Good Lord!

I have seen the 25-year plan for Pacific. In 25 years there will be no Pacific; it will be at the bottom of a man-made recreational lake ringed with McMansions, and somebody will make big money. Historic flooding in 2015, then worse in 2017, twice drowned half the town's housing and businesses; in 2017, the water topped the railroad tracks for the first time. The town was now floodplain and there was no two ways about it. Some residents FEMA'd and some didn't. When we're weary some developer will propose a glamorous lake in place of the sleepy little town and grease some pockets and make it so. But my mind was elsewhere when today I saw the little white country church lifted on pallets way up in the air, and thought, "Good Lord!"

I know buildings get raised and moved, a task I can't even begin to comprehend, and here I could watch it happen by hopping out of my car and telling a worker how amazed I was, and could I take a photo.

"Is the church being raised because of the flooding?" I asked, above the roar of the Bobcat. (Here, "bobcat" is both noun and verb.)

"Just like we raised the other houses around here," he said, and for the first time I looked around and saw that more than half the houses on the street, formerly ground-level bungalows, were now poised on new, high, solid concrete foundations -- ten feet high? twelve feet? More? The doors in front and back were now accessed with handsome new wooden staircases that one could tie a rowboat to. Those folks were staying put, flood or no. And my heart was glad.

In Hiding...and Smiling

North of "my" property line is Missouri Conservation land, designated as such only about a year ago. So I'd never explored it until this winter, and here I found beneath a sandstone cliff along a shallow run of the LaBarque a nice sandy place to sit and rest. That pure white isn't snow but silica sand. It doesn't stick to your clothes; its grains are more spherical than crystalline. It's similar to the sand at the Great Salt Lake. It makes beautiful white sand bars and beaches and little beds as you see here. And it's all from the sandstone cliffs just like the one you see. I hid and rested under this overhang, perfectly happy; it'd make a nice place for a picnic or romantic encounter. Even in December, the determined sort of people could manage. The trees? The old creek banks are eroding (severe drought/flood cycles don't help) and we are losing lots of old trees, oaks and sycamores. It's nature.

Video Visit: The Secret Pond

Two-minute video, narrated by Divine Bunbun, of the secret, intermittent pond below the silica cliff, a La Barque Creek floodplain area so loaded with briars, mud and vines that it is accessible only in late winter or early spring. The Secret Pond is the home of sweet spring peepers and summer skeeters, and is a watering place of all woodland creatures.

Floodplain in Autumn

This floodplain is in Allenton, Mo., a tiny ghost town between Pacific and Eureka. When I moved here eight years ago Allenton was still a town, but it's across the freeway from Six Flags, and development -- the enchanting idea of a retail paradise -- has threatened to flatten it ever since. The post office closed about three years ago. But people still live and farm down the back roads and on the Meramec River floodplain where nobody can develop. Oct. 1 was my eighth anniversary on the Divine property and I thank God. Of all the things I have ever done, I love living here the most. I love this land, hills and floodplain and whatnot. They will remove me from this property feet first, if at all.