Suddenly I began living an episode of "Wild Kingdom." What the heck is up with that?

I am all for the concept of wilderness adventure. As a kid, Marlon Perkins' "Wild Kingdom" captured my imagination until I grew old enough to realize that his assistant (Don?) rigged the poor animals' demise in each and every episode. I mean let's face it, how many willdebeests conveniently swim into deep water where they can be easily netted and tackled; and WHY would you want to do that in the first place.

So when the Klamath River flood warnings were issued, I geared up for the worst possible sort of wilderness adventure: one with NO concept of what was coming. There was no Don or Marlon to rope my silly butt in when the floodwaters raged through Klamath. But rage they did.That river is shallow and very, very fast. It was full of whole trees and other debris rocketing down from up river like a jet boat. The power of the river was truly awesome; and possibly one of the most frightening things I have ever witnessed after the tornado that went down my grandmother's street in Illinois when I was little. That merely removed the roof of the house across the street. This river would rip houses apart and barely slow.

And I took the advice of local law enforcement and emergency services crews: STAY HOME. BE SAFE. I took that to mean basics such as, I don't know...avoiding flooded areas; and not placing myself in a situation to be stranded. Basics.

Many less fortunate, however, ignored the warnings on the principle: It rains here all the time - the flood will not happen. How eerily-reminiscent of Katrina. And, as was the case then, it DID happen and things got ugly. After all, the Klamath River is a river that historically floods...often.

Mel and I ventured out to the edge of the disaster - when Highway 101 was under almost 5 feet of water. Former cow pastures had whitecaps and, I suspected, had the potential to become a radical new venue for the cowabunga crowd over at Noll Surfboards Inc. I took some good photos but now have to figure out how to get them online. I'll post them here...eventually.

Once safely inside and pouting over the frigging never-ending rain from hell, I developed a new talent: cooking on a woodstove. I even got a frozen pizza to bake. Top that Emeril. Ok, so the bottom was a bit, er, dark...but it was SO wonderful given that we were without power for a mere 2.5 days. And we were fast running out of water. Fortunately THAT never happened unlike many in Humboldt County who are still without power and water. It is a world-class mess here.  

One amazing wilderness discovery I made was that soup actually tastes better cooked on the woodstove. The veggies don't go all soggy and stay crisp. And given that all of our food was ready and waiting to go bad, hell, we had no choice. We HAD to cook it or lose it. And we had no money with which to replace what was lost.

As of today, we are down to beans...literally. But hey, at least we have something. And through all of this, I came down with the flu. So the rain poured down incessantly for two weeks and the flood everyone poo-pooed actually happened. Fortunately, to my knowledge, nobody was killed.

Mel played games on his cell phone while I honked around like a whooping crane with the flu trying to come up with woodstove recipes from the brink of disaster. He was the fire keeper and I, the fire user. Then we baked ourselves out because one storm system blew in on hot air currents. Phew.

When I saw my neighbor's lights come on late late monday, I let rip the weirdest noise. It was somewhere between a honk and a laugh. I cannot even describe it adequately. The doc in Crescent City gave me a breathing treatment yesterday, so my lungs opened up a bit. That felt grand. And we finished off the last of the woodstove soup for dinner.

The only severe damage we incurred was the frying of our internal modem - yes, even WITH a surge protector - on our home PC. Sigh. But believe me, it could have been much worse. The cows in the fields once terrified of the howling winds and sheeting rains bucked and hopped around; and even little Yasle, the coyote, emerged when the rains stopped to say, "Hello. We made it through." All I could say was, "Thanks for the warning. Glad we listened."