Sauvage at Seventy

Above: you can tell the height of the flood water from the ice on the bank

The notice in the front reads "No Overnight Camping!"

The ice was about 12" in depth

daily haiku

a winter rainstorm

floods and torrents of water

a savage landscape

This week nature got a little freaky again. We had 2" or more of rain in 24 hrs and with the frozen ground it all ran down creek beds in its entirety. This resulted in flooding and log jams.Hanging Woman Creek here in Birney was no exception. Sitting up on the hill I was oblivious to what was going on - noticed some flooding in meadows and that was all.

But apparently Hanging Woman Creek bridge was jammed by old logs and tree stumps that washed down, resulting in a flood that ran over the road and was so high it marooned foot-thick ice on it's banks. You can see from the above pictures that the level of water was tremendously high. Sometimes the weather and landscape here combine in a savage way, and this was one of those occasions. I prefer to use the french term "sauvage" which translated means wild. Many of my neighbors had horses and cattle marooned or standing belly-deep in icy water and not able to get out; they had to wade in to free them and lead them to safety.

I was recently interviewed by the Billings Gazette for a story about our devastatingly bad phone service and the FCC's lack of interest in correcting the problem. This was a direct result of a letter I wrote to them, about a week earlier, where I accused the FCC of having, "feet of stone and heart of lead" - what's the use of being a poet if you can't come up with a good description or two!

Between the fight to keep the Tongue River Railroad out of the valley, the Otter Creek area from being strip-mined and various other causes I feel compelled to take a stand on, I guess I must be seen to have my own sauvage landscape. Will I be looked back on as "that batty old Brit who lived on top of the hill?" Right now at seventy it really does not worry me. I think I'll adopt the philosophy of my late husband who said, "At seventy I'm a geezer and geezers can do what they damn well please!" So I'll sign off just like a letter to Ann Landers:
Yours Sincerely, Sauvage at Seventy