Where do we go from here?

I took a trip to our neighborhood market on Friday. I passed two closed roads, a drowned school, lots of people hauling carpeting outdoors, kids swimming in pools of water and other unknown liquids, and streams still flowing across yards that didn't have streams before. The market is barely a mile from my house.

Crestview students won't be in class here for a long time.

While kids played in the water below, helicopters above ferried other kids off the mountainsides.

If you look carefully at the hillside, you'll see the slides that brought the new soil to the east side of the street.

This is my "almost home" view. I thought it was particularly pretty this spring when all the late snow left the hills exceptionally green. It's a sight that nearly always makes me smile. I've bumped up the contrast here to make the slides more obvious.

We were asked to avoid going out because we needed to make room for the first responders. I watched long convoys of National Guard vehicles stream past every day and I am in the flight path between the airport and the mountains. Chinook helicopters made my house vibrate. Because I was without my own personal flooding, I checked with friends around town to see if anyone needed help. Fortunately for all of them, none did, but that left me stuck inside for a few days, feeling pretty bored and useless. It's a weird and uncomfortable feeling being surrounded by so much disaster yet disconnected from it.

Saturday I felt slightly better having broken in to a neighbor's house to turn off the gas stove he accidentally left on and then released a gold finch who was trapped in some netting (not mine) in the garden, but I still haven't directly offered any flood help. My trip further in to town that day revealed families and neighbors helping one another remove ruined furniture, the Crestview parents emptying out the school, the Waldorf school parents drying out toys in the parking lot, and the Quakers drying out the meeting house. It looked like everyone had come together and had things in hand. I'm guessing by the look of things online that other opportunities to help will be forthcoming.

Our skies have been all over the map since Friday morning.

The morning after (Friday, AM)

All quiet on the western front (Friday, PM)

Um, whatcha doin', thunderhead? (Saturday, PM)

And the animals have been all over the map, too. Confused crayfish are popping up in parking lots. Slugs are multiplying exponentially. Peacocks have gone astray (I will stop by their house tomorrow to see if they made it back). And there are toads all over.

And Sunday it rained. And we all sang, "Rain, rain go the f*ck away" for the hundredth time. Tomorrow we go back to work. And we start putting things back together one day at a time.

Note: I have a bunch of video from the last few days, but have yet to edit it down to a postable size. I'll work on that.