The Mississippi River is on a fairly dramatic rise: a week ago it was flowing at a little below zero on the Memphis gauge, but in the next ten days or so it's forecast to get up to over 11 feet above zero. That might surprise many locals, considering it's been sunny and hot, with very little rainfall, here in Memphis in the last several weeks. But up in the Midwest, particularly in Indiana and Ohio, they've had more rain than they can deal with. As of this writing some 11 inches have fallen in parts of those states, with more rain in the forecast. One site of catastrophic flooding is the White River watershed northeast of Indianapolis. The White flows southwesterly across the state of Indiana until it joins the Wabash River, and the Wabash, in turn, flows into the Ohio. And as everybody knows (or should know), the Ohio is one of the major tributaries of the lower Mississippi. And so that floodwater from the Midwest will be bringing the river level up here at Memphis over the next few days.
On Thursday I got in the boat for the first time since the race last weekend. When I reached the mouth of the harbor I found a barge rig coming upriver from beneath the Harahan Bridge, so I went out and did some surfing. The waves weren't the best ever, but they were decent, and I got a few good rides.
My mother's funeral is scheduled for this Tuesday, and after that my sister and I will begin the long process of handling estate matters and cleaning out my mother's house. I expect that to dominate my life for the next couple of months, but in these days between my mother's death and the funeral, I'm feeling like I have all kinds of time on my hands. For months, chores related to my mother were part of my daily routine--grocery shopping, paying bills, speaking with doctors and nurses and caregivers, and just going over to her house and sitting with her as the final weeks of her life ticked away. Now, suddenly, all those chores have vanished.
On Friday morning I got out for a bike ride, taking the Greater Memphis Greenline out to Shelby Farms and back. This weekend we're having the highest temperatures of the year so far, with the afternoon highs exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit. So it was a good, sweaty ride Friday, and maybe that was what the doctor ordered. For the last month or so I've been having terrible luck with flat tires on my bike, and I got yet another one on this ride. Fortunately, this flat didn't occur until the very end of the ride, just a few hundred meters from my house.
I was back in the boat yesterday morning. There was no barge traffic on the river, so I just paddled steady for 50 minutes. The sun was beating down, but at least there was a breeze from the south that offered some relief. The only trouble was that I had to paddle the last two kilometers to the dock heading north up the harbor, with the breeze at my back.
It was already 90 degrees as I drove down to the river at a quarter past nine o'clock this morning. I did much the same thing in the boat as yesterday. Back on the dock I took a bath under the hose, but even as the cool water flowed over me, sweat oozed from my pores. As I drove home around 11 o'clock, the temperature display in my car registered as high as 99 degrees.
For more information on what this blog is about, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment