Come High Water

The same logic that causes big rivers always to flow past big cities causes cheap farms sometimes to be marooned by spring floods. Ours is a cheap farm, and sometimes when we visit it in April we get marooned.

Not intentionally, of course, but one can, to a degree, guess from weather reports when the snows up north will melt, and one can estimate how many days it takes for the flood to run the gauntlet of upriver cities. Thus, come Sunday evening, one must go back to town and work, but one can't. How sweet the spreading waters murmur condolence for the wreckage they have inflicted on Monday morning dates! How deep and chesty the honkings of the geese as they cruise over cornfield after cornfield, each in the process of becoming a lake. Every hundred yards some new goose flails the air as he struggles to lead the echelon in its morning survey of this new and watery world.

These excerpts are from "A Sand County Almanac, with essays on conservation from Round River", by Aldo Leopold and published by Oxford University Press (1966). For more information about Aldo Leopold, see: www.aldoleopold.org An inexpensive paperback version of Sand County Almanac published by Ballantine Books is widely available at book stores or on-line.