By Steve Ford

I don’t know if it was an omen, but on June 7, Cindy reported seeing a tiny least shrew in our basement bathroom. These are some of the smallest mammals in the world, and not commonly encountered in the field, let alone our bathroom. This was a first. She missed at grabbing it, and it disappeared. The next day was another record -- by far the worst flood we’ve experienced in more than 30 years at our home in the country. Coincidence?

We woke up to a bit of water in the basement, but not so much we couldn’t clean it up in a couple of hours with a shop vac and some fans. It could have been worse. I know it was for some. (A chicken pen I‘d just helped a friend build partially collapsed in the heavy rain.)

Afterwards we went outside with some small orange flags and a camera to mark the high-water line and to assess the landscape. We decided this would best be done in a canoe. I waded out to untie one of our two aluminum canoes from the trees near the bank of our strip pit; knee-high water, then waist-high, then chin-high, and finally I was “swimming,” that is, using small trees and large shrubs (including poison ivy, to which, thank goodness, I’m not allergic) to pull myself through the floating debris of branches. I’m not a bad swimmer, but was beginning to wonder just how badly I wanted to go canoeing.

I untied the canoe, all but a small part of which was underwater, and wrestled it through the heavy flotsam -- not easy when one’s leverage is unassisted by a substrate. Meanwhile, while admiring the view, I saw that while the johnboat and kayak were still tied to trees, the other canoe was not in sight, nor was my floating dock. Where’s my dock? The missing canoe, ironically, I had spotted years ago in a neighbor’s woods after a previous big flood. He had graciously let me have it, so its evident loss today was sort of return-to-sender. If you find it somewhere washed up in southeast Kansas, please let me know. I’ll reward you with a canoe ride.*

I picked up Cindy and off we ventured into quite a lake of moving water -- an extended flood plain of Limestone Creek. We named it Lake Limestone. How surreal to see our familiar green farm so transformed into a big body of brown water; weird and slightly menacing. Quiet but not serene. We did, however, find the dock wedged among downed sycamores. This is not our first nomadic dock. The first one I made of heavy railroad ties and “anchored” to the bottom of the pit. Heavy or no, it floated up and away. I wrangled it back as best I could but it had an angle to the shoreline and the deck had a 20 degree tilt. At first we called it picturesque. In truth, Ho Boy did it look crummy. Eventually, Mrs. Ford and I just couldn’t live with it and dismantled it. Call us perfectionists.

So, we paddled out, first south, then west as the current carried us toward the Neosho River six miles away. We were not anxious to join the Neosho, but it would not have taken us long to do so.

The woods south of the house is a “green-tree reservoir,” a kind of woody marsh favored by wood ducks, mallards, blue-winged teal, and night herons. It is surrounded by a levee some six feet high. During our outing, the top of the levee was under two feet of water, which was down some two feet from the high water mark. The current was non-negotiable, as it kept driving us into the trees. I managed to find the levee and was able to stand on it and pull the canoe containing my muddy bride eventually back to water’s edge.

Unfortunately, several prothonotary warbler boxes associated with a PSU study that were fastened to trees and T-posts in the green-tree woods were completely under water. We’re not sure how many may have had eggs or nestlings. At least one for sure. Two boxes and several trail cameras were lost. We were also worried about box turtles, but they can float for a while. Hopefully we didn’t lose too many.

They say the series of events initiated by a flitting butterfly can trigger a hurricane. What about shrews? I’ll thank the missus never to perturb another one.

*I found it later, nearly submerged but still tied to a tree. I’ll stand you a ride anyway.