This morning, for the first time after several days of heavy rain and thick clouds, fog blanketed the fields. The fog gradually thinned, and the sun shone on Mt. Baker, Komo Kulshan, wrapped in glittering white snow. Flood waters have been retreating since yesterday morning.
This flood is said to be the product of an atmospheric river, a phrase my mother’s parents would have thought outlandish, even silly. Nothing like a river crashing down from the mountains laden with precious rock flour.
My mother’s parents owned a farm near the Nooksack River downstream a few miles from Lynden. They expected their fields to be underwater for several months in the year, which they gladly traded for well-watered and fertile soil for their crops.
Their house was on stilts until they bought a parcel of high ground for their dwelling, barn, chicken coops, and machinery shed. When my mother was born during a March flood, my grandfather fetched the midwife in a row boat, a mode of transportation he knew well.
My mother’s father was born on the polders of the Netherlands and grew up in the Dutch community on Whidbey Island where he learned to live on the water. This was before the Deception Pass bridge was built. He courted my grandmother in Lynden. To visit my grandmother, he and his brother rowed across the notorious whirlpools and tidal rips of the pass. I never heard what motivated his brother, but I like to stretch the point and say that I was born to the product of a daredevils in rowboats and spring floods.
I’ve gotten emails from all over asking if my family is okay in this much publicized flood. I answer that like most longtime Whatcom County residents, we have learned to live with the fall and spring floods that arrive most years; this year’s flood is was higher than usual but not unheard of.
Lest anyone doubt, I agree that the climate is changing, but climate is averages and statistical norms; weather is the events of a single day or week. Climate change can be detected with objective answerable questions, like ‘was the average July temperature at a give spot between 1950 and 1980 the same, higher, or lower than the same average between 1980 and 2020?’ Consult the records and you have an answer.
The folks who do those calculations say climate has changed. With all the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime, I’m not surprised, and I don’t think climate change is a hoax. However, a lot of the talk I hear about climate change is, in my opinion, uninformed and not as factual as I would like it to be.
We should all feel sorry for the sufferings of those driven out of their homes by the floods and do whatever we can to help, but I still enjoyed the weather this week: heavy rain splatting in my face and rising waters revealing the contours of the earth in ways that are unseen on lesser days.
The weather service predicts the atmospheric river will return for a reenactment next week. The meteorologists know more than I do, but this morning, looking at the sky and the mountain, I have doubts.
We’ll see. I’m used to being proven wrong.