Amy and I each spent time surveying our property and the road to look for any serious damage. The first thing to notice was the appearance of a house across the river! Either someone managed to relocate there earlier today (probably not completely impossible maybe) or it's always been there, but hidden by the trees on the island.

Needless to say, the island took a beating. At the water's peak the entire island was submerged and the trees shivered like Clara getting out of the bath. Several of the bigger trees are now located somewhere downstream and all the bamboo was mowed down. (Sadly, the bamboo will almost certainly be back in the Spring.)

Across the main channel we can now clearly see our neighbor's house and the unprotected bank that is eroding away. There's a levee that protects the upstream part of their property, but the back half is crumbling into the water at an alarming rate.

Speaking of the bank I was especially concerned about ours. We have three large trees just outside our fence that hang over the river. I was sure the water was cutting under the bank and setting them up for a big fall. If they fell they would take out a huge chunk of the fence and probably redirect water into our yard.

Our bank turned out to be pretty burly. Aided by our geogrid (TM) composed of fallen branches, rocks, and grass clippings the moss and ferns held the bank together remarkably.

The same can't really be said of our road. Where the river was flowing across the dirt road it's been eroded to only it's hardest base. It looks more like a Forest Service road high in the Cascades than a simple half-mile residential road. We'll certainly need to do some work on that.

All in all we dodged a bullet on this one. In fact, most of our street did. Go downstream, however, and I can't believe they were as lucky. Our old house must have been flooded. We'll probably take a tour of the old neighborhood later this week once the waters have really gone down.

BTW: Thanks for tall the calls and emails. Maybe I have to put a little less doom-and-gloom into the moosefish stories so you'll stop thinking we're in big trouble. (Don't count on it, though.)