Regarding the River

Just so you can get a bit of a visual picture of what a typhoon can do, Jake Duncan took a video of the swollen river that flows near the base of our mountain at the Mercyland property. And to put this in perspective, the river is normally 1/4 the size seen in the clip*. Those tall grasslike reeds that are bowed down used to line the banks and grown in the low spots of the river. And as Jake pans around, you can see a bit of the muddy side of our mountain, as well as the heap of what remains of our garage. It sort of collapsed this morning, and Joks, Mercy In Action’s tricey driver, is seen in the blue shirt with John. They pulled out the tricey, which was holding up the structure on it’s metal frame. It was actually the tricey that saved ours and the Ehler’s scooters from getting crushed. All three vehicles were salvaged and not terribly damaged. The tricey is slightly dented in the roof, but that is all. We are thinking about using the roof on our CR. When the rain lets up, we’ll construct another open garage. So far, it has been raining for seven days straight, and in that amount of time we have seen the sun for about 15 minutes. The past two years have been droughts, and this is an abnormal rainy season, or so we are told. It typically rains a couple hours in the night or evening, and then stays mostly sunny throughout the day. Still, I hold to optimism. And I have to say this, the waterfalls up in the high mountaintops are beautiful! You can seen them cascading down through the mist, and it is quite awesome to look up and see them at different levels in the surrounding mountains.

*I tried to link the video, but I’ll have to play around with it. He has the clip on his Facebook page, and I’ll toy around and see if I can upload it here too.

originally posted on June 25, 2011