Ducks in the Back 40

Cresting one of the many rolling hills in central North Dakota, I came upon yet another large gray lake with the strong wind making waves, ducks near the shore feeding and telephone poles running through the middle.

Wait, double take. Telephone poles? What are they doing in the middle of a lake?

One of several telltale signs that somewhere under several feet of "lake" water is a wheat field that won't be plowed this year or a pasture that won't be grazed.

Like the rest of the country four weeks ago, I heard about the flooding that plagued North Dakota. The media attention focused on the Red River Valley and the cities of Fargo and Grand Forks, and since western parts of the Dakotas tend to be drier, I assumed that the rest of North Dakota wasn't especially wet. Especially not four weeks later.

I was wrong.

Most of the conversations I had while traveling around North Dakota to discuss health care reform started with talk of the floods. The couple who owned one hotel I stayed at said they've had water in their basement for 4 weeks and they had to build a 3 foot dyke of sand and metal behind their hotel to keep it from being inundated.

Valley City, home of Congressman Earl Pomeroy, had to ban flushing toilets when their sewer system overflowed. The city resorted to placing hundreds of portable toilets scattered around town, and business and restaurants shut down due to lack of sanitation. The rumored new crime is people stealing them to put in their garages so they don't have to walk outside to use the loo.

My trip took me to Fargo and Grand Forks, a small town called Northwood west of Grand Forks, then west to Bismarck via Fargo. There was a stretch of road outside of Fargo where the road is literally surrounded on all sides by water - which makes one very conscious about cautious driving. The "shore" was at least a half mile away on either side, and a flock of geese could be seen in the distance. The Red River in Grand Forks is still well outside its banks, to the point where stairway railings simply disappeared into the cloudy water.

The "prairie pothole" region is known for its small wetlands, but even the flattest farm fields looked damp and mucky at the least and at worst had standing water between the plowed rows. As I drove west, there were stretches of drier fields leading me to think that the flooding was over, only to see more as I crested another hill. North Dakota had a wet fall, so much so that in a few places I even saw corn standing in the field. The farmer had clearly hoped that spring would allow him to harvest, but with the heavy snow this winter and the wetness now, that corn is a total loss.

While one wet year cannot make the case that climate change is shifting farmers' ability to grow crops, North Dakota has had a whole lot of flooding in the last dozen years. However, I fear that a wetter North Dakota might be a permanent condition unless we all take some drastic action to reduce the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. It's just too bad they can't grow rice that far north.

Meanwhile, there's more rain the forecast.

(Photo credit: law_keven on Flickr.)