Woke up this morning and found an e-note from Mary, New York Sister, asking how we had survived Portland’s great flood crisis. Huh? “Streets turned into creeks,” she reported. This Portland? I looked out the window. Traffic as per normal. No boats motoring down 14th. “When your phone went straight to message, I assumed your power was out.” No. Power just fine.

Turns out, of course, there was flooding, of the worst kind, that is, sewer lines overflowing. But we didn’t know, left our cocoon up here on the 7th floor, and drove to the farm, it being Wednesday.

Some storms down there, apparently, too. Check these photos out:

The odd thing is that we’d been looking for some fallen oak with which to make a fireplace mantle, or small tables, something from our own wood. So far, everything that’s already down was too degraded, but this was a healthy-seeming tree uprooted and upended by its less-sturdy neighbor. This, however, is way too high a price for a bit of prideful whimsy. Another 200 years to replace this fellow.

But the mission, this Wednesday, was the meeting with Jarod (F&W), Donna (OWEB) and Steve (Consultant). We set out cross country to show Donna our streams. She was proposing we may qualify for a $15,000 grant to help fence these streams.

We climbed the terrain West from the driveway and came to a spot I’d never seen before. Basically, a mini Grand Canyon carved into the hillside. Water rushed along the canyon floor — okay, I am exaggerating a bit, but the thing is really impressive. Donna apparently thought so too, as she turned to Jarod with the comment that perhaps we should be thinking about the larger, comprehensive grant. How big is “larger” we don’t know, but it’s clear that 15 thou isn’t going to tame that stream. Last week I said we’d named it the “Little Sometimes.” This course will therefore have to be known as the South Fork of the L.S.

We followed the stream to its confluence with the main channel, across the cow-trampled landscape. Treacherous going, crossing tributaries you could see and just sloshing through high water along the old sheep fence and down to Llewellyn. We didn’t hike clear down to Muddy, but did transverse the future vernal-pools site, across to the woods, up the hill and back to their cars parked halfway down the driveway. They left after the hour and a half walk, agreeing that Donna and Jarod would put their heads together. She’d like, she said, to bring an engineer out to the site to consider water gaps for the planned rotationally-grazed cows.

Jarod is a lovely young man. Very soft-spoken, bright as hell, and yet, every now and then, he’s so funny you can’t help falling in love with him. We walked together at one point, he and I, talking about the bluebirds we could see in the oak tree tops. They’re eating the mistletoe berries, he explained. I asked about placing the birdhouses, and he told me his thinking on the subject. You put two houses on fence posts, 7 to 10 feet apart. Not facing one another,of course. Then, if a sparrow sets up shop in one house, a second sparrow will not occupy the other. This space is now available for a bluebird, should she like the neighborhood, and apparently she likes sparrows just fine. But if two bluebirds each want one of the houses, that’s fine too. So this works out well. We’ll put Amy and Alli’s houses in one neighborhood, and position Charlie and Will’s houses in the next settlement. And if Andrew puts his together and ships it north, we’ll have quite the community.

Steve is also a wonder. He said he had this great idea while unable to sleep the night before. We could uses a system of damming the streams with a weir system. This will allow us to store water for the cows in the pastures not crossed by the streams, accessed with the help of a nose pump. A fairly infelicitous name, but self explanatory? And on the subject of “salmonoids,” my mistake. The word is salmonid, accent on the second syllable, referring in our case to cutthroat trout. He and Jarod both claim to see small trout and even salmon fry all the time in such waters, though Larry remains a fish-denier. A nice Ted Talk about the process how and why the fish leave Muddy Creek, stuff themselves with the flooded invertebrates, and go home large enough to deter the bass looking for lunch.

Backing up, Larry and I had wanted to start burning one of our slash piles in the morning, but were unable to get ignition. We’d started the project before the Agency folks arrived and were chagrined to discover that we had no matches. Nor had the builders. Our car doesn’t even have a cigarette lighter, which had been one bright idea. Into town to buy one of those propane lighter gizmos you use on your votive candles. Very flimsy, but it did the job of catching the paper on fire. Not so the oak. Hmm. Engineering required. Must build a better burn pile, I guess. That will have to be another day.

You see from the photos that the weather was sunny, albeit a bit chill. Today? Thunderstorm and deluge. The builders are putting up the siding on the house, so not sure how much will get done until this spell of weather breaks. Larry is very eager to climb aboard Buck-the-Tractor and git to mowin’ them weeds. Especially after having the green light from Jarod on that project. And now, see above, we have another vast job for the power saw.

A sweet letter from Ursel today (Hello, Ursel!). Who suggests that farmers rest in the winter. Guess we didn’t get that memo. But, rain? Can’t mow in the rain, so we do get to chill for a while after all.