-Posted by Isaac

I have to apologize, I had such a good one planned for you— the meaning of life, the meaning of death, that sort of thing. It all began to coagulate two weeks ago on the way down to Nelsonville.

Maizy and I had such an interesting conversation. I was in a meditative state, listening to Sam Harris talk about the nature of consciousness. She barged in with her questions and boy, did we get into it. What a wave of insight. What a flood of thought.

Then, those thoughts combined with the sounds, sights and substances of the festival itself, I anticipated sharing a pretty involved blog post. I’ve been chewing on it for two weeks.

But it was all for naught. Nature had other plans this week.

No flood of deep thinking for you today.

Just a flood.

The nature of Nature.

No, that’s not the Ohio River pictured above. That’s our backyard.

Or more specifically, our buckwheat field.

You can see the high water mark on the big walnut tree. And the home hives in the distance. Yes, the water actually lapped up to the base of the hives. Higher than we’ve ever seen it since moving here in 2006.

Beehives float.

But bees drown.

We had our first flood casualties five miles down the road. A healthy, productive bee yard the day before. Now nothing. Just some bricks and concrete blocks.

16 hives down the river.

I put out a single sad box to catch the homeless. In less than a minute it was filling up.

I’ll give them a queen this afternoon. We’ll see what happens.

Even though the landowner called to tell me, it was still a shock to see that blank hole.

It happened in the night. My friend Rachel, who lives near that yard, posted her rain gauge on Facebook. Five inches!

She said she hadn’t forgotten to dump it from the previous rain. Five inches in 36 hours.

I think we’ve had four consecutive nights of rain.

The title of this post was Jayne’s idea. A play off last week’s post. Although it remains terrible for the crop farmers, it’s getting more terrible every night for the bee farmers.

(Personally, I thought a good fitting title would be: THE NIGHT IS DARK AND FULL OF TERRORS)

I listen to the pounding roof all night, wake up, look out at the river running through the yard and think, Oh man, what’ll I find today?

Somehow those hives on the levee stayed put. The landowner called to tell me the water had made it up to the bottom box before receding.

So far, no more washed out bee yards, but they’re calling for another two inches before tomorrow. Yesterday I plugged in a favorite Led Zeppelin and just drove around. The song seemed to fit the mood.

Houses under water…

Crops and forests and fields…

Pastures and fences and equipment…

The above picture is my brother’s place. He had a bunch of drowned farm equipment somewhere in that mess. And I heard the other Justin, my brother-in-law, stayed up all last night pumping water off the produce farm. (Pictured in last week’s post.) (Did I say something about their weekly disasters?)

Even Westfall Schools took a beating.

But I guess that didn’t compromise the learning. School is still a long way off.

Sometimes I wish I was a kid again.

Maybe we’ll dry out by September.

That song just gave me another good title: CRYING WON’T HELP YOU, PRAYING WON’T DO YOU NO GOOD.