state of icy apprehension for the rest of my life. I had hoped to secretly enjoy the [...]
Editor’s note: After eyeballing more than 400 submissions to Mountain Gazette’s 4th Annual Dog Photo Contest over the course of six weeks, I made a stern vow, one that pretty much mirrors the vow I made this time last year: “NEVER AGAIN!!!” It’s just too difficult to try to pick a relative handful of shots [...]
