Day 366

Maybe we should change our view to living here is paradise for 363 or 362 days per year. Because while day 365 stinks, day 366 is no peach either. What we didn’t realize when we moved here and were told about the flooding is that it’s not really the water that’s the issue, it’s the mud that it brings with it. I mean, it is the water. The water is ridiculous. But the several inches of mud it leaves behind is the absolute pits. So the buzz around The Hive on day 366 is always that of pressure washers firing up all down the street.

Day 366 is also the day where we review what we learned from the last one and how we can better prepare for the next one. Our goals are always to reduce the time it takes to prepare for a flood, reduce the time it takes to recover from one, and reduce the stuff that gets destroyed during one.

The neighbor’s shed is set up to float, ours, to its left is not.

First, the good parts, in many ways Patchy and I have a well choreographed ballet of getting various stuff up and out of the way and can get it all done in about an hour. We extended our garage storage platform last year so that the vast majority of our garage-type stuff is actually permanently stored on that platform. And we’ve also got the post flood mud removal down now too. I use the giant squeegee that the concrete guys left behind and Patchy pressure washes. I then use a snow shovel and wheel barrow to relocate mud back to the river while Patchy continues to pressure wash.

But it’s all about continued improvements. We knew we needed to replace the woodshed with one that floats. But there are only so many hours in a day and we didn’t get to it before it became critical. While we were able to tie off the milled wood planks, we lost the majority of our firewood that wasn’t inside the wood shed. Our next large project is building a wood shed that floats. The neighbors have a good setup, so we’ll copy that as much as possible in ours.

When in doubt, build it bigger! I also may have been wearing one shoe when taking this picture.

We lost the majority of our bees in the flood, which was heartbreaking. Day 366 included fielding calls from neighbors down river saying, “Hey, so we have a box of bees in the middle of our yard. They seem pretty pissed.” We spent a portion of the day collecting pieces and parts of hives that had landed in various neighbors’ yards. And also having them tell us about the hive parts that they saw floating downstream in the middle of the river. So I’m sure someone on Boathouse Row is also wondering how they ended up with part of a beehive. We put hives back together with bees as we could and ended up with one strong hive and one that ended up succumbing to small hive beetles that they weren’t strong enough to defend against.

We believe we’ve solved our bee problems with the latest iteration of the bee dock. It allows for a more central placement of the hives, spreads the load over a larger area, includes actual tie down points, longer pole sleeves, and taller poles. If you look closely at the picture, you’ll note that the original bee dock floated right off the top of the poles and moved about 4-6 inches downstream. The current isn’t actually that bad once you get that far back, so lateral movement isn’t as critical as float stability. However, if this doesn’t work, that will probably be it for keeping bees here. Because it’s not fair to the bees for them to die when it floods. It’s also not fair to the neighbors to populate their yard with angry, wet bees when they’re trying to pressure wash their way out of river mud.

A well deserved break.

The best way to save time prepping for a flood is to permanently store things that you’d have to move in a place where they don’t need to be moved. Patchy put this shelf up so that we can stow the 4x4s and plywood that we use to store the docks when they come out of the water for winter.

Our last step is always to look around and think about what happens if the water comes up another couple feet the next time. At that point, it would be over our storage platforms and we’ll need a way to store things above those. Right now the plan is to get rid of some of the things that we currently store and haven’t needed for the past 4 years. We’ll also be using the folding tables that we store on the platform as higher surfaces to store things.

That wraps up our post flood projects. So are we nuts for living here? Did we miss anything? Are 363 days of fun worth 2 days of pain? Do you have anything in your life that you put up with a couple days of pain to enjoy the rest of the time? And lastly, Happy 245th Birthday to our beloved Marine Corps.