You wouldn't believe the mess we're in. I'm having a bit of trouble trying to take it in myself. South east Saskatchewan is making the record books these days - in fact, I think we make a record one day just so we can break it the next. The water is everywhere.
It was a wet summer last year. The snow pack this winter was significantly higher than usual. The spring melt filled the potholes and creek beds, washed out roads and flooded yards and roads and low lying buildings. The roads have all but melted into frost boils. There was a blizzard at the end of March, and at the beginning of May we had another that dumped rain and snow on us. The ground was so soft and wet power poles were tipped over like sails in a gale, and many people were without power for hours - even days in some cases.
The melt from that storm had the runoff raging through the bridges and culverts again. Sloughs filled even fuller. Glen and I had gone out for a tour on the quad one evening the previous month and he remarked that he had never seen the sloughs that close together before - now the same bodies of water are actually touching.
No one even cares any more how much more rain has fallen since then. Once you reach a certain point, it ceases to matter. No where near 50% of the crop was planted in this corner of the province. Up until now Glen and I have found some comfort in the fact that we have no crop to put in, but as time goes on and the rain keeps falling, we find ourselves worrying about our hay crop instead.
With all the moisture the hay crop is coming along nicely, although it would be doing better with some strong sunny days as well, but the ground is like a sponge. We were out on the pasture last weekend and every step we took sounded like a "squish". How are we going to put heavy tractors and equipment out there to cut and bale it? It's got to be dry before it can be baled - with humidity this high, how is that ever going to happen? Is it ever going to stop raining?
One of the reasons we were out on Saturday was because Glen had to move the electric wires from his fence up higher so that the water in the sloughs didn't ground out the electric current. The water is so high he did this job in chest waders. The second thing we were doing was trying to find a three day old calf whose mother was quite frantic about it being lost. We never did find it - Glen thinks it could well have drowned, or at least got stuck in the mud trying to cross the creek, and coyotes decided that it looked like a tasty lunch. Including the two we lost in that last blizzard, that is three that the weather has cost us.
And yet, I guess we shouldn't complain too much: Weyburn is under a boil water advisory because their sewage system was compromised, Roche Pierce had to be evacuated in the middle of the night and is now under water, and Minot, North Dakota is expecting the worst flood in it's history when all this water hits them on Thursday.
They are starting to refer to this year as a "once in every 500 year event". Normally prairie people love to own the bragging rites to having been there to see such a thing, but I'm starting to think it would have been okay to read about this one in a history book.
