My Sunday Feeling

Mother Nature is on the rampage in Arkansas and Oklahoma.  I took this picture Wednesday from the bluffs of North Little Rock.  This is what is left of a hole on Rebsamen Golf Course in the Riverdale area below my house where I am typing this now.  The green is probably completely covered now.  

As one of my golf buddies said today, "It's going to be a lonnnnng time before we play Rebsamen again."

A real long time.  

But forget golf.  

The recent flooding of the Arkansas River is shaping up to be the natural disaster of a lifetime. At least my lifetime.  As I write this cities all up and down the river are preparing for unprecedented flooding.  And it is not supposed to crest until next Tuesday or so after which we can expect more rain.  Which is the last damn thing we need around here.

And it has Mississippi and Louisiana in its sights as it roars south.  

Lord. Here comes the flood.

As my friend Marge, whose husband owns property in the Delta said, "There's nothing you can do.  You just try to protect yourself and your property as best you can."

There's nothing you can do.

At least not right now.  Arkansas is now taking the medicine Louisiana had to take after Katrina.  Our levee system is a joke.  Give the devil his due, State Senator Jason Rapert, for whom I have very little use, was completely right when he warned, along with the Corps of Engineers, that this day was at hand.  There is no consistent policy concerning building or maintaining levees in this state.  It is a crazy quilt of public and private. State and local.   It's too late now, boy.

The river punched a hole in an old levee up in Yell County.   One over in North Little Rock almost breached.  A good portion of Fort Smith is flooded out.  And God help Pine Bluff by next Friday or so.

Apart from the levees, how many lives will be lost and/or upended, millions of dollars spent and lost before we take climate change seriously in this country?  And guess what?  The Corps just warned the New Orleans area that the water down there will rise again in two years or so, which necessitate the spending of even more money to reinforce the city.  

There's nothing you can do.  

I went down to the Clinton Center to try and take some pics.  They had it cordoned off.  I couldn't get any closer than a few hundred yards of the river.  And yet I could hear as it rushed past me.  It sounded for all the world like a jet engine.  My house is situated about a mile above it.  Late last night, after the traffic had died down, I could faintly hear it up here on the porch.  Such is the unimaginable power of a river as big as the Arkansas raging out of control.

In ten days or so the immediate crisis will have passed.  But what about the future?  Will take our medicine as Louisiana was forced to do?  Or will we continue to stick our heads in the mud?

But these are issues for another day.  Because right know mother nature is in charge.

And there's nothing, absolutely nothing, you can do.