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The Artist’s
Almanac
May 2010
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Thanks to the human heart, by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
Life’s a short summer, man a flower;
He dies – alas! How soon he dies.
-
Samuel Johnson
May got off to a
sodden start this year.
The rain began
early May 1. By dawn it was a deluge, and by afternoon roads
were blocked and people were trapped in their cars. A house
floated down Interstate 24, crashing through marooned trucks and
cars before falling apart. The weather radio sounded Mayday,
warned of flooding, and put us under tornado watch.
By Sunday morning
dry ditches became swollen creeks, merging as raging floods,
rushing downstream to spread and cover homes. Interstates were
blocked all around town with bridges and major thoroughfares
covered. People drowned while stuck in traffic and boats and
helicopters scouted submerged homes for survivors.
Andrea Silva and Jamey Howell cling to Jeep swamped by raging waters
of Station Camp Creek
in Sumner County. They were later swept downstream where they were
rescued.
Photo by Rick Murray as shown in The Tennessean - Sunday
May 9, 2010
At St. George’s
Church at the mouth of Belle Meade Boulevard the waters began
rushing down the center aisle during the 7:30 AM service and
rose as the congregation evacuated. One couple leaving the
service was swept away into Richland Creek and drowned. Another
couple in nearby Bellevue drowned trying to escape their home by
car.
By Monday morning
the rain had stopped, but the river was still rising. The new
Symphony Hall, Country Music Hall of Fame, Opryland and
Convention Center Hotel – the jewels of Nashville, were all
under water.
Pope John Paul II High School
in Hendersonville was surrounded and cut off from all access
except boat. Vietnam Veterans Highway, the main highway to
Nashville from Sumner County, was closed at Mansker's Creek,
with the floodwaters extending as far north as Goodlettsville.
Homes south of
Nashville in the Bellevue-Brentwood area were inundated and
destroyed by the rising Harpeth River. Police, Fireman and
volunteers were afloat rescuing people cut off in their homes
and conveying them to shelters.
Some called it a
five hundred year flood and others a thousand. But historic
records, showed nine higher river crests at Nashville from 1793
to 1937, the highest in 1926 at 56.2 feet, more than 4 feet
above this year’s. While all these were before the flood control
dams erected by the Army Corps of Engineers after 1940, they
still were bigger floods to those trapped in them. Most of the
$1.5 billion of damages this year occurred in flood plains that
in earlier years would have been undeveloped bottom lands.
Incredibly, some blamed the Corps for this year’s floods.
May is a season of
extremes – extreme beauty, heat, cold, wind, rain, violent
thunderstorms and even tornadoes. Now, as the waters recede, she
shows her other face – the most beautiful flowers and greenest
landscapes we ever remember.
First come the
daffodils, then the regal tulips. Next the exuberant peonies and
flaming azaleas, and now the splendid roses in their fragrant
abundance.
Now come the elegant
Tennessee irises into season, and this morning, in the soft fog,
I see the magnolia in full array. So big and fragrant are they
it is said that if they only bloomed in Tennessee people would
travel here from around the world for no other reason than the
experience of Magnolia Grandiflora unfolding.
I feel guilty when I
do not study closely and paint each new flower, for they bloom
but a few days, and are gone for a year. Beauty and youth are
tinged by the melancholy certainty they cannot last. We must
celebrate them while they last and pick up the pieces after the
storms and floods that will surely come in all our lives.
But today we revel
in spring, profligate beauty though she be. We ourselves are the
wasteful ones, if we miss her show.
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