The Art of the Drought

I like to walk on cooler mornings at Glassberg Conservation Area on the beaten and sometimes challengingly muddy path around the pretty three-acre (man-made) lake I sometimes fished in, that I privately called my own Walden Pond, and last week was stunned to see the lake dried out to practically nothing, surrounded by a Missouri moonscape of cracked mud and dead water lily plants.

In this picture you can see from the orange gauge where the water level used to be.

The lake is a tenth or less than what it was! The former sky mirror that had a whole bunch of us (or at least one person every day) hiking in half a mile carrying gear to fish there! The dead trees stuck up from it like wooden knitting needles. Fish remain in the increasingly scarce, warm water--jumping, as if to say, "Save us!" The Department took down the sign warning anglers about the daily catch limits.

Barely recognizing it and not quite believing it I crunched my boots across the desert landscape close to what water is left.

Oh, I Gotta. . .

. . .call all my friends to come over, put on their water-resistant gear and boots with major treads and come with me to tour the property's 8 waterfalls just after a good solid rain. These are waterfalls #5 (above) and #2. To photograph Waterfall 2 demands you balance on a nice wet incline. From there it's only 25 yards to Waterfall 5 but it's not like there's a walkway. Bushwhack and step in the stream if you can't jump it, and risk the quicksand--because wet silica sand can make quicksand, and don't say no, because once I got caught in it under the Highway F bridge. It won't swallow you up like in the movies, but if both feet are in it you'll have a devil of a time trying to 1) grasp that you are stuck in quicksand and treading it like you're making grapes into wine and 2) free yourself. Pray that nobody else is there to jeer. It might help to untie and remove your boots and and throw yourself full length onto a nearby gravel bar where you can sit and think about how to pull your boots out.

The watercourses for each of these falls originate on the Divine property and empty into LaBarque Creek. Only in a very dry spell are these watercourses intermittent.