gifts from the flood & sinuosities

In September 2013, it began to rain along the Front Range where I live. It rained for days. In the early morning hours of September 11, the creek near my home flash-flooded, metamorphosing from a gently flowing stream to a raging river. It uprooted large cottonwoods, carried boulders that one could hear tumbling along in the muddy water. The trees, boulders and flood debris blocked the creek's usual path, so it began to carve a new one straight towards the edge of our barn. In the following days a meander, or sinuosity, formed upstream from the barn, and another in the hay field downstream.

Nothing in  nature is permanent. Yet when humans build homes, plant crops, pave roads, we seek permanence. The creek by our home had changed the way all creeks and rivers change, whether gradually with time or, as with this flood, when suddenly over-saturated with rainwater. Because of the threat to our home and outbuildings, we dug out the debris clogging the creek bed. Water moved back to the old channel and over the coming weeks the meanders dried up.

After the initial work of crisis control I walked the edges of the flooding creek and on the sand bars that formed as water receded. When I looked past the ancient uprooted cottonwoods, plastic bottles, corrugated metal, a suitcase filled with silt, a child's yellow sand bucket, I saw beauty. I saw wondrous rocks everywhere - water-rounded granite, pink pegmatite sparkling with mica, milky quartz. Some were heart-shaped, all were gifts from the flood. I wanted to paint them, but first I needed to get my paper muddy. I soaked it in the flood water, scooped up mud and rubbed it in, then left it to dry in the sun. When I rinsed off the mud the paper had become beautiful shades of biscuit and buff sandstone. It was mottled, wrinkled…it was perfect. Painting the stones marked my acceptance of both the power and beauty of the flood, and the destruction it caused.

I was curious about how the graceful half moon shapes of the flooding creek came to be. So I looked it up. What I found is that there is no conclusive answer to why rivers start to meander. One theory is that a sudden obstruction to river flow can be the catalyst. A bend will start to form upstream from the obstruction. Once a river begins to curve, there is an imbalance in the rate of flow between the two banks. Water moves faster along the outer, convex side of the bend. This fast-moving water has the power to carry more sediment and is more erosive than the slower water along the concave side. Instead of carrying sediment, the slower water deposits it, and over time sandbars form on the inner curves. As the river alternately erodes sediment from the outside of a bend and deposits it on the inside, the sinuosities move and grow.

I was compelled to paint those sinuosities to honor and acknowledge the flood-swollen creek. I painted them large, with layers and layers of loose lines meandering across mud-stained paper, preserving the creek's story. I will hold those meanders in my memory and in my heart.