how high's the water, mama?

Nine feet high and rising...

trees under the force of the water
their little island is completely submerged

the Big Muddy wide and wild
churning its way towards downtown Calgary

2 days after the water crested and the rain finally stopped, I was able to make some paintings of the river higher than I'd ever seen it - though not nearly as high as it was at the flood's peak.  

I suppose these photos do not convey very much information if you don't know the river in its usual state of calm blue-green, when the trees are standing upright rather than bowing to the force of the water, the islands they grow on completely covered by the rushing torrent still running very high.

Well, there are many explicit photos and statistics of the Alberta Flood available online.  

We had our own experience of the flood, luckily only a minor inconvenience for us though we live very near to the river.  The cleaning and sorting and repair for those who were not so lucky will take awhile, and we do what we can.

Here I post only a few hours of painting as the sun emerged.

photo taken by Arno Hoogveld
riding by on his bike, stopped to talk

Here's a website journal post I made a couple of days before the flood.  Interesting choice of words wasn't it, considering what happened just two days later.