Nebraskaland

56 Nebraskaland • October 2019 MIXED BAG OF FLOODS AND FOSSILS There's an old folktale here in Howard County that during the 1890s we were in deep drought. So the Catholic community of Loup City brought in a Bishop from Omaha to pray for rain, but the more Protestant-inclined Dannebrog hired instead a Pawnee "doctor" to perform rituals and incantations to break the dry spell. Loup City wound up with .23 inches the following week. In Dannebrog, Oak Creek ran 4 feet deep down Main Street. The story was funnier when it wasn't so close to the truth. Now the joke runs that over the very wet spring and summer of 2019 people were seen gathering gopher wood in cubit lengths. Some towns in central Nebraska have been flooded at this writing (August 2019) three times, in the span of only a few months. In the past I have seen the quiet, lazy Middle Loup River go all a-roar once in a springtime, perhaps with the spring thaw, but so far this year I have seen it bank to bank, snarling and roiling, on three different occasions. Bridges have been washed away and highways threatened. Entire fields have been washed out; old channels reoccupied by this river that had always been quiet and predictable; sand, trees, and wreckage of old buildings piled midstream or in abandoned channels like pick-up sticks tossed onto a gaming table. People who buy and sell land by the acre must be running their calculators overtime. The southern boundary of our parcel is the main channel of the Middle Loup, which means we have maybe 10 acres less than we had six months ago. An indication of how long it's been since our river has careened across the landscape like this can be found scattered on some of the sandbars – bones and teeth of Pleistocene animals long extinct suggest that some of the land now washed away hasn't been disturbed for 10, 20, or even 30 thousand years! Imagine that! Buffalo crossing the river on the ice or perhaps over boggy sandbars during the last great Ice Age were mired down and died, sand washed over the remains. The river shifted beds perhaps as far as a quarter- mile in another direction, and there they lay undisturbed until the floods of this last spring and summer, to be found by modern kayakers, hikers, and canoers. And now they decorate living room walls beside flat screen televisions. Those old bones must be as mystified by where they now find themselves as we are when we pick them up from the white sandbars of the Middle Loup River. I think we should make some noise about this. There are some states where you can hunt pheasants, ducks, or deer, and maybe pull trout from a clear water stream. Big deal! Here in Nebraska we hunt elephants and giant bison and pull extinct camels and horses from streams with strange names like Loup, Platte, and Dismal. There are rumors that Game and Parks will be limiting hunters to one woolly mammoth per season, however. Seems fair! By Roger Welsch SAMSTUKEL.COM

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