Monday, October 4, 2010

So it wasn't a hurricane...

Okay, maybe I was a little too flip, or blase', or whatever, in my last post when I wrote off the remnants of Tropical Storm Nicole as just a little rain. There was significant flooding all up the East Coast, and some people died as a result. Flooding is flooding. Never a good thing.

Here in the North Country we got a steady rain all day Friday (my day off), and the rivers and streams turned into torrents as they carried the runoff away into Lake Champlain. The lake level was noticeably higher when we took the ferry over to Vermont on Saturday, but the lake is big enough to handle all the extra water.

I love this place. The locals decided that if Scotland's Loch Ness could have a sea monster named Nessie, then Lake Champlain could have a sea monster named Champy. I have even seen a cartoon of Champy making an afternoon snack out of the ferry, cars and all. We didn't see Champy on our run Saturday, however. But the trees are turning, both in the Adirondacks of New York and the Green Mountains of Vermont, and the views are just grand. By next week they should go from grand to spectacular.

Here's a little peek of one of the local rain-swollen rivers, normally so shallow and clear that you can see the rocks on the bottom. I wish I had been taking a video instead of a still photograph. The photo doesn't capture the swift movement of the water as it hurtled toward the lake, or the way it dashed around rocks and made eddies and backwaters of splashing whitecaps (whitecaps in a river? Is there another name for them?). Next time, I'll dig out the video camera.

What a neat place to live.


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